New Year's Resolution #2 - Backup Your Computer
 

New Year's Resolution for all of us - BACK UP YOUR COMPUTERS!

Every few months, there is a plaintive post here - help, my computer crashed, how can I recover my data off the dead hard drive.

C'mon, when your drive crashes, your only response should be to click "restore from backup" and go put a 9mm through the dead drive. It should be no more traumatic than running the toilet paper roll empty in mid-p-

Best Buy has a 3TB Toshiba external drive right now for $130, which is pretty damn cheap.

I just improved my backup scheme as follows - every few hours, Time Machine does an incremental backup of my system to an external drive, that is of both the boot drive (soon to become the boot SSD) and the data drive (which holds the Mac OS libraries). Every week, Carbon Clone Copy makes a bootable clone of my boot drive and a clone of my data drive. When I have time, I'm also going to set up a cloud backup using Carbonite or similar.

Yep! I tell everyone the same thing and they still don't back their data up.

try dropbox.com = automatic and more benefits.

There are two types of people. Those who do backups and those who will do backups.

I also use time machine but still have a failed Windows drive I want to take in for recovery. It will cost me around $800 at best and $1400 on the high side. An exspensive mistake.

I had a bad experience with a time machine backup. My drive failed and my time machine backup wouldn't restore. It would hang up sometime in the middle of the night. Repeatedly. I finally figured from the logs it was hanging up at the same file each time. I deleted the file and then the restore went further before hanging up. The next day I deleted the next file it had hung up on, and after most of a week, my disk was finally restored. Not a good experience. So now I clone as well as use time machine.

Keep a yearly backup in a safe deposit box/fireproof vault as well.

At work I only save to the network which is backed up daily.

At home I have very little stuff I really need long term. That I save to an external HD and generally have it on more than one of my computers.

I like this saying:

G

I save my financials on thumb drives. This 3TB Toshiba sounds interesting though. Is it plug n' play? What is the use life of an external drive?

It is a USB 3.0 external hard drive. Lifespan - should be several years, but the point with hard drives is you just dunno.

Just lost another WD Caviar 90Gb drive today. Yes it was backed up. Guess things don't last like they used to.

Hmm, Carbonite is saying the initial backup only proceeds at 2-3 GB per day. So to initially back up my iPhoto Library will take 30 to 50 DAYS? Ehh, cloud backup may not be workable.

add some fiber to your diet

I have a large raid array for my /home directory, so I'm not too worried about hw failure....

I live in brush fire country. I use Carbonite. I may well get a big external HD just because my puter is getting maxed out. I had to use Carbonite once to restore a computer and it took a while, but it restored everything. Including deleted emails.

I'm interested in a cloud backup in case my house gets burgled or burns down. But in necessary I'll just carry an external drive back and forth from home to office every month or so.

All of my data is on my Windows Home Server with disk duplication, so everything is written on two different drives. If the server itself fails, I can read the data drives on any Windows PC. My main desktop, running Windows 8 is backed with Acronis True Image Home, and I have a current System Recovery DVD with updated drivers, etx... Everything has been thoroughly tested and it works!

Every PC is our house is backed up by the server and all data is on the server. Now, if someone breaks in and steals the server.... I'm sunk!

So I thought I'd do the right thing and back up my system again. Hadn't done it in a while.
Got the error of sector not found 0x8007001b.
I am running Vista 64 and have an external 750 gb hard drive.
Windows says it's the external drive that has the problem.
Where is scan disk when I need it? (sigh)

Or your house burns. I knew a man whose house burned. He told me the worst loss was all his photographs of his family.

I forgot to mention that I have all photos and family videos backed up on an external hard drive that is stored in the gun safe. Not fool proof, but pretty good. I should store the hard drive at my father's house in his gun safe...

A 3 TB time capsule is in my future. The downside is it has been for about a year so yeah I'm one of those playing Russian Roulette right now...

WTH? Get thee to Best Buy, spend $130 for that 3 TB Toshiba external HDD, and get Time Machine or Carbon Clone Copy working. Later when you spend the $500 for the Time Capsule, the External HDD can be the "store in barn in case house burns down" backup.

I am super paranoid with personal as well as business backups. I home I backup to my NAS (mirrored drives) nightly as well as to external, offsite hard drives monthly. I also use a cloud service called CrashPlan for the most valued files - nearly 1.5TB thus far - but that's not feasible for all my data given my internet pipe. Certain stuff is also on Dropbox.

At my work, I have onsite RAID disks and offsite tapes (LTO & DLT) with Microsoft DPM and BackupExec, plus Dropbox and CrashPlan in the cloud for the most vital stuff. We are an enterprise software company and therefore any significant data loss would be catastrophic.

BTW - I have had numerous internal and external hard drives fail. When you have a lot of them failure becomes a regular, almost predictable occurrence. I've had computers stolen as well, and also destroyed accidentally. Never, ever, entrust all of your stuff solely to a single disc drive, or keep your main and backup media in the same location.

Be mindful of backup mirrored drives. Check them weekly to ensure they are healthy.

I lost 4 years of non critical data at my office recently.

Data was stored on server with mirrored backup drive. Mirror died within a year of install and I never knew it. When the other drive we were writing to finally died, I discovered the issue.

Live and learn. Now we back up to the cloud as well as the usual in house methods.

THere's no excuse for this anymore. I bought a 1.5TB drive from Costco. It syncs my document folder automatically and runs a backup once per week. I never have to look at it unless I accidentally delete something.

I'm going to see if I can find this later today. Good advice! Been putting this off too long!

This. My wife has TBs upon TBs of photos and video. Copies kept and home and safety deposit box. Pain in the butt sometimes but necessary. FWIW my Office Depot frequently enough has closeout external drives sitting up front on the closeout table. Snagged a couple of WD 2TB drives last month for around $70 each. I'll eventually need them.

On top of that, we just bought my daughter a laptop for Christmas. After umpteen Dells via work for my wife and I this Dell is dead two days after Christmas. Won't post. Tech installed new motherboard on Friday. Still no luck. It's in a box to Dell as I type. My long winded way of saying any one of them can go at anytime. Keep your stuff backed up.

-J

PCs backup automatically to Network Drive. The business part of the Network drive backs up daily to another network drive at my house, with a more extensive backup every weekend.

I've already had two SSD failures, and the backups saved my butt!

Re the resolution to backup:
An I.T. friend of mine has a sign in his office
Jesus Saves and so should you.

timely thread, my Maxtor back-up drive just died. won't even turn on. going to local Micro Center today. I don't think the Toshiba is Mac compatible.

I used to use Carbonite, I've switched over to CrashPlan and all of our household computers are on it. In addition I run time machine on my primary computer plus a full image backup before every business trip.