I must admit that at the moment I do not have a backup plan.
Have any of you ever lost data because you did not back it up?
Tell me your experiences and convince me that I should do it.
BACK UP EVERYTHING!!
I was, WAS mind you, one of those people who said “It will never happen to me.” Then I went on vacation for the summer (I teach high school.) When I returned, I discovered that the computer in my classroom, the one on which I had 7 years of notes, lesson plans, tests, etc. had a Fujistu hard-drive. Totally corrupted. They couldn’t recover a single bit of information from it, I lost everything. 7 years of production…gone.
Back it up if you want to see it tomorrow.
Same story, except it was 3 years of production and I’m not a teacher.
There are two types of computer users: those who have lost data, and those who will.
Sheeeeeeee -it. I quickly learned years and years ago to backup anything important. And this doesn’t necessarily mean using some sort of backup program. For the most part, my backups are all “by hand” – I copy my documents folder to another location on another hard drive. I regularly copy financial data to zip disks. I will check in programs I am working on to the source control repository periodically just so the stuff is on the server.
Ideally, one would back up ones entire hard drive, but geez with capacity nowadays how could you? By making sure important stuff is copied SOMEWHERE you can recover. I’ve lost hard drives several times over the years but never lost anything important. I’ve only lost the day or so it takes to completely re-install all my software …
Yes, I’ve lost important data that wasn’t backed up.
And, the flip side of that question, I have many times had my bacon saved because I was able to recover data from backup.
Actually, large-capacity external (USB2 or fireware) drives may be the cheapest and easiest backup devices available at the moment, so backing up your whole drive isn’t entirely out of the question. (I don’t really back up the whole thing, though. Within the Windows directory I only back up the user profiles area, and in the Program Files directory I exclude all .exe and .dll files. I figure that, in the case of a catastrophic disk crash, I’ll need to recover that stuff by reinstalling the OS and applications. After that, restoriing those files from the backup might do more harm than good.)
Information on nearly 3000 members of my “family” compiled over a period of about 5 years. Genealogies, digital photographs, wills, deeds, etc etc etc.
I’ve only lost data once due to my not having backed it up. This Mac I used at a job once completely fouled up. The OS was toasted and all the data on the hard drive was corrupted. It took all of the stuff I had been working on for about six months. I lost training manuals, paperwork templates, employee evaluations, and a massive payroll database. A lot of the stuff I had saved on my laptop (although in earlier versions). The payroll database was completely toast; I spent two weeks having to rebuild it.
Since then, I make all the important documents on my personal computers are backed up regularly. The only mishaps I have with data since then have been my fault (like losing an archive of saved email messages from Outlook and breaking a CD).
I once lost ALL my writing–and I’ve been writing every day-ish for over 7 years (holy crap!)…along with my MP3s, pictures, misc. stuff, and all that. Through old backups and one of those “Read deleted files” programs, I got most of it back. But still. EVERY MONTH I backup. Sometimes more, if I finish a draft of something big.
But I’ll never forget that sinking feeling, that pain, as I stared at a blank monitor…
Does porn count?
If you’ve not lost something due to not backing up then it simply means that you’ve not been using a computer for very long. If you want to keep it back it up, just the other day I had to re-format my hardrive and lost everything on it, though luckily I didn’t really have anything that I really minded losing and I had backed up stuff that it would be a pain to get back.
In 1995 we were using QIC-80 tapes to back up our companies’ computers (not a boo-boo - two companies). We came to be infected with a virus that destroyed most of our stuff.
QIC-80 tapes were an old, but still common, technology then. A real pain with them was that you had to format them, and that took a couple of hours. So I was happy to see preformatted QIC-80 tapes appear on the market.
In the course of recovering from the virus, we discovered that we could not recover data from the preformatted tapes. Ouch.
More recently, I needed to restore to my employer’s network a large project backed up to 8 mm Exabyte tapes on another company’s system. It developed that we couldn’t read any of them, nor could the data recovery company we contacted, who informed me this was not an unusual occurence with Exabyte 8200 and 8500 tape drives.
I wound up going over to the other company with a USB portable hard drive to get the project.
I back up to an Onstream 30GB tape drive. (I have a 20GB HD with about 4.5 GB of data.) Full backup weekly, incremental backups nightly, two tapes in rotation and a spare for emergencies. Periodically I back up absolutely critical stuff to CD. I’m self-employed and would just about croak if I lost my data, and my backups have saved my bacon more than once. I have occasion to restore a file I overwrote by mistake about once a month, and I don’t care to recall the number of unplanned HD wipes I’ve had to do.
Happily, I do have a backup plan. Always have. I burn backups to CD.
Happily, the worst I’ve lost was some Diablo 2 character profiles.
Sadly, it wasn’t a hard drive failure or Act of God-type disaster that led me to lose the files. I did it to myself. It happened when I upgraded my OS. I backed up most of my hard drive, not realizing that there were files worth saving outside my Documents and random stuff folders. I figured I was safe, because few of my apps save to anywhere other than a central folder or two. I ignored the D2 folder because “it didn’t contain anything important, and besides, I could just install it later.”
Argh.
The worst part was that the lost profiles included my roommate’s mules, which had a ton of gems, potions, gold, and equipment. The rare items were pretty much irreplaceable. And because progress had been made in the games since my last backup, my old backups were useless.
Happily, I haven’t lost a file since.