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#1
03-19-2003, 01:45 AM
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how do you backup your home computer?
Right now I copy my email, address book, documents, and other files once a month to a CD. I have EZCD Creator, but it doesn't have any backup function, so I need to enter the files in from scratch every time.
I don't do business at home, so I don't need a daily backup - although losing recent email would be quite lousy. What do you do? 
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#2
03-19-2003, 01:48 AM
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I back up via CDR as well. I used to have a little utility that would back up emails in Outlook Express (it was a Mac version, I'm sure there's a PC version too). I now use OS X's Mail and I don't know how to back that up. I need to do that.
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#3
03-19-2003, 02:03 AM
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Besides frequent backups of data files (only) to CD or tape or floppy (yes, floppy for small files!), I make an entire image of my hard drive on an identical hard drive periodically. After making the image, I rotate from 3 hard drives (easy to do with plugin "mobile racks") and use the last copy for future work. If the system crashes, plugging in the previous drive gets me immediately back in time.
I know of no way to back up all configured Windows system files while the system is actively in use, which seems like a huge weakness in the whole concept. If someone knows how this can be done without shutting the system down, and in a fashion that allows complete restoration, I sure would like to know about it. Especially if can be done by the unsophisticated user, all of which seem unprotected at this time. Meanwhile, the image backup is pretty darn good for me.
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#4
03-19-2003, 02:14 AM
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I also back up on a CD-R, usually every 1-3 months.
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#5
03-19-2003, 04:49 AM
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Quote:
Piss on Windows. Give me dd or cp and Linux any day.
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#6
03-19-2003, 06:49 AM
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Daily differential backup to tape, full backups weekly. GHOST images of each hard drive are also backed up to CD.
I store a lot of crap on my computer, and run several servers for testing and learning. I break stuff all the time, so it's easier for me to just GHOST and restore data from tape. I'm a computer geek and total freak though.
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#7
03-19-2003, 06:58 AM
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Every month or so I make about 4 CD's of backups of stuff that I acquired or updated within that time. And every couple of months I alway back up ALL of my important, irreplacable stuff (digital camera photos, email, creative work etc) since CDR's tend to fail within a couple of months (yeah, the companies SAY they'll last for 200 years, but my CD's seem to get scratched pretty easily so it's always nice to have extra, newer backups). I've never been into the whole tape drive thing, so I don't use it. If I have something REALLY important that I don't trust to CD's, I always make copies to each of the 4 harddrives in my computer. I've had harddrives die instantly on me before, so it's always good to know that I'll still have the file on a separate, working drive.
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#8
03-19-2003, 07:50 AM
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I'm self-employed, so this is an important issue for me.
I'm on my third tape drive. I love the whole concept of automatic unattended backup of my entire drive -- it's saved my bacon more than once. Full backup on Sunday morning, differential backups on all the other days, two tapes that rotate weekly plus one spare. We don't really have a handy place to store off-site, so I just stick 'em in our home safe, which is in a pretty secure place, and hope for the best in case of disaster. In the event of a bad crash (or a new computer), I don't even try a full restore -- I just do a clean install of software and restore the data. Yeah, it's time-consuming, but I like the control. The full drive backup ensures that I didn't miss something I might have forgotten in a manual backup. I also have important files (utility installers, patches, archived data) on CD-RW. Nice to use those CDs to install stuff on my laptop or someone else's computer. Just recently I bought a 64MB USB flash drive that's been great for grabbing daily files, transferring to laptop so I can work on the couch, etc.
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#9
03-19-2003, 08:20 AM
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I've got my eye on a used 5 slot DLT library with a DLT4000 drive. Extreme overkill but really cool
 . Each tape will hold 40 gig compressed, so if I fill it up I will never have to swap tapes.Everyone that backs up your data, do you do offsite storage? I keep my CDR's locked up at work in case my house burns down.
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#10
03-19-2003, 10:01 AM
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SCSI RAID1 with a couple of Ultra160 HDDs on my main computer, and tape backup on my server.
