You've NEVER backed up your files? WHY THE HELL NOT?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

No system files. I wouldn’t really bother with saved games and similar stuff, but I do back up:

  • any documents I’ve created. Since I often have to prepare similar courses, having the old ones handy can speed up the process (although each new customer gets a new set of screenshots and so forth). Word, Excel, Access, PDF…

  • the very few financial documents that I need for the tax folks and can’t get from my banks’ webpages. These are also kindly backed up by Google, as I use gmail to send them to my customers (it’s only my bills to them, anything else I can get from the banks or from the tax agencies).

  • pictures.

  • music. Mind you, all my mp3s are from CDs I actually own, it’s only that recopying back from a DVD is faster than re-ripping the whole freaking pile of CDs.

  • the Itty Bitty File. This file has codes needed to set up those programs I own and which do require a code.

22

Preach on Sklad, I’ve lost count of the number of distraught customers I’ve had to “counsel” because they’ve never backed up and “my life is on that machine”, meh I have no pity for them, as I’m fond of saying, A lack of planning on YOUR part DOES NOT constitute an emergency on MY part

for example, today, I’m working on an old Mirror Door G4 tower, the customer has three internal hard drives (boot, media, and spare), the machine will not boot fully to the desktop, it hangs just before the Finder loads, yet it runs flawlessly when booted from an external…

a good guideline with hard drives is to keep at least 10% of the hard drive free, her boot drive is a 120GB hard drive, it has a mere 205 MEGABYTES of free space on it, IOW, the drive is FULL, as are her media and spare drives, and, of course, she has no backups either!
conversely, I also have a MDD G4 at home, I have four hard drives in it;

Drive 1; a bootable 10.4.2 games drive (The Sims 2 doesn’t like anything more than 10.4.2 on my MDD), 120 GB, if that drive dies, I just wipe and reinstall the OS and apps, I back up my Sims userfile once a month to DVD-R, just in case, the drive has about 60GB of free space

Drive(s) 2, a dual 160GB Mirrored RAID running 10.5.X, a mirrored RAID is two drives linked together as a single drive, when data is written to the drive, it is written to two physical drives, in essence, automatic backup, if one drive in the RAID fails, the computer can still run off the other drive just fine, just pull the bad drive, slap in a replacement drive and have the RAID auto-rebuild

Drive 3 is a 320GB drive set up as a Time Machine backup of the 160GB Mirrored RAID

and yet, I still perform regular backups on the Mirrored RAID to both DVD-R and an external drive, it’s not a matter of if a drive will fail, it’s WHEN

funny, I’ve had the MDD up and running for almost three years continuously now, and have NEVER had a single problem with any of my drives, and given the complexity of my system, a failure at some point is a given…

some further hints;

in the event of thunderstorms/hurricaines/NorEaster’s, Tornadoes, Zombie Uprisings, or other inclement weather, be sure to UNPLUG both the computer AND the Ethernet and/or modem lines from the machine , it’s the only guaranteed protection from power anomaly damage, also, invest in an Uninterruptible Power Supply, even if you have stable power (I don’t, I have the misfortune of Central Maine Power, the most incompetent power company in the galaxy) they’re worth their weight in gold, and power anomalies can happen at any time, not just during inclement weather…

23

I just popped in to say Time Machine is awesome! I was using Retrospect before, but Time Machine blows it out of the water. I read one review of it where the writer said he kept dreaming up reasons to retrieve files just so he could see the “windows going back in time” effect. I’m kind of there, sad to say…

24

Really? Why is this?

I can’t imagine it ever being a real issue for me; when all you have is text files on the hard disk, you’ll never fill it. I’m just curious.

25

Having just finished grad school I know a lot of folks who had the lost data/dissertation blues. Truth be told, though, it would be pretty hard to lose everything. Most writers send drafts to colleagues, advisors, readers, etc. so there is probably a coffee-stained recent draft somewhere. Or a copy on e-mail.

Truth is, Apple got it figured out right with Time Machine. It works, quietly in the background. Asking users to do anything makes it possible for failure to happen. And dissertation writers often have epiphanies by the hour, so even if you’re on a daily or weekly backup, you could lose a lot.

Personally I don’t understand why more programs don’t have autosave for all open files, and just keep those files in a folder for a week or so. Last week Word kept crashing on me and I would lose a paragraph or two on the open docs. Pretty freakin’ annoying.

