I’m reading the first book of Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy. It truly is a thing of beauty. I enjoyed the Farseer trilogy that preceded it, and this one is shaping up to be even better. Ever have one of those moments where the last line of a chapter turns everything on its head and you just have to put the book down and ponder it? I had one of those. I stared at the cover art for a bit and then casually flicked through the first few pages. That’s when I saw this in the acknowledgements:
“The author would like to thank [support person] of [software company] for rendering swift and compassionate aid in stamping out the computer virus that nearly ate this book.”
Wow. Something inside me snapped. I worked in PC technical support for home users for many more years than is considered healthy. I’ve heard many variations of “but my business runs from this computer, what do you mean all my data is gone?” and it all came rushing back to me. I couldn’t pick the book up again for several hours.
I had a conversation regarding backups with a cow-worker a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned an acquaintance of his that dropped out a university degree he had been working on for almost six years because of lost data. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
This was very nearly a pit thread. It incensed me to think that Ship of Magic may not have existed in its current form; that someone could study hard for nigh on six years only to throw it all away; that I had to console crying uni students or remain calm in the face of screaming small business owners, all because people place entirely too much faith in spinning metal disks. I let it simmer overnight, and decided to forge my anger into something that might be constructive.
Hard drives die. Viruses eat data. If you have any information on your PC whose loss would elicit a reaction north of “meh” you MUST back it up. Those files need to exist in at least two separate places. Or you might find yourself heartbroken. This is a poll though, not a lecture. I’d really like to know if ignorance in the area of personal data backup has decreased since I dealt with home users every day.
Do you run your business, create art, or write school assignments on your PC? I know there are a tonne of novelists and students on the Dope. Do you have a method of backing your information up? Do you stick to a backup schedule?
If you don’t back up, why not?
Have you ever suffered from catastrophic data loss? Has it changed the way you use your PC?
I back up my entire laptop drive onto an external HD every few months.
I really should back up important papers and such more often. My biggest fear is losing all of my digital pictures. I enjoy photography, and my archive is currently at about 16GB.
Every few months I back everything up onto an increasingly large stack of CDRs. I very nearly lost my whole collection a few years back (It was smaller then) when I had a HD die on me. Luckily for me I had backed everything up onto a web server, and didn’t lose anything.
The only disks I trust are those that are RAIDed and backed up nightly. All others are considered expendable fodder.
A bit of a hard line, I’m sure, but I have also heard too many users wailing about years of lost work. If only they’d backed it up, or stored it on a redundant volume, the story would be different.
The stuff I create or record gets backed up regularly. I have only lost important stuff one time, and that was when the machine went south an hour before I could run a planned backup. (Frustrating, that.)
I would, however, extend the OP: having performed a backup, you are not safe until you have executed a restore. The engineer I worked for last year was adamant about having sufficient backups, but when they were pondering how to move their corporate files from one system to another, last year, and wondering how they would accomplish that in a timely fashion, I asked whether they could not simply “restore” the new system from the most recent backup (data files, only). The outside techie who was arranging the move demurred and it was only then that I discovered that they had been backing files up for almost ten years and had never executed the restore process. “The backup always reports that it worked.” Yeeeeesh!
Nothing “works” that has never been tested. If you have never recovered a file, you cannot know that your backup actually works. (Obviously, if you are simply copying a number of folders onto a CD through a straight burn, the odds are that your data has successfully moved in a recoverable fashion, but if you are using any sort of backup-and-recovery software that is supposed to execute a search for the files to be backed up, then copy them appropriately, it is just one more piece of fallible software that needs to be tested (periodically) just like any other software. Even when just burning MyDocuments, I generally take the disk over to Deb’s computer when I am done and randomly open various files with different extensions to be sure that the process did not fail on this execution.)
I have to put some faith that our department’s share of 1.3 terabyte RAID array at work is administered by competent people. My group dosn’t store anything really mission-critical on it anyway.
Beyond that, my files for work get backed up daily to that 1.3 T drive, and I burned new CD copies of them just last week.
Our departmental records that have retention schedules are archived to two sets of CDs, which are shipped off to two different states. Each set is randomly checked by attempting to open files.
At home, “My Documents” is dragged over to an external drive every so often - my home files don’t change all that much. The one or two really important ones that do change are emailed to my work address every month or so.
I don’t trust DVDs for this because the media are less physically stable. They haven’t been around as long as CDRs, and are not as developed. Even CDRs are only good for 3-5 years.
Plus, DVD is far from a standardized format still. what with + and - and whatnot, long term backups on DVD make me shiver.
I worked tech support for a long time, and we had several drives fail on us. I got pretty good at doing file recovery. Using the RAID firmware to restore a failed drive became second nature to me.
The one I had the most fun doing was when I had to swap out circit cards on one drive with the circuit card on another identical drive, copy the data, swap circuit card back, and rebuild the system. The data was important, but not important enough to send out to the experts.
The worst failure we had was with a RAID system. One of the first ones we had installed in a users system. The RAID was setup as a RAID 5, and the user had the system running 24x7. Unfortunatly the default configuration of the RAID software was to only report failed drives on boot up(I couldn’t believe this when I found it out).
Well the user had started to complain about his system running slow, but the system was setup at his house so he could work from home. We didn’t do house calls, and he didn’t want to bring it in till his work was done. Talking with the user we figured it was spyware etc slowing his system down, and we could clean it up when he brought it in.
