Have you backed up recently? Cautionary tale

[airdick]

Originally Posted by grandmascrotum

This morning my hard drive blew up. I mean, literally, with smoke, and electrical smell and everything. |shocking|

As the god of dramatic irony would have it, this disaster happened when my hubby was trying to ghost/backup my hard drive, as I hadn't backed anything up for 2 months.

And for a while there, it looked like the last backup we had was actually June 04 rather than December 04.

As you can guess, today has been a very stressful day with a lot of wasted time and productivity.

Luckily, we were able to patch new circuitry onto the original hard drive to replace the fried stuff, and our Frankenstein experiment worked. So I'm only down one day, rather than several days trying to relocate invoices, download html files, redo spreadsheets etc. I would never have got my personal digital photos or recently updated tax spreadsheets back if the drive had been lost.

So, please learn from my disaster and back everything up RIGHT NOW.

I know there's been threads like this before but it can't hurt to give people a reminder.

Your hard drive WILL fail, it's just a matter of when.

What circuitry did you replace on the harddrive? Those little tiny surface-mount components scare me, I have enough trouble just counting the jumper pins!

I lost my laptop harddrive in January. My last backup was from November, although some newer bits and pieces of essential information was backed up into my palm pilot. I didn't lose too much data that couldn't replaced and/or reconstructed, but I'll bet I've wasted at least 40 hours recovering.

As for the server, I think I'm pretty well protected there. Backups for the server are scripted with a full copy of my data and config ftp'd out every Sunday morning, and incremental copies ftp'd on the other mornings.

It would be nice to have a procedure to refer to in case of a planned or unplanned move to a new a server. I have been thinking about doing a "fire drill" one of these days and restoring the server backups to an extra PC here at home so that I can create a checklist of instructions for disaster recovery.