I should do offsite backup one of these days.
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#11
03-19-2003, 10:26 AM
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I have very few files on my home computer that are important enough for me to backup. I stash copies on my laptop, on a ftp server downtown, and another at Linkoping University in Sweden.
My space on the Swedish server has been filling up very gradually over the past ten years - it's occasionally fun to sift through what I've stored there and see how my coding skills have waxed and waned in the past decade.
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#12
03-19-2003, 10:27 AM
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Cdrs were free or almost free for me, I have stacks of them so i just backup to them when I have enough data or consider the data I have important enought to backup. I also backup onto a dvd whole directories when they are large enough.
A cd only takes about three minutes to backup 600+megs of data & it's practically free. :-) I throw out free cds & keep the spindle just for storage sometimes.
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#13
03-19-2003, 12:12 PM
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NewTech InfoSystems BackUp Now
Works like a charm for me. Not that expensive, either. I usually need between 4-6 CD-RWs but I don't back up either drive fully. The NTI program makes it absurdly easy and just writes the changes to the files which makes the back-up take about 10-20 mins. Of course you do have to set-up the back-up jobs first, and the first write takes several hours. But after that it's a breeze.
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#14
03-19-2003, 12:50 PM
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I download a lot of music (freely distributed jamband stuff), and as soon as I get 650-700 mb or so, I burn it. At around 20 cents for a blank cd-r, it's cheap insurance.
I also have a separate folder where I keep all of my save files, data docs, downloaded jpegs and crap I want to keep, and back that up to a cd-rw every week. Once a month or so I burn it to a cd-r, along with my e-mail folders. My most frequently changing file is my bookmarks file, but that's easy enough to copy to a floppy every couple of days.
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#16
03-19-2003, 01:10 PM
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Back up my data only, either on floppy, or on my Yahoo briefcase. I especially like Yahoo, since it means the data is stored off-site in case of a real disaster. My files are valuable and irreplaceable, so I think it's the way to go.
And you can't beat the price. 
__________________
"One never knows, do one?" Provider of quality fantasy and science fiction since 1982.
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#17
03-19-2003, 02:10 PM
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Anybody using DVDs to back up yet? It seems like the next logical step; if you're using a handful of CDs for one drive or system, the whole thing might fit even better on a DVD. And the retail price of DVD-R blanks is now under a US$.
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#18
03-19-2003, 02:17 PM
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back.....up.....?
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#19
03-19-2003, 02:26 PM
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Quote:
It's not a question of IF your system will fail, but WHEN. Nothing has a MTBF of infinity! And when it does, will it have zero impact on your life?
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#21
03-19-2003, 04:50 PM
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I've got two hard drives. Everytime I upgrade my PC with a new larger drive, the old drive gets moved to the secondary slot.
I can use batch files written around "xcopy" to semi-automatically copy my documents, etc over to it. I also burn the occaisional CD.
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#22
03-19-2003, 06:45 PM
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welby
Please give more detail as to how you "ghost" your Harddrive into CDs. I would like to learn how to do that.
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#24
03-20-2003, 05:11 AM
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I hook my computer up to an engraving machine, and have it engrave the binary files onto stainless steel plates. It takes a long time, and the plates are heavy, but that is one backup that should last for awhile.
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#25
03-20-2003, 05:41 AM
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Thanks in part to this thread I did a more thorough backup tonight.
