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A few days ago my computer gave a few clicks of death and decided to go into a coma. Fortunately, we've managed to save the hard drive well enough to transfer the contents to a new computer. The transfers are in progress. At this point, we think we can recover everything. Should be interesting.
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Good Luck!
Hope everything goes well. Good luck!
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Similar Situation
I've got a couple SSDs that I've been saving anything of value to me to. So far, sort of temporizing about actually moving to another computer because I dread the myriad updates, downloads, and fixes that will be required... Sheesh. I have a huge monitor that has grown attached to me, and I hate to lose it. It's part of an all in one, so lose it, I will.
Before anyone makes suggestions, I'm a writer and hate working on Computers, it is torture... My vision sucks... Sigh...
not my fault!
It's not contagious. I didn't start this.
Backups? what Backups...
I don't have time to do backups...
Is a cry I've heard so many times over the years.
It does not take long to put a flash drive into your computer and copy all your files to it. But people don't to it.
I also now hear the same about people who deride Electric Vehicles ( I have one). They say that it takes too long to plug it in to charge. Is 30 seconds too long? (but I digress)
Is 1 minute too long to put a flash drive into their computer and copy all of their "My Documents" folder to it?
Please, please people do it. You know it makes sense. Heck, buy several flash drives and rotate them. A 64Gb USB stick is under £10 here.
If you don't then watch out for another rant from me when another failure happens.
Samantha.
It takes longer than you
It takes longer than you think, when you're looking at 7 terabytes of information.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
7TB?
That is a lot of data. Most people won't have that amount of storage let alone a C:\ drive capable of holding that amount.
My photo Archive is currently 2.8TB. That's all the photos I've taken since 2003 when I went digital. I've added 100GB already this year.
It is not held on my main computer. I have three copies of it on 3 separate 4TB USB-3 drives. Like you said, it takes time. It took me quite a bit of time to get it all sorted out but adding to it takes less than an hour once a year. I keep the current and previous year's photos on my MacBook and it is backed up to a 2TB HDD everyday using TimeMachine. This does incremental backups and is also where I'd go if my laptop died and I was going to restore it to another one. With MacOS, this sort of restore is all there in the Operating System and not some extra.
But I digress.
If you have lots of data you will develop a backup strategy.
My guess is that most writers here won't have huge amounts of data. We are not the norm.
Samantha
Depends
If you do photography and video, 7TB is nothing. Modern high pixel cameras, especially if you do RAW files are huge and 4k video eat 10TB drives for breakfast.
A Plex server would be another use where RAIDed 10TB drives would be common. Then you should double or triple that for full backup, on-site and off. Pros still use Tape for server backup but obviously overkill for your average Joe or Josephine
I have backups of most of it.
I have backups of most of it.
As an IT consultant, I hang onto images for various customer machines plus ISO images for installs that people can't be bothered hanging on to (or lose regularly), plus copies of software that the original manufacturer refuses to support - or even acknowledge that they exist. (Neat, for example, no longer has Neat Receipts. It's store in the cloud or nothing. Which brings up all sorts of privacy concerns for lawyers, doctors, small businessmen, etc. So I have a copy of the last version of it that they produced, in case the data needs to be moved to an other computer because of new machine, crash, whatever)
That doesn't mention my 40 years of digitized music and video collection. (That's only about a terabyte)
My issue isn't the amount of data - it's how SLOW it can be to try to make a backup. Not just the backup itself, but the initial 'what needs to be backed up' indexing. Backing up 2 terabytes of email took about 3 hours to index, but only about 45 minutes to sync the differences.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Automatic Backups
You can set automatic backups to occur anytime you want. Get a huge external drive, set the backup to occur at say 3am and wakeup in the morning with it all done. I would personally get at least two, possibly three identical drives and keep them in rotation. Do a full backup once a week and then incremental backups during the week. When it's time to do another full backup swap out drives and store the previous drive in a safe place, preferably off site.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Um.. It can take days for a
Um.. It can take days for a backup to finish.
At a theoretical maximum of 625MB/s, I could supposedly transfer a single 1 terabyte file in roughly 27 minutes. In reality, it can be a LOT longer, especially if you have tens of thousands of small files. As an actual example, assume 20 kilobyte email files (MDIR). That's 100 million files at one customer, equaling 2 terabytes of email. Each one of those has to be parsed, copied, assigned, verified, then go to the next file.
