In the office we have complete server backups and selective PC backups on tape. At home I backup some important stuff on CD.
When I wrote my Diplom thesis I made regular backups as printout on paper - the safest method (if the most onerous to restore). Frankly I cannot conceive why novelists don’t do that - surely it would be feasible for a successful novelist to hire someone to type in the novel from a printout?
Is there another option? How about simply saving onto cds- does that work?
All those are great ideas. I suppose if Google dies, it means the world is ending and we’re screwed anyways…
No, I wouldn’t think so.
I think there is software that can mount a blank CD so that you can write to it by using the save dialog box, although I’ve never used it nor do I remember the name it. Another option would be to have a second hard drive, external or internal, and save everything you do to both locations. My preference would be to save everything locally once and do a regular burn of that to CD, as previous posters have mentioned. Whatever floats your boat. As long as the important data is in at least two places.
Very little, after several consecutive hard drive crashes including some files I have never been able to recover. I recently rebuilt my system when my old motherboard crapped out.
My master hard drive is a SATA disc in a swap bay, it contains sensitive data, a copy of all files, and is stored in a firesafe when needed for extra security.
All non-sensitive data is copied to at least two of the three internal IDE hard drives. DVDs are burned every 3-4 months, but since it takes 6+ DVDs (constantly increasing) to backup my entire system, multiple hard drives are actually a more cost-effective solution.
I’m also looking into a safe deposit box to store DVD backups offsite. I take it seriously.
I just read an article in the newest issue of Wired. Apparently some rap artist I can’t remember the name of kept only one copy of his in-process CD, and that was on a portable hard drive. After a year (before the CD was finished for release) the portable hard drive crashed - it had melted, because the guy had basically kept it on 24/7 for the whole year. He had to pay $10,000 for it to be recovered. :wally
OK, OK. I’m buying an external HD right now. Geeeze.
do i trust hard drives?
nope, not one bit, seen too many customer drives fail than to put my trust in a metal platter spinning at 7200 RPM (or 4200, 5400, 10,000K) with the read/write heads floating a micron above the surface of the disk
you may not want to think about it, but every hard drive will fail, yes, even that shiny brand new one you just pulled out of it’s antistatic bag, there will come a time where it will grind to a stop, taking your data with it, it’s not enough to simply back up, you must back up to multiple different types of media, i have important files archived to an external hard drive, as well as CD-R and DVD-R, once solid-state flash-based hard drives become affordable, i’ll have a more reliable way of backing up data
to echo a point made above, it’s also important that you test your backups on a regular basis, make sure everything that needs to be backed up, is
my typical quick backup is to use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to clone my active hard drive to the secondary drive, then boot off the secondary drive and use it as my primary, when i back up again, i do the same thing to the original drive, that way i know that both drives are functioning well, and it spits the wear-and-tear equally between both drives
i’ve been considering picking up another pair of 160GB hard drives and setting them up as a mirrored RAID inside the machine, i have room for 4 internal drives inside the Mirror Door G4 tower and i should take advantage of it…
Until recently, a bit. Now, not much. I just had my first hard drive crash a month or so ago. Thankfully, I had made a backup of my library folder, so I kept my passwords, settings and things like that. I kept most of my older stuff, since I’d backed up the 6GB drive on my old PowerBook. Unfortunately, I didn’t back up my music, pictures, movies, and some of my wordprocessing stuff because of 1) Lack of a real big hard drive that could hold all of it, and 2) Not having a backup program. I missed some stuff because I did it by hand.
The old IT saw about data not existing unless it’s stored in at least three different locations or forms is pretty true. I’ve got big gaping gaps where information that I’d collected used to be. Thankfully, most of the things I created, stories and such, were backed up. That kind of stuff can’t be replaced, I can find the information again, hopefully.
I’d borrowed a friend’s old 20GB for backups about a week or so before the drive crashed. Prescient of me, no? I was broke, so I hadn’t gotten around to getting one of my own. I finally broke down and bought a big hard drive for backups on my credit card when the crash happened.
On a related note, this experience makes me think it might be a good idea to buy the extended warranty. The drive swap cost about $70 less than the warranty, and if anything else goes wrong in the next 2.5 years, I may wish I’d bought the warranty.
Not that it changes the need to backup data, but those spinning disks are increasingly often glass, rather than metal. My understanding is it’s easier to polish glass perfectly flat than it is to polish aluminum, and glass has better dimensional stability.
This also makes it easy to destroy data - just give it a good stomp and the platters will shatter.
A little historical anecdote - my cube neighbor has an old 5 megabyte “winchester” disk pack from a mainframe. Eight or so platters about 18" across, and weighing about five pounds. The data density on this is so low, you could just about read the bits by eye with some help from magnetic developer. (It’s something that used to be used in editing video tape so the editor could see the actual magnetic tracks and be able to cut the tape without cutting through a track.) How far we’ve come in 25 years!
Interesting timing. Both my wife, and my mother just experianced hard drive failures. My mom I think I have fixed. Somehow the NTLDR file got corrupted. Not really sure if the hard drive was at fault or something else. My wifes hard drive will just stop spinning at random. Replacing it tomorrow.
No backups, but I will be able to recover both systems fully.
Now how many of you that make backups test em? If you don’t then how do you know the backups are any good? Try to restore from em once in a while.
Anyone else heard the story about the computer tech that was complaining to a coworker that the backups on the Unix system were taking longer and longer because the tape drive was so slow. His coworker supposedly joked that he should use the backup device dev/null. Apperently the guy didn’t realize it was a joke, and didn’t know enough about unix, and did that for months before a drive failed, and they didn’t have a backup.
-Otanx
I can so totally see that happening. “Cool! It’s backing up 20 gig in two minutes now!”
Oddly enough, we have a javascript for backing up users’ Outlook files from their PCs to network share drives that behaves like that. Whoever wrote the thing has no grasp of error trapping, and if you give it a bad path, it just happily says “Finished” in about half a second after clicking Start.
Lets see, in the past week, i’ve repaired (hard drive replacement) 3 customer machines with bad hard drives (unrecoverable bad blocks, did not respond to repartitioning or low-level formatting), and guess how many of them had backups to their data?
yes, that’s right, NONE…(sigh)
and all of them wanted to see if i could pull the data off the old drive, i was able to with two of them, third one wasn’t so lucky, total data loss
in fact, i just put an iMac G3 on the bench last night, problem?, yep, you guessed it, bad hard drive, total data loss, it’s sitting right next to me now with the “?” error, and the customer has no data backup…
oh well, as i always say, “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”
On the wall of the computer studies classroom in my old school, “He who laughs last has made backups.”