I finally learned how to back up OS X's Mail. It's sinfully easy—just back up one folder and you're all set! Same with MS's Entourage. I can't believe I hadn't backed up any email in over 6 months! Sheesh! I have been better about backing up data files, though, (mostly my web pages and photo scans) and I did that again tonight. I just got a new scanner (like about 2 weeks ago) and in that time I have generated about 4.5 GB (yes, GB) of files! I have the new and fabulous Epson Perfection 3200 scanner, and it will scan at 3200 dpi. All my neg and slides scans are measuring in at about 40 MB in size each. I have already scanned quite a few pictures, and then edited them and saved the edits as new files, so you do the math. (I also am a prolific photographer, so I hope to scan in a lot of my own stuff, plus I want to archive my late father's slides, so I see that all of this will really eat up hard drive and CDRs!) Fortunately I have tons of hard drive space (160 total) and an 80 GB external drive, but still! I will really have to keep up on my backups and maybe even consider getting another hard drive (external, probably) to deal with all the photos I want to scan!
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#26
03-20-2003, 05:58 AM
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Is it possible to have two mounted hard disk and use Norton's Ghost or some hard-disk copying software to backup one hard disk to the other?
Or even to DVD?
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#27
03-20-2003, 06:30 AM
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Monthly: Boot to alternative OS on second hard drive. Ghost primary drive, copy non-OS files on second hard drive.
Weekly: Copy document folder to second hard drive, copy document folder to HDD on other computer over network.
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#29
03-20-2003, 08:57 AM
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Quote:
Not possible while Windows is running AFAIK, but booting to DOS from a floppy allows copying of one or more HD partitions to another drive of equal or greater size. You are making an exact image copy, not file by file copy, so it not only goes much faster, but preserves track & sector numbers so critical to hidden and special files. The best of all methods is to get three identical drives, mount each in a "mobile rack" and put two docking (1/2 of each mobile rack mount) stations in the computer. Then, with power off, you can plug in any two of the three units from the front of the computer. Do an image copy of one drive to the other. Switch off the computer and remove one drive; configure jumpers if necessary, and continue computing with one drive in the system. If anything goes wrong, you can unplug the active drive and plug in one of the backup units (with the power off) and go back in time. The reason I suggest using 3 drives (or more) is so you rotate backups. When you are ready to do another backup, pick the oldest of the 2 unused drives, make the copy, then that one becomes the new, active one. This provides insurance against accidentally copying the wrong drive (!), and provides a unit for off-premises storage. The image backup to DVD is a great idea, but, unlike the multiple HD scheme, wouldn't allow you to boot from the DVD and run your system from there. At least not until R/W DVDs are developed that function just like magnetic HDs.
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#30
03-20-2003, 08:59 AM
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Quote:
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#31
03-20-2003, 09:00 AM
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I put my stories and poetry on floppies. None of my email is that earthshaking. And I don't care all that much about my high scores in Solitaire and Minesweeper. I don't use my computer for any financial stuff, so really, there's nothing to back up. I'm a pretty low-end user.
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#32
03-20-2003, 10:14 AM
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"Is it possible to have two mounted hard disk and use Norton's Ghost or some hard-disk copying software to backup one hard disk to the other?"
Sounds like a baby-Raid configuration. Yeah, but HDs come with software to do a perfect HD to HD copy, but like sheep clones, they don't always copy everything in my experience. Also, copying an active OS isn't usually allowed because files are in use.
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#33
03-20-2003, 02:40 PM
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Three sets of rotating magneto-optic disks for incremental backups every five days (with one set stored in my garage) + weekly incremental backups to hard drives (thence to segmenting and burning to CDRs) + monthly cloning to hard drives. This is just for my home system where all I have is e-mail, quicken-esque data and porn.
