Do you back up your data?

[dest]

If not, why not?!

How would you feel if your windows died, or your harddisk decided to corrupt itself one day randomly?

My XP was installed in 2003 and has been 100% stable ever since, I have tons of programs installed, and over 150GB of data.
Yesterday my harddisk decided to corrupt itself and now windows wont boot.

What would you do if it was you, and you didnt have a back up of all of those mp3s you love, all those pictures/photos you could never replace?

Thankfully, I planned for this and have all my data on a seperate drive, (and dvd backups) so I can install windows on a new drive, and still have all my data.

Its surprising how many people dont have backups of their most important data, or never think to do it.
I had it drummed into me when I worked as a computer engineer, it was always hard not to laugh when when seeing a managers face when going to a site to fix a system, ask for the backup to restore the data and to be told they hadnt done one!

You have been warned!!

[Dan_s2_coupe]

yep happened to e windows started slowing right down so i went and bought a external hard drive and copyed everything i wanted and then couple of days later it crashed completly. well glad i done it now

[rj scotty]

I run 2 machines and laptop. All have the same data copied to and from each of them once a week.

I know somebody who had all the photos of his baby son on his laptop alone and the hard drive died.

Be sensible and back it up !

You could look at web based backups as well.
What would happen if all 3 of my machines where destroyed in a house fire ?

cheers

rich

[madwolf_Uk]

Yeah i cheat slighlty and have a windows only H/D, a documents drive and a music/games drive in my machine, its not as good as haveing a CD backup, but if your windows goes corrupt the rest of ya data is relatively safe on different discs.

Of course, if you have a drive failure your a bit knackered, but my next setup gets round that by being a set of 4 SATA drives on a raid, you can loose a disc and recover the data no problem, so no need to backup as such.

Plus the amount of data i have, would be a large stack of discs, even DVDs to back it all up!

[terrybullwon]

set of 4 SATA drives on a raid, you can loose a disc and recover the data no problem, so no need to backup as such.

I am sure thats not english Gary

I had to copy my user account across the other day, i will be buying a external HD lesson learnt

[madwolf_Uk]

I am sure thats not english Gary

I had to copy my user account across the other day, i will be buying a external HD lesson learnt

It is english, honest

SATA = Serial ATA hard drive, faster data transfer than the useal IDE hard Drives.

Raid = different versions (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 etc), but basically spreads the data across 2+ drives in different ways giveing you tolerences for drive failures. http://www.acnc.com/raid.html explains it all nicely

[mcandmar]

Working in IT i have to keep it all nice and secure on tape, no excuses allowed. Having that disaster would be unspeakable, a kin to a vet accidently killing his pet dog!

@Madwolf, I've used Raid0 on my home machine for years and years, never had a failed disk. .....I know

[kwlw]

@Madwolf, I've used Raid0 on my home machine for years and years, never had a failed disk. .....I know

I'm changing failed disks once a week, sometimes few ones. I can't imagine living on Raid0 . My Audi directory is copied to three locations and DVD (that's how it is copied) every few weeks. And of course "primary site" uses mirror...

Audi data is the only data I backup .

Sau

[mcandmar]

Audi data is the only data I backup .

Sau

My collection of Audi data alone is close to 20gb, i cant resist saving every pic and vid i find

[Nuvo]

20GB?Thats incredible!

[madwolf_Uk]

Hell, just my music alone is 14 Gig! 18Gig of movies/Dvds, 24 Gig of games and 6 Gig of game mods/patchs. thats all on one 200 Gig Drive, but 99% of that is also replaceable.

[Acidburn]

Think I might do mine soon I know I had problems with mine when my machine was put in storage when i moved so will have to check it when I start using it again.

[dest]

My mp3s are about 150gb, probably more now!
About 25% of them would be near impossible to replace without finding them on vinyl, and they are very rare/expensive if you can find any for sale

[dan_b]

I got a Seagate External HD about 18months ago and back it up once a week, doesn't take long over Firewire. I also now once a month do an incremental backup to DVD-R. I used not to bother at all as I never had much personal data and could always just as quickly re-build my machines, but since moving to a digital camera, and then an iPod, and of course pulling films/ tv down from bittorrent, it soon builds up!

I've never had a hard disc failure on my home machines, but seen plenty in my previous life in IT, and have had two home machines have motherboard or CPU failures (must stop overclocking...)...

External HDs are so cheap now, and so enormous, and the bundled backup software are easy to use that there's no reason not to.

[curlyks2]

Raid ... basically spreads the data across 2+ drives in different ways giveing you tolerences for drive failures.

Aye, but not always much tolerance! RAID 0 (striped no parity) has no fault tolerance, and losing any single drive typically equals total data loss, and RAID most-other-levels (single digit) losing multiple drives is likely to equal data loss. RAID at double-digit-levels is most tolerant and most expensive... but that didn't stop us (work) going for RAID 10 on a server doing very intensive disk work.

My home machine has three drives: a pair of fast SATA drives in RAID 0 for speed, and a third drive (not in an array). A script runs every time the machine gets shutdown which copies any new or changed data files from the partitions on the array to the single drive. There's also a semi-regular DVD backup.

I've had three or four drives fail on me outside work, and lost count of the ones at work: laptop drives - those in early Vaio's and Compaq's particularly - didn't like being treated as truly portable and getting thrown around by the road warriors.

One of our servers at work which had RAID 5 decided that two drives failing at the same time would provide us with some entertainment. Our only viable recovery path was new drives (we replaced the entire array with a slightly different configuration), reinstallation, and then putting the backup tapes to use.

Ck.