Milamber

iTrader: (2)

It seems that more and more people are storing important documents and photo's on their hard discs nowadays but hardly ever (if indeed EVER) backing them up.

So when did you last do yours?

kingofturds

iTrader: (1)

I lost 10 gigs of precious memories once

richs2891

Once a week - to my old pc via the network - it turns it self on (via the bios) and then an automatic backup job runs and then after a certain time period ( 10 hours) it powers it self off.

Always amazes me how many people dont back up !

Richard

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

All my macs and even the G/F's laptop get backed up automatically via TimeMachine and a Time capsule..all sorted

Milamber

iTrader: (2)

that much ****



In all seriousness, it's amazing how many people don't do it..

judgejules

I back up every night using Acronis (awsome program) to my 14Tb media server

dasher

Yeh i have Macs with timemachine, so they back-up hourly.

But at work on my PC, it gets backed up every month or so when i remember to take in my external hard drive.

Sonic'

And for all of those who do backup their data, how many of you test it actually has backed up

I know of one customer who religously changed backup tapes every night, took them home etc etc

They had a crash and needed to recover some data, so called us in and I asked for the last backup tape, turns out it was over 12 months old as that was when the backup software last backed any data up

What had happened was there had been a power cut 12 months previous and the server had rebooted and the backup software they were using put the job on hold, they didnt know (as the power cut happened over a weekend) and lost an entire 12 months worth of their database, nearly put them out of business

wiley

iTrader: (63)

never had the chance, everything on my pc can be re downloaded

wiley

ChefDude

RAID 0 OS drive
2 non raid drives

I back up all the time

I have an app that I just drag files and folders on to and it autocopies the dragged files/folders to the same dir on the other 2 drives using robocopy.

NotoriousREV

I put my trust in RAID5

GaryK

backup every 3 days using mozy.com, 5 bucks for unlimited storage and runs as a job overnight.

Sonic'

Until 2 drives fail

HankScorpio

Or your house burns down. (or less dramatically, your raid controller poops itself )

At least once a year, I put all my important stuff (about 80 gigs) onto a removable drive and send it to my inlaws 300 miles away.

As well as the personal docs and photos, I've got about 40 gigs of music (10,160 tracks) and 99% of it is ripped off CD. To re do that would take years.

alistair

I backup between PC's in the house every week,or more often if I have new photos.

Then about once a month I bring home the USB hard drive I keep at work & refresh that.

The **** is on a seperate 1TB removeable drive that remains under lock & key

Sonic'

the only stuff I have backed up tbh is pictures of the baby as they are irreplaceable and as such are copied onto 3 DVD's two laptops and another portable hard drive

Markus

I've got Retrospect set to backup my main machine every day at 4pm. This is an incremental backup. Every month it performs a "recycle" backup which is a full, complete backup. It's backing up to a file set stored on an external HD

As for testing the backup, well, I had the hard drive in the iMac fail in mid November, so had the chance to ensure the actual backup restored, which, thankfully, it did. The only pain is that you never know if Retrospect is doing anything when it's restoring. It'll sit there saying it's matching items in the set, but there is no progress indicator, ok, the cursor is a spin cursor, but we've all seen the beachball of death which spins, so it's not indicative that it's actually doing something, plus when you check on the process list it does display it as "Not Responding".
However, after about three hours it had completed the matching process and started to actually restore the data, which took about another three or so hours (about 110 GB of data), but once done, I ran Disk Utility, checked the disk, repaired permissions and away I went

Any of the Time Machine users know if it compresses the data when it backs it up? I think that could be part of the slow down with Retro, because I have it set to compress to save on disk space on the backup volume - I know, I know, disk capacity is pretty cheap these days. I might get a 1TB drive and try not compressing things, or go the Time Machine route.

mike1210

Thursday I did an Incremental. I typically do weekly incrementals and a full every 2 months

c-o-l-e

I use raid 1 on my home servers OS and data partitions, along with raid 5 for movies, music etc.
I also use BT's digital vault for documents, but are now looking at mozy.com after GaryK's post

Removed.

Important photo's etc are backed up to iDrive online backup, currently use free account but will probably upgrade. Emails are all copied to Gmail, as well as backed up locally. Laptop backed up to main PC, which has an internal and an external drive which is updated using PT Replicator. Also do system disk backups using Acronis, and some stuff like family photo's is also backed up to DVD. I also have ad-hoc backups to LTO tape which is stored off-site. I do occasional test restores.

I got bitten by a mistaken disk format once, got my dive letters mixed up when upgrading hardware, I lost a lot of stuff that I couldn't replace. It wasn't until several years later that I found an old hard disk lurking in the botteom of a box, with a lot of it on.

druddle

Backup daily using Allway Sync to second (third actually come to think about it) hard disk in PC and to another machine on my network at home.

Photos get backed up to BT Digital Vault (so I put my trust in BT and Netapp !) and a monthly DVD dump of everything gets filed at my Dads house. Paranoid ? Maybe........

SirFozzalot

Not as often as I should!

I've got an external hard drive that lives in a secure place and I try to back-up at least once a month, if not more, I don't have that much stuff to back-up to be honest, mainly photo's really, which I don't take that many of so don't have the need to back-up too regularly.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

My backup is due to be done tomorrow.....

Maņana

Seriously though; backup of work is done daily per client, on to DVD-RAMs on a rotational disk system, which is an extended form of grandfather-father-son. Due to the backups being pure data files only (so only 50meg or so) they are permanent ally archived. So should a operator error occur (who enters the wrong information), we can go back to any point in time via the backup and restore the data to before the mistake was made.

I avoid using external hard drives (or internal) for permanent backups, due to the sheer quantity of data that can be stored on one drive, and the consequences if that drive was damaged in addition to the main data drive. Although I use a scratch HD for temporary backup storage. Whilst HDs don't f**k that often, when they do, its tragic. Data stored across many DVDs (especially RAMS) is less damaging should one backup disk fail. Of couse you could have three hard drives and run grandfather-father-son