This came up at work a few days ago, and there seem to be two types of people: those who have byzantine and rigorous backup procedures and those who just don't get it. At the end of our lab shifts, there's a guy who backs up his software to the local hard drive, the server, the server again (in a different location), and someone else's local hard drive on the network (CDR's & hand-carried magnetic media are not allowed in our area). Half of the crew look at him like he's nuts and the rest of us look at him and say, "there's a good story behind that." FairyChatMom: Floppies bad. Optical (CDR or M-O) good. IMO here's the list of backup media, in decreasing order of reliability: DreadCthulhu's method. I'm embarrassed that I don't already have that in place. Magneto-optic (amorphous silicon instead of chemical dyes) CD-R (fairly stable chemical dyes) DVD-R CD-RW (less stable dyes) DVD-RW DLT (also convenient, but less stable organics than the disks listed above, plus magnetic field susceptibility and bleed-through) Hard drives (also convenient with quick recovery; but susceptible to magnetic fields and physical shock) Carefully arranged arrays of belly button lint Floppies Why do I put floppies at the bottom of the list? Variable production quality, mechanical complexity (even as compared to hard drives -- integrated over the size of your backup, you're comparing the aggregate reliability of 50-200 floppies versus one hard drive), sucsceptibility to temperature, magnetic fields and dust, and (the big one) you won't be able to find a drive to pop your floppies within in a couple of years even as your current floppy drive is filling up with shmutz. Contrast that with belly button lint, for which you'll always find a reliable supplier. Long ago I worked at JPL and we were having severe problems with hundreds of data tapes from the sixties that were both brittle and rotting. Note an interesting factoid that many people don't seem to know: all (?) plastic is derived from organic materials (i.e., petrochemicals), so somewhere out there, there's a fungus or bacteria or something that would like to dine on said material. Sorry to throw this out without a cite, but there's some company that takes data sets, convolves them into two-dimensional error-corrected patterns and prints the patterns on acid-free paper using either very stable chemical dyes or india ink. Of course, then you have the silverfish problem. If that were made more practical and the paper were stored correctly, it might compete with the CD/DVDRs. Ironic that originals of The Canterbury Tales are readable whereas some Apollo, Gemini & Pioneer data is gone forever.
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#36
03-20-2003, 06:40 PM
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I can compress all my important files into a self-extracting file about 5 megabytes or so. Then I transfer it to my Yahoo! Briefcase. I keep 3 or 4 backups there.
This way, not only are my files backed up offsite and safe, and I can access them anywhere with an internet connection.
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#37
03-20-2003, 10:56 PM
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I UUENCODE all my files and store them, a tiny piece at a time, in my signature on various message boards.
--- M<F4@=&AA;B!A('1E<W0@9FEL92!C<F5A=&5D('1O('!R;W9I9&4@9F]D9&5R M(&9O<B!T:&4@=F%R:6]U<R!E;F-O9&EN9R!S8VAE;65S+B!)9B!Y;W4@87)E M('5S:6YG(&ET('1O('1E<W0L(&-O;F=R871U;&%T:6]N<R!O;B!Y;W5R(&%G M:6QI='D@:6X@8W5T=&EN9RP@<&%S=&EN9RP@<V%V:6YG+"!A;F0@9&5C;
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#38
03-21-2003, 07:58 AM
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Quote:
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#39
03-22-2003, 12:02 AM
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I've got a jungsoft nexdisk thumb drive that I back up everything to as I use a file and carry around with me so I can use my files on any computer with USB. The one I currently use is 128MB and I'm about to buy a new one 256 or bigger with the new security software (so no one can access my files except me.) I also back up to CDs on a weekly basis (2 cds) and I keep one in the trunk of my car and one in the garage shed area which is separate from the house. My PC and my laptop are backed up to each other via the thumb drive.
This may seem like overkill but I have had 4 hard drives fail on me and I learned early that I don't like reconstructing massive amounts of work.
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#40
03-22-2003, 02:34 AM
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Just a warning to all of you who use Floppy disks for backups - DON'T. Floppy disks have incredibly high fail rates. If your sole copy of any important files are on floppy disks, it is very likely that when you need them, it will CRC error. Consider investing in a different format.
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#41
03-22-2003, 02:41 AM
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Quote:
Probably the same scenerio for public computers all over the world. Also true at my town's public library (which doesn't even let users save to the harddrive -- it's floppy drive or nothing, making it very very hard for me to do scans of books in the reference department that are over 1.2mb.....and as mentioned in my previous reply, by the time I get home and download them to my computer, about 10% of them already have CRC errors)
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