PLEASE backup your home computer data regularly !!!

On Sunday morning the OS drive on my home workstation died.

On Tuesday night, the data drive on my wife's home PC died.

I lost only 1/2 a day of data. This time I was prepared

I might be too geeky for you guys (and gals), but I have a very comprehensive backup system that I wanted to share with you:

- each computer has at least two separate physical drives: an OS drive and a Data drive. I learned a long time ago (the hard way!) not to trust the OS and Data on the same physical drive (even if in different partitions).
- a have a third computer in my Gigabit home LAN, a PowerEdge 4400 Dell Server. Like on my regular PC's, this one also has two "drives" - a RAID 1 (mirror) array for the OS and a RAID 5 array for the data. All drives are SCSI 10K drives.
- I have Ghost images of each of the PC's OS drive in each respective's data drives. They need to be "local" to each machine so if you ever have to run Ghost to restore the OS image, the drive will be local and you don't have to depend on a network device to get your PC running again.
- Every night at 4AM, each of the two PC's does an automatic incremental backup of the Data drives (not the OS) to my Dell server. This data is housed in the RAID 5 array (5 drives in my particular case- 4 for storage and 1 for redundancy).
- About every 1 to 2 months I do a one-to-one full backup of the server's data drive to an external HD (USB interface), which I keep in my fire-proof safe.

Given this, although it look me a couple of days to buy new drives and install them, I was able to restore all of the data until the night before

Moral of the story - please backup your precious data tonight

Will

EDIT: Daily automated incremental backups happen at 4AM not PM

Re: PLEASE backup your home computer data reguarly !!!

Here is some entertaining reading if you like Zen parables:

http://taobackup.com

Re: PLEASE backup your home computer data reguarly !!!

Indeed. I've NOT learned the hard way a few times already and it sucks every time

I'd really like to set up a file server running RAID 5 but the price for all the bits and pieces adds up real quick like and puts me off a bit. All critical data like pictures and such are copied at random intervals to differnt drives but I have no system in place. Having a file server would be very helpful as you could just dump the data there and it would atleast be safer than on a single drive.

One might also add that it's a good idea to make "off site" copies aswell in case of fire and such.

Re: PLEASE backup your home computer data reguarly !!!

paulr said:

Here is some entertaining reading if you like Zen parables:

http://taobackup.com

Click to expand...

That was GREAT reading - thanks

Robban said:

Indeed. I've NOT learned the hard way a few times already and it sucks every time

I'd really like to set up a file server running RAID 5 but the price for all the bits and pieces adds up real quick like and puts me off a bit. All critical data like pictures and such are copied at random intervals to differnt drives but I have no system in place. Having a file server would be very helpful as you could just dump the data there and it would atleast be safer than on a single drive.

One might also add that it's a good idea to make "off site" copies aswell in case of fire and such.

Click to expand...

That is exactly how I felt prior to getting my current system. But I did loose some precious pictures of when my daugther was born a couple of years ago and I told myself - never again!.

The one important step that I have not yet implemented is to keep backup copies off-site. My fire-proof safe will have to do in the meantime

Will

Technically, a fire proof safe is not where you will want to store your computer media (disks, CDs, tapes, etc.)...

A typical fireproof safe relies on the fact that paper will not burn if kept under 400 degrees F. And, it will release moisture into the interior of the safe as part of it's temperature control--thereby forcing humidity to rise dramatically (another absolute killer for magnetic media).

A data (or media) safe should be rated to keep the contents below ~125F and ~85% relative humidity.

Here is one link to such a data safe (don't know anything about the company).

You would be much safer to store the data off-premise than in a typical "fireproof" vault.

But then, that gets into the issue of data security because if a bad guy has your backups--they also have all of your personal records. I am sure, that everyone uses some sort of strong encryption and keeps the password/key someplace safe, but not with the data---right????

-Bill

I've read someplace that the only really good archival backup media is MO because it is a true "change of state" media. Only thing is last time I checked they were slow and small. :shrug:

-LT

Online storage systems (read: gDrive) are probably a good way to back up small amounts of data offsite. They likely have redundant backup systems on any online storage subscription service.

This is a very important thing. I've been fooling with computers, and particularly hard drives, for as long as IBM-type PC's have had hard drives. I've used MFM, RLL, ESDI, and IDE. I've seen the quality improve and get to where ESDI and IDE drives were very good and reliable, to the current state where competition has all but completely killed hard drive quality and reliability. Considering how unreliable hard drives currently are, it is worthwhile to back up anything you don't want to lose.

When we started our little business 4 years ago, our computer supplier had gotten some motherboards with built-in RAID, so we had our computers set up with 2 drives mirrored. Then if one drive fails, we plug in a new one, the controller syncs them, and we're back up and running. In 4 years, I believe 4 of our 5 computers had at least one drive fail. We didn't lose any data, did not have to reinstall anything nor spend time reconfiguring things. (Some of our applications take a long time to get configured and customized to run the way we like.)

