Backups (or Why I’m An Idiot)
on 11.18.06, 09:53am in windows • Comments (9)
I’m a &%@#&@! idiot (see ‘why smart people do dumb things‘).
I was doing some work on my home server last night and I managed to have a catastrophic data loss. When I say ‘catastrophic’, I mean complete, horrible and non-recoverable. It’s kinda like that ‘crawl into a corner with a brown bag of whiskey’ horrible. I lost 7 years of financial data, my family website, and a bunch of other things that I haven’t even begun to realize yet. It was a complete and utter disaster.
The details of what actually happened are still a bit fuzzy - I have no idea how I lost the data since it was on a completely different physical drive than what I was working on. One minute it was there, the next Windows said it was an ‘unrecognized partition‘. In fact, the details of what happened are probably not even important - except for the fact that I learned a very costly and valuable lesson.
While my ‘digital memories’ are somewhat safe (I have them stored on the server in RAID-5), I really do need to execute a better backup strategy (see Tao of Backup) for all of my data. RAID-5 buys me some security, but can you imagine if I lost all of the photos and videos of our kids. I would be crushed.
I’m curious what people’s strategies are for massive personal data backup. Anyone have any suggestions? I usually backup my laptop weekly with SuperDuper to an external 200 GB drive (in fact, i’m doing that right now), but what about all that data sitting on a server? Thoughts?
SM (November 18, 2006 @ 1:12 pm)
I sleep better knowing that my data is backed up offsite at Amazon and it’s stored encrypted. The prices are reasonable and it’s relatively easy to use.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261
Try it.
aawoken (November 18, 2006 @ 5:05 pm)
Oh man, I feel for ya….I have been there. I had carefully backed up my drive with Norton Ghost(don’t get me started). 28 cd’s worth of patinet backing up. When I go to restore, it blew up. Apparently Norton had copied a HD corruption and I was out of luck as Norton refuses to deal with this. Precious family photos lost. Every six months or so I give about 12 hours of time to trying to recover the data.
More recently, I move and despite having an external drive to backup to my hard drive failed and for some reason I can’t restore from backup.
I broke down,drinking is not an option for me as I am a recovering alcoholic. Switched to a Mac and have backup to a Lacie 250GB. Which I backup to a Maxtor. I can’t wait for Carbonite for Mac. I have learned my lesson for good.
JeffMc (November 18, 2006 @ 6:34 pm)
Same as you Steve, I use SuperDuper to backup the studio machine, and my laptop to a raid set. In addition, there are some things I will burn to a DVD once in a while, in case the raid set barfs. I learned 4 years ago the side affect of not backing up. Will never make that stupid mistake again.
Werner (November 19, 2006 @ 10:43 am)
I actually lost my raid-5 drive not too long ago. These are absolutely earth shaking disasters. It left me hating technology for a while.
I now also use S3 for backup (serious, this is not a commercial). Links: list of tools built on S3. Jeremy’s list of S3 backup tools
Chris Edgington (November 19, 2006 @ 6:38 pm)
I use the free SyncTool from Microsoft. It runs as a task on a nightly basis on all my machines. It copies the data from my server to a BACKUP partition on each machine. I also have it running on the server, copying the data to a separate NAS. On a non-consistent basis I burn a DVD of my PICTURES share - but not too often - as I feel pretty safe with having everything replicated across 5 machines.
John (November 19, 2006 @ 9:11 pm)
Ouch. I treat my personal ‘data’ and media separately. If you exclude all your movies, pictures and music most people don’t have that much personal ’stuff’. This should fit on a DVD or two. I also use MS sync toy for this kind of stuff and sync to my laptop every few days. As for personal home media - like home movies and pictures - this takes up a bit more space and I am very paranoid about that stuff. I have about 30 DVDs of home video, and I don’t ever want to lose that stuff. I have two complete sets of DVDs at home. Plus a copy I sent to the grandparents (off site storage), and the data is sitting on two different hard drives. Pretty much the same thing for my photos. It is a lot of work, but some things just can’t be replaced. I don’t worry so much about music. I have some scattered across various drives and devices. I keep my original CDs tucked away in sleeves though (the plastic cases take up too much space). I can always re-rip them if I have too.
Brettski (November 20, 2006 @ 5:19 am)
As smart as we may be, it seems backup routines never get created until something is lost. With me it was four years of personal financial data and other past projects. while trying to get out of my ‘Oh no, I lost my data’ funk, I decided, I am going to start a new backup routine and it’s going off-site. Tapes and hard drives around the house are just two easy to distroy, specially with young kids and pets around.
A good friend of mine suggested iBackup.com and I couldn’t be happier (we it could always be cheaper). The company has a decent windows client, I believe a Mac client, and even supports rsych! When I asked them about their security policies, they answered my questions well and even provided me with a SAS70. They are definitely worth look into if you are concidering Internet storage.
Best of luck,
Brettski
DWAnderson (November 20, 2006 @ 8:20 am)
I have three categories of items that get backed up:
1. Media (music, photos, movies & home movies)
2. Non-media items sitting on the SBS 2003 box in our basement, e.g. all the SBS files (e.g. Exchange database, SBS boot drive), My Documents files from all the household PCs, applications installed on multiple household PCs.
3. Applications that I just use on my PC, e.g. a bunch of video editing apps, games, etc.
Items in 2 get backed up daily and automatically by SBS 2003 on a USB drive that sits attached to the server at all times. I son’t currently keep an off-site copy of this drive, but I’m considering doing so on the same “monthly” backup schedule described below.
Items in 1 and 3 get backed up, ideally every month, but in reality every couple of months, on to a series of 250GB drives in USB enclosures that I keep at my office and bring home in my briefcase when I want to do a backup or restore. I figure that it would be the end of the world if a couple months of this data got lost, but it would be bad if we had some catastrophic event at our house that resulted in the destruction of the PCs and on-site backups.
FWIW, I’ve used AIS Backup software which is little known, but I’ve found the software to be very flexible and reliable and the company to be quite responsive. And the software is priced right at $37.50.
Corey (November 20, 2006 @ 11:36 am)
Having _local_ storage backups is great, but what if there was a fire or flood?
My family’s solution to this is to use FolderShare and sync directories across our extended network. We all live in different states with cable modems. I sync to my sister, my sister syncs to my dad, my dad syncs to me, etc. This provides the benefits of an offsite storage provider like Carbonite or Amazon without any of the cost or reliance on third parties. If FolderShare wasn’t an option, I would use the Hamachi VPN network we have and something like SyncToy across the same machines.