One day he called saying his system had locked up, and now it wouldn’t boot anymore. Finally had him bring the system in, and found that two of the drives had failed. Ended up sending the drives out for data recovery. Ended up paying $17,000+ for his data to be recovered.
Last time I talked to him he backed up at least 3 times a week. Copy to DVD, copy to network, and a copy to an external hard drive.
Myself? I don’t backup at all. I can’t think of anything that is important that is stored on my system. Also right now I have no means of backing up. Only 1 hard drive in my system, and no CD or DVD burners, not even a floppy drive.
At work I have our 3 file servers (all raided) backing up data to each other. Then at 9pm the data gets transfered to an external drive. This way if one computer bites it, I still have 3 copies of the data.
For my own work files I store those locally on my workstation and send those files off to one of the servers - one extra copy.
I’m running two different anti-virus on the systems. This way if something manages to sneak past one anti-virus software the hope is it won’t sneek past the other.
At home I have a ton of music I’ve written and recorded. I dump that data off to Cd’s and then every month or so I transfer it all to removable hard drives that are only powered up with I back data to them.
Right now the music computer isn’t raid. Once I get my new studio up and running I’m rebuilding that system with a new board/cpu and a raid array.
I’m glad you started this thread- recently I had a problem w/ my computer and had to take it in to the store; the guy carried over all my files, no problem, but just the thought of losing them was a wake up call, even though I was already realizing that before it happened.
I’m just starting my life, so to speak, and will be putting a lot of documents on my computer that are v-e-r-y important to me- I NEED to know how to back my whole system up on disks. How do I do what you all are referring to? Not only do I want to save all my Mic Word documents (which can be done on floppys), but of course the system itself as we’ve discussed, and also
My internet bookmarks
All my programs
All my music files
All my desktop shortcuts
In short, I won’t settle for anything less than a 100% transfer of data after a crash, which is what I got this time.
But let’s broaden this discussion even further- how much faith do people put in their homes to not catch on fire and destroy precious documents? I’m only 20, so my ‘documents’ are personal ones, but if I lost them, I’d be crushed. I’m going to be copying them and saving them in a safety deposit box (or possibly a relative’s house). I can’t fathom why any adult wouldn’t prepare for a catastrophic fire or flood, or computer crash, or zombies or bears w/ laser beams
Floppies die too quickly to trust for backups and should be considered a transfer medium only, although these days USB keys well surpass the usefulness of floppies for that function. I recommend getting a CD or DVD burner. The drives and media are fairly cheap and it is probably the best way to back up your larger files such as music and programs.
For your super important documents, a free web mail account such as Gmail is handy as you can bet Google have a fairly robust backup system at their end. There is an interesting article here about using a Gmail account as a file server. You just copy your files to a folder on your PC and it sends each file as an email to your Gmail account, accessable from anywhere you have web access. There are plenty of other ‘free’ data hosting sites, but IMO you’re better off with a large company like Google or Yahoo that isn’t likely to just disappear one day disappearing all your data in the process. They do have file size limits though.
Both Internet Explorer and Firefox allow you to export your internet bookmarks to a html file. In Internet Explorer it’s File, Import and Export, and follow the prompts from there. In Firefox it’s Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, File, Export. The result is a basic html file and you could back it up whichever way you wanted.
Desktop shortcuts in Win2k and XP are usually stored in C:\Documents and Settings[Username]\Desktop and C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Desktop. You can back these up like any other folder.
If you don’t want to settle for anything less than 100% though, you could use an imaging program such as Ghost. It takes an image of your PC and allows you to recover everything as it was at the point that you took the image. The resultant files are quite large though, and might take multiple DVDs to back it up. The other option is to have a second hard drive to store the images on. You might not want to go to that extreme.
Fair point about the bears w/ laser beams. I’m off to buy some bear traps.
I back up several times a year. DVD-R media are cheap now.
DVD-R is the standard. It’s recognized by better than 90% of standalone players and virtually all DVD drives. DVD+R is a little more problematic, but still widely recognized–it’s popular because of the enhance DVD authoring capabilites it provides. But again, if you’re backing up frequently, media compatibility oughtn’t to be an issue.
I have two hard drives in my computer, and I occasionally copy everything from one to the other. I think of this as “manual mirroring.” When I run into difficulty I can just swap the cables around. Of course, if I get a virus that does wholesale deletion of both drives I’ll have a problem. Similarly if my computer physically fries somehow.
There’s very little on my computer that I’d miss, though.
No backups here, and I’m a computer science student! Shocking, I know. But the only files I care much of anything about are pictures, and my boyfriend keeps all of those backed up - he’s a musician who works primarily in digital stuff, so he’s quite paranoid about his files.
My router/fileserver/etc. box has a 120G drive to which all the computers on my network should probably automatically back up to, and I back my favouritest stuff to DVD every month or two. (And I’m sure they’ll last that long.
I have a few toasted drives around the place, but I’ll admit that my not having lost anything is mostly due to luck as opposed to having any sort of regular backup regimen.
(I still do way better than my Dad though, who has had the only copy of all his financial information in one or two spreadsheets on the same 720k floppy* for the last 10 years*** :eek: He somehow doesn’t trust HDs - I back it for him whenever I can though :rolleyes: )
