Lets talk backing up...........again.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The new Western Digital "Passport" range of external drives all seem to be getting "hammered" in reviews because they use a "microUSB" connector which, apparently, in many cases is very loose, and results in the drive losing its connection if you so much as touch the cable. That's why I go for ones with a nice, solid, mini USB.

Mine is one of the older ones I guess. It's a standard mini USB as is my 500G external (also a WD).

[wodin]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's the benefit of using cheap external USB drives - it's easy to keep one out of the house, eg at work, or at a friend's house. More convenient than "cloud" storage if you have a lot of data (at least it is if you use ADSL, which has a very slow "upstream" data rate). I use two drives, and keep one at home, and one at work, swapping them weekly, so the very most I'd lose would be a week's data updates.

Yes, I would agree, but that's not possible for me. Due to extreme paranoia, external USB drives are BANNED at work (US Dept of Defense). It seems that someone brought in an infected thumb drive a couple of years ago, and shut down an entire region.

The knee jerk reaction was to ban all USB external media throughout the DoD, and enforcing it with a GPO. The smart thing would have been to install a GPO to scan everything as part of the mounting process, but whoever accused bureaucrats of being smart.

The hardest hit folks were people who do a lot of photography. Imagine trying to get your photos into the network when you can't mount your camera as a hdd. You have to have a stand alone computer to mount your camera to, and burn your pics to CD/DVD!

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

(can you call cats your possession anyway?)

Nope, cats and dogs are family!

[alecE]

DG - really sorry to hear about your data loss - I hope the recovery efforts are successful.
FWIW I use a 1Tb usb drive to store the bulk of my data - this makes it easy to switch between laptop and netbook. However, all the important stuff is also backed up to CD or DVD, and my son has been press-ganged into acting as off-site storage for DVDs as well. As mentioned earlier, the critical bit is building the backup process into normal activity.

[desertgrandma]

Doing the happy dance here.

My new very bestest friend, and newly adopted son, the computer guy (jk) just left. He picked up the replacement disks for the dell.

Seems he was able to retrieve everything on the desktop, my documents folder, my pictures, and the Calibre library. For me, thats all thats really important.

He's going to wipe, reinstall everything, then bring it back, and when he does, he's setting me up with a new external hard drive, showing me how to set it up, and watching while I download Carbonite. He's also going to network the three computers in this house.

I've used him a couple of times before for stuff, and trust him enough to do this. Sometimes its better to let the pros do it.

Oh! And someone else suggested burning pictures to CD's, and storing them in a safedeposit box. Yet another level of protection.

See? I"m learning!!

[daffy4u]

Happy dancing with you! Congratulations DG and many happy back-ups to come!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Doing the happy dance here.

My new very bestest friend, and newly adopted son, the computer guy (jk) just left. He picked up the replacement disks for the dell.

Seems he was able to retrieve everything on the desktop, my documents folder, my pictures, and the Calibre library. For me, thats all thats really important.

He's going to wipe, reinstall everything, then bring it back, and when he does, he's setting me up with a new external hard drive, showing me how to set it up, and watching while I download Carbonite. He's also going to network the three computers in this house.

I've used him a couple of times before for stuff, and trust him enough to do this. Sometimes its better to let the pros do it.

Oh! And someone else suggested burning pictures to CD's, and storing them in a safedeposit box. Yet another level of protection.

See? I"m learning!!

Wonderful!

[omk3]

Congratulations desertgrandma!
So this little adventure brought you a brand new son, and a lot of knowledge on backups!
All's well that ends well!

[Mobile Mason]

My uncle hosts all my data on his home server, which fills his entire garage.

[fugazied]

You are probably on windows so this post won't help at all, but for mac guys it might. Here's what works well for me.

On my windows machine, I keep nothing of importance. Some movies and games I could download again.

On my mac I have time machine, the built is backup procedure which backs up everything every hour automatically in the background to an external harddrive wirelessly (Apple time capsule). That puts my data on two harddrives, theoretically guarding against HD failure (but no theft/fire where both could disappear or die).

On top of that I backup the very very important data to Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/). It is insanely cheap, I think my highest bill has been $1.50 for a month. I use a shell script to back it up but there are a few solutions around for mac to S3.

I found my script here: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html and modified it slightly. But if you don't want to fiddle with scripts you can use this service: http://www.jungledisk.com/

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Doing the happy dance here.

My new very bestest friend, and newly adopted son, the computer guy (jk) just left. He picked up the replacement disks for the dell.