What I generally do is I have the critical files on RAID, I have singleton backups of the enormous files that truly aren't THAT critical, and then I reasonably regularly copy core data to another device. I try to keep two copies of most things, which means that I run de-duplicators pretty frequently as well, between a workstation and a Drobo.
For your average person, my recommendations are one external hard drive that stays connected, using a backup program that makes full images and locks down the drive, and a flash drive that gets critical documents copied to every week or two, and then put in a drawer. (or taken home and exchanged for one there)
DO NOT use a flash drive as your MAIN working drive! Flash memory is better than it was when I bought my first 256 megabyte drive, 18/19 years ago, but it's still extremely weak when written to repeatedly, which is what most word processors do. (autosaves). Always have your critical files on a separate drive - even if that's another flash drive. I've had to tell more than one person that I couldn't salvage anything off of their dog-chewed drive, because the dog's tooth shattered the main chip. I have managed to salvage data from drives where I had to run fine wires to replace broken/torn tracks - I _hate_ doing that, but as a last resort, it most recently salvaged accounting and customer data for a group of lawyers.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
That's what incremental backups are for
You video and music collection has data that has not changed in years. Back it up a couple of times and then you only need to backup what changes. There really is no sense in backing all that up every day or week when it hasn't changed.
I don't backup my Photo Archive any more. I have three copies of everything up to 1/1/19. This years photos will be added to those copies next january. Lightroom is good in that respect that I can archive a specific set of photos to a catalogue that LR can open.
I agree that Flash Drives are not a long term solution but they are better than nothing. Having several and rotating them is even better.
With 1TB HDD's costing around $50 these days using them makes even more sense than flash drives
But you have to start from somewhere.
Some of us have been in the IT game longer than we care to remember and 'have the T shirt' from HDD failures so we mitigate the effect that the same thing happening again. Most people who are not in the IT business and are sold a PC/Laptop have no idea about how to take backups of their work.
Samantha.
Wow 7Tb????
I hope you meant 7Tb and not 7TB ( a huge HUGE difference)
Anyway, I backup 16 Gb and I thought that was a lot. Of course that doesn't include the 500+ DVD's I own which I have copied to my in house server. They are backed up independently of the data on my laptop.
Data on the laptop is backed up twice each week onto two separate 32Gb flash drives (usb sticks - and alternately - once each).
Sometimes, just for kicks, I back up to a third flash drive ( once a month ). That one is tucked away somewhere safe (if there is such a thing).
16Gb backup takes around 40 minutes. I can't imaging how long it would take to backup 7Tb (20000 minutes??? - 334 hours??????)
Wow again
POOKA
Seven tera _bytes_. Yes. I
Seven tera _bytes_. Yes. I have a four terabyte drive full with nothing but customer data, and two others that are half full. Plus the Drobo, with 8 terabytes of storage space, about half full.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
There are no truer words
I totally agree with you, Samantha. I suppose it's like insurance - one doesn't want it because of the cost, but when there's an emergency...
A perfectly good 64GB thumbdrive can be as low as $15 at Walmart, though the more expensive kinds can go as high as $100.
I suppose some people will say, but what if I had terabytes to back up? Again, it's like insurance, right? The initial cost and effort of making a system backup will be substantial, but one will be sooo glad when something happens to your computer. And when one is done with a system backup, then one can just back up the files one is working on at the time. And that won't probably be in terabytes - I suspect a 64GB thumbdrive would be enough.
Anyway, I'm sure one can always rationalize away the need to back up because of the effort it would take, and find reasons why one can't back up. But, again, it's like insurance...
I suppose there's an attraction to living on the edge, or living dangerously, but not safeguarding data isn't like bungee jumping or skydiving. Not backing up data isn't living dangerously - it's just being stupid. Just an opinion only, of course.
click here to read all of my blogs,
click here to read my stories in BCTS, and
click here to see my profile & know more about me.
note from a person that
note from a person that believes that everyone should learn to redo their hard drive and be back up fully 100% in one day...I know that is pushing ya....
but here is a trick
https://ninite.com/
100% GOOD site I have used for years, This place has all your needs for your drive redo in one place and in one download, all done with place, choose a few or all, one click-wait and install one or dozens of needed programs ALL in shot! ALL updated and ready to go~!
Proud member of the Whateley Academy Drow clan/collective
Ouch!
Good luck, hope you get everything recovered and all set back up right.
>i< ..::