I was recently chatting with a guppy who was having computer issues only to learn that they hadn’t backed up their data since July and was upset about potentially losing important pictures. The question is, do you guys back up your data? If yes, what is your backup strategy, i.e. what backup software do you use, where do you back it up, how often etc? If no, why not, is your data not important to you? How willing are you to lose all your data?
I’ll start. My data is very precious to me. My photos and videos are the most important, followed by contracts, legal documents, deeds etc, and finally my music. I use Acronis to run a full backup of my data once a month and differential backups 2-3 times a week. I feel that this backup window catches all my changes and updates. I back the data up to an external hard drive that I keep physically separated from my laptop. Once a quarter, I take a full backup and send it offsite to my parents’ house for DR.
I didn’t…once i thought lets do it…but as i was planning…my Hardrive crashed and had lots of bad sectors n stuff…then i ran data recovery software and backed up on DVD’s…Really important data i write on DVD…and regular Backup..i had thought of running Norton Ghost n stuff…but then i can’t find the time to figure that out n spend money extra HDD n stuff…
I just save my data on Dropbox and don’t even use my local hard drive for work related documents, or anything else that I consider to be important.
It alleviates the backup overhead since I know the files are in the cloud and someone else is doing my backups for me. Also, dropbox allows me to have the my files available through any computer I use or through the web, so that’s an additional advantage.
I think the $10/month I spend is really worth it to have this peace of mind about backups and the convenience of accessing files from anywhere. Before using dropbox, esp. for my Ph.D. dissertation I was extremely paranoid about backups and had to use external USB keys and HDDs which were a pain to manage and track and sometimes carry these with me wherever I go. No more… thank God.
LC, yeah, the cloud is also a good way to go. I’m paranoid though, I don’t trust the cloud… yet. A few years ago, a major cloud backup service lost a lot of their servers and a lot of people lost their data… I guess there IS no 100% turnkey solution.
^ aahmed, that’s a valid concern, and I guess I like Dropbox because it syncs the remote folder with every machine that I use… so even if their servers are down, my data will be on the machine that I used last.
Prior to Synctoy (recommended here at GS few months back) I used to copy my data to external disks. Now I use Synctoy across the board.
Home PC T6000 duo-core/4GB - XP64 - 500GB int - Multimedia/Educational/Docs/VM
Work Laptop - XPSP2 - 120GB - Docs/PDFs/XLS/VSD/SW (we use Avamar as dedupe backup solution to bkup all desk/laptop at work)
Home Laptop - XPSP2 - 120GB - Pics/MP3/Docs
WD250GB passport (dedicated for games)
HP DL380G5 - ESXi 4.1 - 2x36GB - vmdk/vAppliances/scripts
Storage:
a) 2TB WD Int (Spin Down) in home PC
b) 320GB portable iomega external
c) 500GB portable WD external
d) 4 and 8GB Sony flash drives
1 —> a
2 —> b —> a
3 —> c —> a
4 —> a
5 ----> a
d < ----> 2 <-----> b ----> a
b is used for travelling. c is used for Bluray/Media player with TV and other portable purposes for large data. Planning to use SCP with script to backup vmdks onto the home PC.
Cloud: I have Mozy 25GB account for some critical data that I keep online.
Conclusion: a is used as archiving and second tier backup for all systems and portable drives. I have spin down feature tuned on, so its only active when I access it (to have least wear n tear). The head-parking feature is excellent for archiving purposes but not great for real time primary I/O on the system.
I have two 500 GB external HDrives. Maxtor is attached to our main Desktop and does the backup every day at 3:00 AM. Iomega is the one I keep with myself and every few weeks, manually back up my data to it from all our computers.
I learnt my lesson the hard way when I lost all the pics of my older daughter (about 1000 of them), almost everything from her birth till she was 3. Since then I backup everything.
yes i backup once a week. cost of external hardrives is remarkably cheap £70 for 1.5terabytes or less. and speed is very fast ony takes 20 minuts to back up 500 mb.
only a clown would cry after losing all their data. dont be a clown spend, 1% of your budget on an external drive.
yes cload backup is a good alternative but backing up 500mb at a time is not reasonably possible at this time.
although this does mean protection against loss against a fire or theft of your hardware.
so really both methods should be used. cload for very important files (encrypted of course)
Nahi yaar, it was my stupidity. I had 2 hard drives in my computer, one data drive (with pics) and one primary C drive. I bought a bigger 3rd drive to use as Data drive and wanted to reinstall the primary C drive. I discontented old drives and accidentally reconnect the old Data drive and reformat and installed a fresh copy of windows. That is how I lost it. I tried using few software to recover but because I re-wrote the data on top of the old sectors, old info was gone.
i have 2 1.5TB externals. i backup from my main work pc to one external every week. then that external gets backed up to the other external say monthly. so my data/apps are on 3 drives.
also i used to backup my entire work folders from history (ie 4/5 years worth) but now i have moved to just adding new files only, saves alot on backup time and also you backup more often as you dont think “o i dont have time to do a backup”.
My question to you guys is this. NO matter how many backups of backups that we do, there is always a chance of some major faliure, like all my backups can fail together. I mean what layer of redundancy is good enough for you to feel secure about your data?
3 drives malfunctioning, i dont know the probability but i think its slim. The only threat of taking out 3 drives (1 of which is not connected to that pc) would come from a virus type attack / or theft or fire/water damage.
also buy named brands Verbatim Samsung etc
you know if there was a fire i would grab one external for sure before i run, lol.
