Don't be an idiot!
 

Don't be an idiot like me, ALWAYS back up your stuff!
Last week my HD crashed and I didn't have a backup. Result: I lost all my program files, a shitload of content, etc..
Don't think it can't happen to you, it's gonna happen sooner or later..

fuck that sucks man, good luck rebuilding

ugh.. that happened to me once a few years back. Sucks for sure :(

Had another hard drive crash last year but luckily that time I had backups of all of my stuff. It definately pays to take the time to do it.

i need to do this, what is best way to back up my harddrive, it is 80 gigs i believe and probably about 80% full at this point, should i buy second hardrive, or what do you do? i have been getting nervous about this lately and now seeing this post reminds me, i am on windows XP. please let me know easiest way, have a cd burned as well, can i save to a bunch of disks?? would be a hell of a lot of them.

For the backup challenged the Maxtor One Touch is a good solution. I don't use this myself but I know lots that do,

That sucks. What I like to do is when I get a new PC take the hard drive out of the old PC , put it in the new one and then it's just point and click to make backups of your files. That Maxtor One Touch looks like a good idea too.

thanx, cleo! :D that was fast! it looks nce kind of expensive i can buy a second hardrive cheap if someone lets me know just how to dump this one to the new one for back-up. i am sure it can't be that tough. :)

hey! thats what i want to know lunatic, where is the point and click n windows XP, i just have never done it, but really now need to can buy a harddrive off my comuter guy cheap :)

Actually I meant copy and paste your files to the other hard drive. You can just transfer the files you want to backup to the new hard drive, or if you want to make an exact copy of the old hard drive to the new one you can use some software. The software is good for making backups too. Here's a link that tells you how to make transfers and backups pretty easily.
http://www.infinisource.com/features/copy-hd.html

nice! not too hard, thanx! lunatic and cleo! :D will buy a 2nd hardrive soon and copy it. just want to be sure, most of my stuff is backed up on my 2 servers but have a lot of other things i need on my HD would be a massive pain in the ass if it crashed :)

I have also used a program called casper which not only clones disks, but but can clone smaller disks onto larger drives and format up all the extra space at the same time. It's a pretty powerful program.

Hard drives are cheap and plentiful these days. Don't miss the chance (this comes from a man with about 15 hard drives in the house).

Alex

You can get pretty good deals on the Maxtor drives by going to www.pricegrabber.com or one of the mail order places like PC Mall.
http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/de...pno~404171.asp

IMO, Maxtor drives are sub-par in terms of HD quality and build.

I'd recommend you get Seagate or Western Digital drives.

Just my $0.02.

I agree.

But for someone that just needs something real simple to use and not that expensive just for backup they do the job.

While I personally don't like Maxtor/Quantum, having a backup -- even on a cheap drive that isn't spinning 95% of the time is still better than taking a risk and not having a backup.

If you do a backup through an external drive, whether USB, Firewire or whatever and then unplug it and leave it in a file cabinet until your next backup, you still have a much better chance at recovering that data should there be an issue.

Hmmm
Cannot understand anyone nowadays not running at least a simple raid 1 on their critical systems. The second Hard drives are cheap enough, and most newer computers with their SATA drives don't even need a controller card to accomplish this.
A raid 1 clones every single thing to the second drive mirroring the primary drive..a tad intensive on older systems, but definately worth it for the absolute redundancy.
The primary dies, you always have a perfect copy available.
Of course one of the higher raids accomplish so much more with the added striping(thus higher performance), but rebuilding an array is beyond most people I've found.
Of course for absolutely vital data, removable backups are important too...even the online options are great and affordable.
But a basic mirror at a minimum should absolutely be part of ones security.

Raid doesn't prevent accidental deletion of a directory tree.
Raid doesn't help if your machine is stolen or burns in a fire.
Raid doesn't help if you get a virus that overwrites your MBR. Raid will faithfully write those changes to the mirror.

Don't get me wrong, Raid is good, but, its still no substitute for making backups, preferably off-site backups.

And I couldn't get Raid-1 working in my laptop -- so, nightly, my laptop is backed up to a storage server that maintains 5 generations on raid. And those are backed up to a disk that goes in the safe on a monthly basis. Recently, I've decided that another backup needs to be maintained at the local bank.

You are absolutely right.
Though the first and third are usually quite easily fixed and everything recovered...not always possible with a hard drive failure, and always expensive when it is possible.
You would be surprised how many people actually do their "backups" to a partition on the same drive, or even a second fixed drive in their system and think they are safe.
The Raid is an inexpensive and easy option that only protects against a catastrophic hard drive failure.
It should only be a part of a comprehensive plan to secure your data.
It all depends on how vital you think the data is, and how far you feel you need to go to protect it.
Removable backups are a must either with a removable drive, usb drive, cd/dvd etc...and a copy of that should always be kept in another location then the original...a different building if possible. And as I mentioned with just about everyone having broadband now a days online options are quite attractive for added security :)

Just make sure you aren't backing up all the malware and crap that XP lets in these days.

Whatever happened to mirroring and duplexing as alternatives to Raid

These look expensive until you have a system crash http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10491. I have a couple of them and they run a bit hot and are noisy but they're damn fast. Automated backup software is all of about $50 these days.

Mirroring and duplexing = raid1

Shows how long it is since I built servers. :)

I might have a go at duplexing when I switch to Linux - it would make sense for a PC used to build web pages and store content.

I've opened up dead LaCie FireWire drives and they have Maxtor drives in them. Kind of pissed me off since LaCie drives tend to cost more then Maxtors.


I personally have a bunch of FireWire drives that I rotate and even keep some off premises just in case something really bad happens.

