Disaster on the TF Wiki

[kup]

Personally, I have been lazy with my personal back ups. At work everything is all good in the backup and restore department but my home computer is relying on the stability of my HDDs!

I keep saying to myself - Back it up - but I never get around it. I think that I will buy a giant capacity portable Hard drive and copy all the stuff there.

So I guess I am both a:

1. Someone who does backup - Professionally

2. Someone who will backup - At home.

[Saintly]

anything that is even a little bit important is worth a backup

heck i've even backup some that doesn't work when I test it later

That said, if it is your life.. you need to do it... just write a xcopy batch

[dirge]

Some of you may know that the server hosting cliffbee.com fell over a few weeks ago. My most recent backup of the server was about 2 weeks old, although the website itself is always backed up, since I keep a copy on my iMac.

The 2 week old backup of the server was sufficient, thankfully - once I'd sourced a replacement for the dead server.

I have to admit, I'm glad I have the local backup of the website files, otherwise I would have lost around two weeks work. While that would be recoverable, it took me around 2 days to restore (once I had a server sourced), instead of a few weeks. Much of that time was reinstalling the O/S on the new server and customising a few settings - most of the server's configuration files were backed up (some, such as Squirrelmail, run as a database, but most I could simply copy).

I feel your pain, FFN!

[jaydisc]

Personally, I have been lazy with my personal back ups....

I keep saying to myself - Back it up - but I never get around it.

This is so common. You must automate backup, because it's always the week or month or months that you haven't been doing it that disaster strikes. Hard drives are still the best combination of cheap, large and reliable.

Using IMAP or a web provider for email instead of POP gives you a built in backup. The same goes for using a service like Flickr or photobucket.

A few US friends have been recommending a service call Mozy, which is an online backup service. The benefit here of course is if your place burns down, along with your backup drive, you're still somewhat protected.

They have a free 2GB product, and for US $4.95 per month they have unlimited storage. The only problem with the latter is that SOME Australian ISPs charge you uploaded traffic and backing up 100's of GBs would adversely affect most quotas.

[tron07]

Dont they have daily, weekly, monthly, yearly type of backup to fall back on?

[kup]

This is so common. You must automate backup, because it's always the week or month or months that you haven't been doing it that disaster strikes. Hard drives are still the best combination of cheap, large and reliable.

Using IMAP or a web provider for email instead of POP gives you a built in backup. The same goes for using a service like Flickr or photobucket.

A few US friends have been recommending a service call Mozy, which is an online backup service. The benefit here of course is if your place burns down, along with your backup drive, you're still somewhat protected.

They have a free 2GB product, and for US $4.95 per month they have unlimited storage. The only problem with the latter is that SOME Australian ISPs charge you uploaded traffic and backing up 100's of GBs would adversely affect most quotas.

I don't need anything fancy, my personal data management is pretty basic and not much changes from one week to the next. I think I will just buy a USB SATA HDD encasement and a 300+ GB HDD and I am all set.

I was thinking of doing a RAID but couldn't be bothered - I am not like most people who keep invaluable photos or other irreplaceable stuff in the HDD. At most I would loose a few videos and some saved games.

On a related Real Life note: The HR manager where I work had been keeping all her PSTs, files and just about everything in her local laptop HDD despite being told to keep important stuff on the network/external storage. Her HDD died and she lost everything. She begun to get really upset and started crying.

Now her department has to pay $1500-$2000 in data recovery services as the HDD had a mechanical failure.

[Saintly]

Now her department has to pay $1500-$2000 in data recovery services as the HDD had a mechanical failure.

That's quite alot for HDD data recovery

[kup]

That's quite alot for HDD data recovery

I called several places and that is the best price I could find with extra 'hidden' costs. Keep mind that the HDD is physically broken on the inside.

[Saintly]

that's true...

is it the place in st. leonards?

[kup]

No its in New Zeland but they courrier fro free.

That's what I like about these guys, they give it all to you in one package instead of (we charge you for this, then for that and now this and so forth). On top of that, they are the cheapest and painless since they handle everything.

I personally put more value in the 'they handle everything' bit because it isn't really my responsibility but I know that HR would constantly bother me with it asking all sorts of questions if the process was more involved. It's also coming out of their department not mine if they choose to go forth with it.