What do you do if lightning hits your home or business and every hard disk you own is fried?? Do you keep backup copies of your important business files. How bad would you be hurt if you lost these files from your computer?
I’d just like to see what others do.
One trick I have is that I periodically upload my critical files to my Internet Service Provider to the space they provide. Since I have DSL and WSFTP it’s quick and easy to do that. In other words, I use their backup system to preserve the files. I keep about 10 generations of the files there so if one gets corrupted it won’t overwrite my only other good copy. Also, about once a month I copy all the files to a CD or DVD platter.
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)
PlaneWood
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Back up ALL my digital pictures, over and over. Other than that, nothing is sacred. Back them up every time I upload some.
Every night I do an incremental backup to the hard drive of a spare machine.
Every weekend I do a full backup (5g) to a portable harddrive (120g) that is stored in a remote building. We have about 10 years of data stored this way.
Mike, your use of offsite storage is by far the best method. The further away from you the better. Just make sure your ISP's server isnt in New Orleans, or on the Texas coast (you're inland aren't you?). I'll never forget Fireman's Fund moving the Corporate Headquarters out of a 100 year flood zone to a 500 year flood zone and then getting flooded out the first year. There were more than a few Actuary's with mud on their shoes and faces.
Thats why the secondary backup with the DVD drive is also the correct move. You cannot predict the future no matter how hard you try so when it comes to something as precious as your data, prepare for the worst and you'll fair better than most.
Ever thought of creating an event with MS scheduler to do all that automatically for you?
I set my system up with all of the necessary software and programs I use and then did a backup to a DVD.
After that, I back up my data to a CD weekly and keep them at my day job desk.
Then if my system is still running fine, every 6months I do another FULL backup to DVD.
The DVD backups I burn a second copy and keep them at work also - the origninal is in a fireproof lockbox with some other documents.
I am responsible for Disaster planning at my company, and you have a good plan, just be sure your carrier has good hacking protection. If your provider was compromised and somone gained access to your data what would it do? Do you have banking information, or worse client banking information. Just be careful. There are numerous ways to back up data. With the cost of external diskdrives it's cheap to use an external hard drive to back everything up and keep it at an offisite location. If the data is small (less than a gig) you can even use usb stick disks. If your business is large enough and loss of data wouuld be a large impact, pay a company to store your backups. Finally, if you do take a hit (even lightning) don't assume all is lost. There are services (on-trak) that can get data off of damaged drives. They charge a fee and depending on the damage it can be steep. But I have seen miracles happen. I also know of instences where a company has closed the doors, because of the failure to plan for business continuity. Sorry, I'll get of the soap box, but you raised an excellent issue.
Since you mentioned external drives (which is what we use):A 120g/8m Western Digital IDE drive was $29 at Best Buy a couple weeks ago. They are often $49.Add an external IDE drive USB connector hard drive case for about $49.For $100 or so you can back up data for a long time.We do backups on Sunday morning as we read the newspaper.
An iPod makes an excellent portable back-up drive the size of a deck of cards besides providing a lot of entertainment value. I have a 4th Gen 40 gb that gives me about 14 gB of disk base beyond the 8500 songs on it. Eventually the music will crowd out the data and it'll be time to upgrade to the 60 gB iPod leaving the 40gb iPod available just for data storage in the glove compartment of the car.
John O'Connell - JKO Handcrafted Woodworking
The more things change ...
We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
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I use a USB 40G external hard drive ($150) and a USB 256K flash drive ($40). Both have come down in price since I purchased them. You can now get 4G flash drives for $250. You can store an awful lot of stuff on the 4G flash drive and keep it in your pocket. Safe, fast and handy. The flash drives are also great for carrying around pictures from your portfolio, drawings, without having to carry a laptop. Make back ups a regular scheduled event. Last thing Friday night or first Monday of the new month. That way your less apt to forget. Your ISP can probably automate the back up if you are willing to leave your computer up 24/7 and are willing to pay. They usually like to schedule the back ups for late night early morning. How much data? How often? How critical if you loose it?
We have a UPS.
It is unlikely that the hard drive that has our data on it and the backup drive kept on either a different machine (nightly) or in a different location (weekly) will go bad at the same time.
What do you do if lightning hits your home or business and every hard disk you own is fried??
CRY? or get REALLY mad!
I have a DVD Read/Write.. The write once/read many are cheep and make a good backup for important stuff.. But if it was my a business I'd get some type of Auto-backup software// I had some for tape but long ago.. I'd guess they use DVD now?
EDIT:: I forgot.. In a fire the backup get burnt up too.. Maybe offline is better... Or a fire proof safe?
Edited 10/22/2005 3:26 pm by WillGeorge
Edited 10/22/2005 3:26 pm by WillGeorge
The reality is that backups are only good if you test them before you pack them away and call them backups. All too often, in my past life as a Systems Engineer, we found that the backups that we thought we were getting were useless.
There is one product that I particularly like. Its made by Symantec and it is called Ghost. This software can run from windows but is most reliable when its run from a DOS boot disk. The software creates a full system image on the first pass and then you simply update files that have changed on all subsequent passes.