We also bought CD burners for those computers, and the part of the data that I was responsible for I backed up on CD's at least once a week and took home with me. Our applications create _.bak files each time you save the data, and we have data that we get from clients that we use to build our data, but we don't need to archive the _.bak files nor the stuff that comes from our clients, just our own data. In 4 years we built up about 2Gb of data, easily backed up on a series of CD's or a single DVD.

My home computer is a bit older and doesn't have RAID, but I do have a second hard drive that I can occasionally copy data to. I'm not conscientious about it, but anything really important I also have copied to my work computer and from there onto a few CD's.

I have a 200 GB external USB backup drive, with one touch backup,
I would go nuts without it, I take way too many photos etc. to be loosing file s!! :green:

~John

jtice said:

I take way too many photos etc. to be loosing file s!! :green:

Click to expand...

That is my biggest fear by far - too many pictures of my two small children. I "really" want to hold on to these as far as I am alive

Will

wquiles said:

That is my biggest fear by far - too many pictures of my two small children. I "really" want to hold on to these as far as I am alive

Click to expand...

So whats the best solution for this? I burn 3 identical CDs of new kid pics each month, and back them up on an external hard drive. But I dont trust either the CDs or the harddrive to last 10 or 30 years.

So is the best solution simply to x-fer the images from an old CD to a new one every X years before the old one decays? There has to be a better way.

cheers

iMac

Plus an External DVD drive

Important docs, one folder, (XL Docs) copy to CD daily.

Less important, diff folder, (Docs) to cd / dvd weekly.

Photo's, 20gb, copy by year (3 copies), 1 safe, 1 metal filing, 1 elsewhere.

As I go current year, to CD / DVD.

(Also, I copy camera original JPG's to another folder / cd before I do anything to JPG's, PS7 etc)

External HD, copy all data monthly.

Programmes, etc, don't bother, (keep master cd & copy) but when I have to re-install, I keep paper note of what and in what order.

Really important inventory etc, e-mail passworded copy to a hotmail a/c.

When on holiday, cd copy of important data goes with me.

Usually Excel.

Also, copied important data to my MP3 player !!

I think most people with home computers think their hard drive will last forever. It would be good if every store bought computer had a big sticker on it that said if your pictures and documents are only on your hard drive, you might as well delete them all now, because they will delete themselves someday.

I also think it odd that nobody but me tests their hard drives periodically. It only takes a couple of minutes. In my experience the diagnostics will spot a sick drive weeks or months before the OS has a problem. I've had three drives go bad in the last three years but all three are still completely readable, and in fact the OS thinks they are still fine. One is so bad that the hard drive diagnostic crashes.

In case you don't know, there are two hard drive diagnostics that run under XP/Win2k, so you don't even have to re-boot to test.

Seagate's runs on-line and installs an active X control. I guess it requires I.E.
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/asp/tools/en/

Western Digital's is downloaded and installed like a normal application:
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=15&swid=3

Despite what they may say, all hard drive diagnostics will work with all hard drives, no matter who makes them. All you have to do is run the S.M.A.R.T. test which takes a couple of seconds, and the quick or short test which takes a couple of minutes.

Drive diagnostics are not that predictive of failure and in some cases they are worse than useless. I had an IBM Travelstar drive making awful whining noises. I tried to RMA it but IBM wouldn't take it back because it passed its diagnostics. Of course it failed within a few days. Even if it hadn't failed, it still should have been RMA'd because of the annoying noise. The diagnostic's main function in this case was to give the vendor an excuse to refuse an RMA.

the pc im on now has no hardrive at all wnet back to puppy on a thumb drive and put the hardrive with my imporatn stuff away for safe keeping also did dvd back up cant wait for bluray

A great thread with very useful info.

What apps do you guys prefer for backups?

nero has a app that works and is cheap it came with my dvd burner.ghost is also very nice.i forget the other ones name but its nice ill edit post when this darn brain recalls it

I use Norton Ghost and have daily backups scheduled. It's saved me a few time when my IBM DeskStars (DeathStars) died. For data loss, I use SpinRite 6.

Even xcopy works pretty well for copying files from one place to another.

I'm using Acronis True Image (version 8). It is set to do complete backups twice a week and incremental backups the other five days (using different names for each of the 7 backups so nothing gets overwritten until a week later). The backups are to an external hard drive. I also have another internal hard drive. Every day the contents of "My Pictures" is copied to that drive.

BB, I was glad to see the mention of fireproof media storage. That was good info. As soon as I sell off a few things (cameras and lenses this time, not flashlights) I plan to get something, probably the FireKing Media Vault, as well as another external hard drive. I'll also probably look at getting larger drives while I'm at it and rethink what will be backed up where. If there were an inexpensive way to do external RAID 1 I would probably be all over that (and rotate 3 drives so that one could be in the to-be-acquired media vault).

Mike