Seems he was able to retrieve everything on the desktop, my documents folder, my pictures, and the Calibre library. For me, thats all thats really important.

He's going to wipe, reinstall everything, then bring it back, and when he does, he's setting me up with a new external hard drive, showing me how to set it up, and watching while I download Carbonite. He's also going to network the three computers in this house.

I've used him a couple of times before for stuff, and trust him enough to do this. Sometimes its better to let the pros do it.

Oh! And someone else suggested burning pictures to CD's, and storing them in a safedeposit box. Yet another level of protection.

See? I"m learning!!

Awesome! I'm glad to hear that everything turned out O.K.!

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Doing the happy dance here.

My new very bestest friend, and newly adopted son, the computer guy (jk) just left. He picked up the replacement disks for the dell.

Seems he was able to retrieve everything on the desktop, my documents folder, my pictures, and the Calibre library. For me, thats all thats really important.

He's going to wipe, reinstall everything, then bring it back, and when he does, he's setting me up with a new external hard drive, showing me how to set it up, and watching while I download Carbonite. He's also going to network the three computers in this house.

I've used him a couple of times before for stuff, and trust him enough to do this. Sometimes its better to let the pros do it.

Oh! And someone else suggested burning pictures to CD's, and storing them in a safedeposit box. Yet another level of protection.

See? I"m learning!!

Woot! Glad it was only a scare and nothing really was lost!

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

DG, here's my two cents worth (for what it matters).

How do the Big Boys do it?

Multilevel and off-site Back ups. The bank I first programmed for shipped a copy all their files off-site every night. And weekly backups. And quarterly backups. and Yearly backups...

So you need at least two external drives. One at the house, one somewhere else (safety deposit box?) Before you laugh at that, think how much you've spent on data. And that's not even including the priceless stuff (priceless because you can't recreate it at any cost.)

Rotate the off-site and on-site every three months. Sync 'em up with your current data and put one back off-site.

And let's face it, we individuals who are not programmers will load 99% of our data as static files, never changing. Pictures, music files, e-books, they don't change. So every three months is good enough. Keep a USB drive handy for anything you get that you can't risk losing and keep it handy with the computer. Clean it out after every three month swap.

If you do that, hard drive crashes will become just a nuisance....

Excellent advice! I do place a copy of my pics on a flash drive which we store in a fireproof safety box, but it's still on site. Off storage like our bank safety deposit box is a great idea.

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you have a laptop, I'd suggest getting a "bus-powered" external USB drive (ie one which is powered by the USB port, so you don't need a separate power supply for it). The best price point now for these (at least in the UK - I imagine it's the same in the US) are the 500GB models.

For actually making your backups, take a look at Microsoft's "SyncToy" tool, which you can download free here. It lets you set up "pairs" of folders - one on your PC, the other on the external drive - and keep them in sync at the click of a button. Works beautifully, and it's completely free.

Everybody has a "bad" disk crash at some point; it's just one of these things where, unfortunately, you only realise how much you have to lose once it's happened. The important thing is to plan ahead and make sure that it only happens once.

I'll have to check with the hubby to see if that's what he uses to back up our systems, but if not, I think that sounds like a great idea. Thanks.

We have the 2TB external hard drive that we use to back-up everyone on our wireless network (we have 8 computers). When I was buying it, the salesman told me a 1TB EHD was the size needed for a small business and that it was probably overkill of a home network. I don't know how much data we are actually backing up, but my husband was thrilled with the gift. He also has a pocket drive that I think is 500GB. It's pretty nice because it slides right into the front of his tower and he can grab it if he ever wants to take it somewhere.

I'm still a big fan of my flash drives. So far, I still have a ton of unused space for my ebooks and even on the flash drive for my pictures (I have separate ones for each). I like the price, portability, and simplicity.

Originally Posted by omk3

Well, the big boys obviously have more to lose. I find the off-site storage a little overkill. I mean, if my house was destroyed, lost data would be the least of my problems. But giving (ir)regular copies of my most important files to my parents to keep could be compared to off-site storage too. It's not even a burden, they are interested in most of my books and all of my pictures anyway.
Interesting thread this, and lots of good ideas. Thanks, people!

Although it would seem losing data would be the least of your problems if something happened to your house, it would actually cause a great deal of trouble that could be easily avoided. It's best to cover all contingencies.

@DGma ~ I'm so thrilled that you were able to recover your data!!

[alecE]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Doing the happy dance here.

Congrats!

[acastillo]

And also very timely.

I am starting a business next March and this thread has certainly convinced me that I need a plan for backing up data.


Glad that your "recovery" was complete!