If you have a catastrophic failure, you simply restore the system with the full image and then incrementally restore the rest. The image files can be written to disk and then transferred to DVD later which is the preferred method since it is faster to create them and you can continue to work while the DVD burns.
The nice thing about the full image is that you never have to reload any software. You just boot off the DOS disk and tell it to restore the system. When your finished, you PC is exactly like it was the last time you backed it up.
You can also make as many DVD copies as you like and store them at different locations for added security.Steve
"You can either be smart or pleasant, I was once smart but now I'm pleasant. I like being pleasant better." Jimmy Stewart - Harvey
WhatKnot -
Ok, you just lost your system drive. What software do you use to read the DVD that contains the system image that was created by Ghost? Er, I guess Ghost didn't create the DVD - that was created by the system from the harddisk system image copy that was created by Ghost.
Does the Ghost boot disk have software that will restore from DVD? And, what do you do if you don't have a floppy drive? When you create the DVD, do you make it a bootable DVD with the required Ghost software to restore the data?
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)PlaneWood
Ok, I'll throw you a curve. I use Bart's PE. You can look it up on the net. What a great utility. It creates a windows boot cd will a partial load of windows. You can add applications when you create the cd. All you need is the utility, a cd burner, a good copy of winxp (sp4) and it will create the disk or an ISO image for burning later. I had to recover a disk of a computer that had begun an DOD erase. I used the cd to boot into windows from cd and used a disk recovery utility to get my data back. There are even groups out there developing code for bart's PE.
Planewood, check out my comments on Bart's PE. It will do what you want. If you have access to a winxp disk and a burner, you can create a bootable cd with any extra utility on it. Do a google on Bar'ts PE. If you have any questions drop me an E-mail. I use it all the time, and it's free.
Ok, will check on Bart's PE.
But, can you use Ghost to create a bootable DVD, with the necessary software to copy the system image that's on the DVD back to hard disk? I have thought about buying Ghost previously.
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)PlaneWood
The actual executable that restores for gost is very small. It will fit on a floppy. The image you create (the backup of your hard drive) can be spread in pieces or volumes. It will allow you to specify the size of the image files (.gho). For instance you could set the size 630meg and split a two gig partition into 4 cd's, or a single DVD, so as long as you can boot an os and read the media you would be ok. I have not tested this with bart's pe, but I will and let you know how it goes. I do know that the current version of bart's pe will not support a bootable dvd, but that has not mattered, since once booted I could load a program from usb disk or put it directly on the bootable cd. We use ghost to backup the system drive that holds our backup software for all our servers. We found that it could restore fast and put us in a position of loading tapes to restore data volumes fast. Another application for the same use I have used is called drive image. It is very adept at backing up a hard drive. I apologize for using jargon, and if I am confusing you shoot me an E-mail and I'll explain in more detail.
Bones -
Altho I've been retired from the computer business for 6 years, I feel I had an hand in inventing some of this modern computer jargon.
The first digital computer I programmed was called, I think, an IBM 650. It was programmed with wires on a patch panel. The 2nd was the IBM 704 which had 64K iron ferrite core memory and 9 of those monster tape drives. Disk drives hadn't been invented yet! And a card reader, of course.
My first PC was an Atari 400. I wrote and sold lots of software and firmware for it and the Atari 800.
That was my Good Ol' Days.
Would you believe that in 1960 some of my EE professors believed that analog computers were the future and that digital computers were just a passing fad?
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)PlaneWood
Ah that word retired, sounds inviting. Sorry, I don't always know the audience, and sometimes throw acronyms out and when I get the blank stair back, know I have done it again. You do go back a ways. My first computing environment was key punching my cobol programs in a vax PDP7. Oh how times have changed. Now, a vuneralbility is announced, my whole staff has to stop everything and get a patch deployed before the code is available on the net, and an attack is in progress. The last exploit was announced on a Tuesday, and on Thursday evening we received the notice of first attack. We are getting better at responding, but these guys are getting faster as well. We have to be perfect and the bad guys only have to get lucky once! Take care.
Mike, excellent questions, I think they've been answered for me.
Steve
"You can either be smart or pleasant, I was once smart but now I'm pleasant. I like being pleasant better." Jimmy Stewart - Harvey
Edited 10/23/2005 1:41 am ET by WhatKnot
The company I used to work for would do a full backup Sunday evening and incremental backups every other night during the week. The next Sunday the last backup tape was dismounted and sent to a salt mine in Kansas. The next tape was loaded and the process started again. This was done for every major system which amounted to about 2 dozen tapes going to the salt mines each week.
PlaneWood by Mike_in_Katy (maker of fine sawdust!)PlaneWood
I swiched to Mac computers, learned the hard way. For a fee ($100/year for 1 gig of space) you can backup all your data to what they call idisk. Unless lightening hits Steve Jobs house your safe. I backup everyday at the end of the day. No problems for three years.
A hard drive is the most fragile piece in a PC & the most likely device to fail.
NA! For me it was that paper punched tape ya booted the puter with!
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