26

This is why I always use gmail to send files to myself, rather than counting on myself to remember to make backups. I move around from computer to computer so much during the day that I can almost always count on a recent draft being somewhere on my account. Saved my ass when my hard drive died while I was working on my comment (think “thesis-lite”).

27

As mentioned, you can get external hard drives pretty cheaply now - and most of them come with built in software that guides you through the back up process.

I have this problem with students all the time. I can remember one Adobe Illustrator class that had been working for hours on a project. I said, “Be sure to save as your work as you go along!”
Sure enough, five minutes later there was a short black out and all the computers went down for just long enough to screw up everything. I hadn’t heard that many people scream, “Fuck!” at the same time since the days of orgies back in the 70’s. (Only one person had saved their work when I had mentioned it a few minutes prior.)

It was a great learning experience for them though…I never had to ask them to save their work again for the rest of the quarter. They were hitting save practically every time they exhaled.

28

In your case, if all it has is your World Domination plans (which should be backed up regularly) in .txt, .doc, .misc, .whateverfileformatyouuse, then you don’t need to keep 10% free…

if you have a lot of media files, games and such, which the average user does (how many people download .MP3’s and don’t bother backing up?..) then you want to have a 10% buffer space for swap files, temp. files and the like, think of it as “breathing room” for lack of a better term

29

Oh, I keep the World Domination files in the subconscious minds of the 667 pseudo-autistic psychics being held captive in my basement. Where do you keep yours?

30

So you have a Beowulf Cluster of Pseudo-Autistic Psychics then, pretty cool :slight_smile:

as far as MY plans go, like I’d tell YOU… nice try, Rhymer :wink:

31

I would have pegged you as more of a **control-s ** kind of guy.

32

Heh. Control-Z gets me out of all sorts of fixes. At least it used to.

33

Fool of a Took! :wink: The purpose of asking the question was not to get you to UTTER, WRITE, or TYPE the answer, but rather simply to think about it. The non-autistic psychics handle the rest.

(By the way, I’d keep those impure thoughts about Lindsey Lohan to myself if I were you. That’s just…embarassing.

34

In my experience, every single user* who takes backup seriously has a story to tell. Once you’ve lost something significant through lack of backup, you tend to become fanatical about it.

In my case, it was a 2300-line assembly language program due at 8:00 am the next morning. I lost it about 7:00 pm, and had only a three-day old hard copy - and I had been working on it steadily for those three days. Did I mention this was the semester project, worth 50% of my grade?

I recreated the program, tightening up the code as I went, debugged it, verified that it worked, printed it out (1700 lines!) – and then walked to my 8:00 am class.

  • as opposed to systems guys, for whom backup is part of the job.
35

Swapping space (Windows-based OS’s use the hard disk as a kind of “expansion” of the actual RAM. The fuller your disk is, the harder it gets).

It’s also far easier to defragment a disk with at least 15% percent free space (or more, of course) than if it is filled. A fragmented file is, of course, slower to load and/or to save. Additional files (like the aforementioned swapping file) are faster when they can be saved contiguously.

36

My entire hard drive is backed up nightly to a bootable backup. I could pitch my current hard drive out the window and immediately boot from the backup and be out no more than 24 hours worth of file changes.

Retrospect rocks.

37

Oh, how very retro. I keep mine inscribed in the DNA of every living organism on Earth. Go ahead and check; it’s already far too late to do anything to stop me.

38

Yeah, well, my doomsday device rolls time back to 0.00000000000000000000000000001 second after the big bang and changes the matter-antimatter ratio to 1:1, thus not merely destroying the universe but preventing it from ever evolving.

:stuck_out_tongue:

39

+1 on the bootable backup thing, it’s S.O.P. for me, when I back up a customer’s machine (because they were too lazy/stupid/clueless to do so), I generally use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to make a bootable clone

bootable clones definitely give you a relaxed attitude to hard drive crashes, hard drive dies, taking all data with it, Meh, no biggie, just restore from the last bootable backup…

…it also makes software repairs easier, corrupted OS on drive 1?, just boot off your external or internal clone on drive #2, fix drive 1 and be back up and running in short order, simple really

40

Cloned hard drives are so easy…

But then if I lose a post just as short of this one I have a melt down… :frowning: