Have you backed up recently? Cautionary tale

[Ms Naughty]

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.

[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.

[Cleo]

Too much hot porn on your drive?

Yeah I do nightly versioned backups to a FireWire drive each night automatically using a program called DataBackup

I also do a bootable clone of my hard drive anytime I update my system or install major applications using a program called carbon copy cloner so that I can plug the FireWire drive into any Mac and boot from it in case of disaster.

I also keep copies of my backups someplace else besides my home.

[Useless]

I need more hard drives for back-ups. I'm terrified of using anything over a 40Gig drive because I just don't want to lose 100+Gigs of shit at once. After reading this I'm going to have one of those days where I panic every time I hear a funny sound from inside my pc.

[Cleo]

Over at Angel's place we have been buying FireWire drives in pairs and then making mirrored RAIDs out of them so that if one drive fails then everything is still safe on the other drive.

Not sure how easy this is to do on a PC but on a Mac everything needed to make FireWire RAIDs is built in and real easy to setup.

Mirrored RAIDs are really the way to go when you have terabits worth of data.

One caveat is that mirrored RAIDs do not protect against data corruption, only drive failure. Versioned backups is the only thing that will also protect against data corruption.

[Ms Naughty]

We have a toolbox full of backup harddrives which we keep offsite. The plan was that every month we'd ghost my harddrive so that I'd always have a recent backup. Unfortunately time got away so I was overdue for a backup. Luke was trying to make use of a new removeable hard drive case which we suspect is what caused the problem - there must have been a fault with the connections in it somewhere.

Anyway the drive is a Seagate Barracuda. With changing out the circuitry, Luke just unscrewed the entire electronics plate and screwed on another from the same brand of hard drive. It was a bit of a risk, we didn't know if it would work, so it was kind of like a scene from ER, with the loud heartbeat and heavy tension. The short had happened in the upper right hand corner of the circuitry, away from the actual drive, so we think that helped.

Sorry if this isn't a very technical explanation.

Does anyone have suggestions for an easy to use Windows based backup program? I find myself wishing there was something that was able to pick out all the recently changed files and only back those up rather than regularly cloning the whole thing.

[airdick]

Originally Posted by grandmascrotum

We have a toolbox full of backup harddrives which we keep offsite. The plan was that every month we'd ghost my harddrive so that I'd always have a recent backup. Unfortunately time got away so I was overdue for a backup. Luke was trying to make use of a new removeable hard drive case which we suspect is what caused the problem - there must have been a fault with the connections in it somewhere.

Anyway the drive is a Seagate Barracuda. With changing out the circuitry, Luke just unscrewed the entire electronics plate and screwed on another from the same brand of hard drive. It was a bit of a risk, we didn't know if it would work, so it was kind of like a scene from ER, with the loud heartbeat and heavy tension. The short had happened in the upper right hand corner of the circuitry, away from the actual drive, so we think that helped.

Sorry if this isn't a very technical explanation..

That's a good story and a cool workaround. I'll bet everyone was really happy when it worked out.

Does anyone have suggestions for an easy to use Windows based backup program? I find myself wishing there was something that was able to pick out all the recently changed files and only back those up rather than regularly cloning the whole thing.

The Windows ntbackup.exe program can handle that. You can have it backup files changed since the last backup. It doesn't install by default with XP Home version, but I think it's available on the CD. I ended up grabbing a copy of ntbackup.exe from a XP Pro CD and it worked just fine.

[Tricky007]

It's very important to make backups.

If you can automate it, do that.
Then you are sure it gets done.

This reminds me to take backup of some which isn't automated yet.

[NastyTaylor]

Well know on you know is very important to back up everything!!!