I keep two versions of my entire boot drive that I've cloned using Carbon Copy Cloner. I also do nightly versioned backups of my laptop's home folder where I keep eight previous versions of all my data using a automatic program called DataBackup.

Last year when the drive in my laptop died I was back up and running in ten minutes booted from an external FireWire drive until my new internal drive arrived and didn't loose anything.

Over at Angel's place we have a bunch of RAIDs made from cheap FireWire drives but as cd34 mentioned they do not protect against data corruption. Since the data is noting but raw video and jpegs on a Mac system which doesn't get viruses it is a risk that we have decided to accept. We have archived important stuff to another set of FireWire drives.

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/g.../features.html

it's $69 and works for me, I hope, as I've never done a restore.

Can Windows computers boot from a FireWire drive the way Macs do?

I think most PC's can be set to boot from an external drive.. it's handled by the motherboard chipset if it is supported.

I don't think there is any solution quite as simple as plug it in and boot up like I imagine the Mac does though.

Yeah on a Mac you hold down the Option key and it boots into Open Firmware and then there is a GUI where it shows a list of drives that have a system on it and you boot from whatever drive by clicking on it. It can be FireWire, ATA, SCSI, and Serial ATA, but not USB for some odd reason.

You can also Hold the Command and S keys at the same time at boot to boot into the *nix command line and not have those annoying pretty icons in that goes along with a GUI.

I installed Panther into my iPod and can boot from it in an emergency.

WOW re the ipod.. Panther would be some sort of Mac OS I'm guessing?

Do you know how fragile the Ipod is btw? if i drop it on it concrete would the drive in it crash?

Panther= Current version of Mac OS X, new version of Mac OS X is coming out next month and will be called Tiger. I guess Steve Jobs like cats or something.

iPods and pretty rugged. Mine is two years old and beat to hell but works perfect. I have the 40 gig model. When you are listening to music that drive hardly ever spins up since it has a huge cache that is holding whatever you are listening to so dripping it doesn't cause the HD to crash. I guess the most fragile part would be the LCD but I don't know anyone that has ever broken it. Apple actually doesn't recommend booting from it since its drive isn't designed to run continuous but I haven't had any problems in the short times that I have done this.

Ghost has always been a sweet program, though it too is an intensive program always pushing the limits on boxes. Again most people do not know how to configure it properly and think they are secure against loss far more then they actually are.
I've been booting to usb thumbdrives for years as part of my computer sevice arsenal, most pc's since the 98 standards will boot to it with a lil tweaking of the bios.
Basically every single suggestion in this thread is appropriate to some degree.
For the Windows users that can afford it a 2k cluster is even more fault tolerant.
It all comes down to the fact, if it's vital you had better have some type of redundancy in place. And the amount of back up protection you need rises with how critical is that data if you lose it, along with how fast you need to recover it if you do lose it.

I've asked 3 or 4 sales people that question about the drive crashing, and been fed nothing but bullshit until now. Thanks Cleo!



Meatpounder.. that's how I feel about ghost.. I'm not really 100% certain I've got it setup right if I need a restore. I just have to take the time to read the instructions properly I am sure... but havent got around to that so far in the last few years |dizzy|

With any disaster recovery plan, you should always test it to make sure everything works as expected.

I remember years ago a client was doing backups on a tape -- the tape was never verified after it was written. Mammoth issued a rom fix that allowed backup tapes created on their drives to be able to be read. Backup/Verify or testing it would have eliminated that problem. I of course was called in after a failure to reconstruct. It took 9 days to get that Rom fedexed because Mammoth had to burn new ones for each client.

If you are using norton ghost or some mirroring utility, take the time to try to boot off your backup -- or learn the procedure to get your data back over and test it.

No sense waiting until disaster to figure out how to do it.

One of the people in the WTC on the 71st floor went back for the company's backup tapes and his palm pilot. He walked away and singlehandedly saved his company weeks of lost data because they moved things offsite every 30 days on the 15th.

If it takes you a week or two to get your system back together, how much revenue loss are you dealing with?

Some would say that iPods are built a bit too tough.
Brad Pulaski had died of blunt trauma to the head after being repeatedly bludgeoned with an iPod

I've dropped mine while biking. Slammed my car door on it. Ran over it with my car. Left it in my car where it got so hot that the display turned black and wouldn't come on until it cooled off. The plastic that is over the LCD is so scratched that it is a bit hard to read and it probably doesn't last as long on a charge as it used to but seems to last for even a very long bike ride so it isn't a problem.

Ghost sounds a lot like Carbon Copy Cloner except it costs money and sounds difficult to use.

Yes it can



dirtyjumbo there is one think I like to know, can you still use the HD, if so
http://www.ontrack.com/ can get the data fra you HD, it can, some time go 7 format down and get you data, I know, as I have try it more that one time |headbang|

you are right on that one... And I love the new one where you, done have to go in to dos |king|

Should I even ask? :D

It is really easy to do and I've done it a few times. Back when I carried a Palm I ran over that too and found out that Palm gives you a referb for $100 plus what is left of your old one. I'll forget that the iPod, phone or whatever is in my lap when I park in my garage and when I get out whatever falls on the floor and I don't always notice it until I'm backing out or something.

[quote=Cleo]Some would say that iPods are built a bit too tough.
Brad Pulaski had died of blunt trauma to the head after being repeatedly bludgeoned with an iPod

Wow. Seems like she takes her music a bit too seriously. |angry|

Damn, that's cool! |thumb ... and easy! Looks like I'm gonna be breaking out the cc. lol

Much nicer than saving everything to disks and such. Thanks!