Backups are a PITA so they often don't get done.
Just refer to the anguish that Maddy Bell had where her PC stopped working.
Now she's got no excuse for not backing up her work. {courtesy of yours truly}
I came upon this little ditty again today.
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.
I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data's gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.
Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay
Now I believe in yesterday.
So get copying your files before Murphy comes along and takes them away.
I, on the otherhand appear to have about what seems like 20 copies of everything. I'm a week into sorting out around 40TB of storage.
Samantha
Comments
they
Are being done now Honest!
Just to emphasise the point - I almost lost everything i've done since 2010 - spreadsheets, databases and scribbles of course (I had thankfully got a separate drive for my photos). I was lucky that Sam managed to recover almost everything but it was a close thing.
So do back up your work regularly and don't rely on a single drive to do everything.
Mads the lucky
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Backups are so easy to do....
One Drive, Google Drive, Widows OSes have had automated backups for years, heck even UNIX systems have CRON for dumps. Even with the super duper solid state drives, its not a matter of IF, but WHEN your hard drive either shatters into little bits of metal plated glass, or goes and releases the magic blue smoke.
Clouds on the horizon
One Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox and other 'cloud'/'networked' solutions are all fine and dandy but as with any service that you don't control, what is your plan 'B' when the provider changes their T's & C's or gets taken over and closes your service down?
Also it relies upon you being connected to the internet.
If you travel then that 'connection' could become expensive especially with data roaming charges.
Google in particular has launched many services with a fanfare of publicity only to let them fester and rot and eventually close them down. Also, do you trust them not to read your data and use it for advertising?
Portable 1TB or2TB or even 4TB HDD's are pretty cheap these days. I carry TWO 2TB drives with me on my trips. Everything is copied to my laptop Drive and also to both portable drives. i.e. three copies of my data.
Three weeks in the USA last year used close on 500GB of storage for my Images. There is no way I could use any cloud service for that amount of data.
Obviously, my needs are far, far greater than most but I am just saying that be careful.
As one post has said, take backups of your backups.
Always remember...
The cloud is just somebody else' s computer....
Personally I use external hard drives that are connected to my docking stations. A little peace of software does a mirror of the data stored on the laptop to the drives. Same setup at the office.... Software is called "Mirrorfolder".
Tabby
Dropbox has rapidly become my
Dropbox has rapidly become my best friend. :-) I'm almost OCD in making sure everything essential is saved in at least three different places now, sometimes as many as five places.
Debs xxxx
I agree after almost losing
I agree after almost losing all my business data for a three year period everything goes to dropbox and it is auto shared to 4 computers with the ability to access offline meaning I have a total of five copies of every file i produce.
Backups
I used to do voluntary work teaching 'silver surfers' and a phrase I tried to instill in them was "Back up the backups of your backups"; the degree of success varied, it has to be said.
Radio Cressar - not available on FM
I think the tune could go some place
But I'm not certain about the lyrics.
If you can afford a second
If you can afford a second computer - even an old junker, install OwnCloud on it. You can use that as the backup for all the computers in your house, and if you know what you're doing enough to set up a forward and dynamic dns, you can access it from outside your home network and back up other devices. You can then back up owncloud to an external hard drive.
As for Google, most of the stuff they've 'abandoned' still exists. They just stopped supporting it as an active service, or migrated it to something else. The source code (and often binaries) are still available. About the only thing they've removed completed are some API's, that I can remember.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
OwnCloud is a bit too hard
for most people here to install unless you can get the Windows Appliance.
The basic edition needs Linux. AFAIK, most contributors here use Windows and are not computer experts. It would take me several hours to install this correctly (to my satisfaction) and I've been using Linux since the days when it came on Floppy disk.
There used to be a full
There used to be a full installer ISO, that built the entire thing from scratch for you, based on Ubuntu/Debian. If you didn't see it there, they might have dropped it off, but it's not that bad to install. Took me about 15 minutes. (not including the physical 'wait for the install to finish' time)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I'm lucky
I don't handle any large amount of data so my back-ups consist of USB flash drives (or whatever name you prefer to use). Still haven't been the victim of a catastrophic failure though.
USB Drives
I don't have a problem with that approach but just be careful with the types of device you use.
I've had a few die on me in the past year or so. These were all cheap 'no name' devices.
When tape drives were commonly used for backups we used a thing called
Rotating Tower of Hanoi
to rotate the tapes used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme
Don't use the same USB drive every day. Rotate them and keep a record of what device was used and when.
Backup to a new date stamped directory every day until the deivce gets full then delete the old/ancient backups.
Keep a record
I seem to have a couple of dozen flashdrives, from 512k to 64gig, and I never could remember which drive something was on. My solution was this: I have one of those label printers (my brother got 3 for $15 each off the bargain table at Office Depot). I made labels for each flashdrive, organized by size. So my 8gig drives were 8A, 8B, 8C, etc. The 16gig ones were 16A, etc. I have a little spiral notepad and I can just log that the story backup is on 64B, 11/17/16. Suddenly everything is organized!
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
If you buy 3/4" heat shrink
If you buy 3/4" heat shrink tubing (white or black), you can put that over the drives. Writing or putting labels on the drives never works long for me. So, I put the heat shrink tubing on, I carefully use a hair dryer to put it in place, then write on the tubing with a sharpie. (silver for black, and black for white tubing). Need to repurpose? Cut the tubing off, put on a new piece.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Problem
I haven't had any problem with the labels so far (knock wood). Perhaps you handle your drives more than I do. Mine mostly reside in an acrylic box on my desk.
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Mine mostly travel with me,
Mine mostly travel with me, and they are very identical.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.