Computer back-up files

[Quigley Brown]

The big news around these parts this week is a shopping center fire set by a drug-crazed arsonist who died in the blaze. It destroyed over a dozen small businesses. Today the paper reported on some of the business owners who lost all their database info in the fire and hadn't made back-up files. I'm totally obsessed with making back-ups of all my photo work out of fear of such an incident. I've made at least three copies of everything I've created and have them stored at different locations. Everyone else do the same, I hope?

 

[scotrace]

Having been caught without, yes. Offsight backups are really smart for critical information.

There are two kinds of people. Those who have lost everything due to some computer failure, and those who will lose everythng due to some computer failure. And that applies to any platform.

Backup your stuff.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Sadly, I learned the hard way. I was doing back ups on DVDs, but only "mission critical" type stuff, and that was once a month.

I had just finished a month's worth of work, and we had a wind storm that kicked the power on and off in rapid succession. My pc automatically attempted to reboot, got power cut, again and again until all data was completely wiped off of the HD.

I lost that whole month of time, plus all of my personal pictures comprising five years, and many other files.

Now I back up once a week on a back up drive.

 

[Chanfan]

Alas, even though I'm in charge of that type of stuff for my office, and also spend time recovering files for people, I've been guilty myself of being lazy about backing up my home files.

For me, like you, it's largely photos that need to be backed up. I really should get in the habit of storing a copy off site - mail a set to a brother or something, in case of a fire (or similar) disaster.

It's an excellent habit to get into - but honestly, most folk won't until they have had stuff wiped out. Some not even then.

 

[zeus36]

I'm using an external USB drive that I put together for my backups. It saved me when my work PC crashed. Most of my Excel and Word files were on 2 gig thumb drives for redundant backups.
All of my MP3s were burned to CD. Guess I could put 'em all on DVD now...

Soon I'll be looking into a Network-Attached Storage drive using a RAID 5 controller. Should be some coming out using eSATA instead of USB (or in additon to)

 

[CharlieH.]

Father also learned this the hard way. Not too long ago he was updating his machine and for some reason he got that dreaded blue screen, and the machine went kaput. The only option to save it was by formatting the hard drive and so he did - losing every single piece of data from his business in the process. He was able to recover most of it with some data recovery application whose name escapes me. He now has stacks of backup disks.

As for my information - mostly pictures, archived jobs and music-, it has yet to be saved somewhere else. Some of my music is backed up in CDs, some pictures are stored in someone else's computing apparatus and many a job is in print, but the bulk of it remains endangered. Stupid Microsoft...