Always Back up...

[Alain]

I worked in the disk drive industry for almost 25 years. I started out as an engineer and served as a Project Manager, Section Manager R&D Manager and Manufacturing Manager. The point is that I know something about these devices. I backup nightly and automatically. To me, anything less is unthinkable.

To which type of device do you backup? I like my backup far from my main pc...

[Winston]

Hard drive. I periodically, manually, take a copy off-site...I don't like that part. If I lived in South Korea or Japan, I would have the bandwidth to do it autmatically and electronically. Here, in the U.S., we are still dealing with stone-ax internet technology.

[Alain]

Hard drive. I periodically, manually, take a copy off-site...I don't like that part. If I lived in South Korea or Japan, I would have the bandwidth to do it autmatically and electronically. Here, in the U.S., we are still dealing with stone-ax internet technology.

Is the hard drive inside the computer, usb/firewire or part of some nas device?

I've seen some rather cheap nas devices (€ 80, without disk) and those could be used.

I'm using usb drives now,but I disconnect them all the time and it doesn't seem safe to automate.

[Winston]

USB

[Mike-Photos]

It's your process that's protecting you, not the program. Sounds like it works fine for you.

I have "must have" files that change daily. Things like my M$oft money file, email directory, Lightroom catalog, etc.
I make lots of mistakes and so prefer automatic solutions.

I agree with that, I have separate backup. I make ZIP files per day, and copy them to two separate hard drives.
Once a week, I make a DVD with the seven daily backups, and that goes offsite. I also copy the daily zips to all five hard drives once a week, and it gets included in my hard drive rotation.
I agree it's a process that relies on me more than the automation, but its habit and it never varies, so I'm happy with that.

Here's what happened to me once, when I relied on someone else. I was working in a company, and on the network all my files were backed up daily by an automated backup system, with weekly, monthly, and annual backups also being stored.
One day someone requested to reprint a set of very old manuals that we had not changed for years. I looked on my computer, and the folder that had the backups was corrupt. No problem, I called the network supervisor and requested a restore from my backup. I could see the date the folder was last used, a few months back.

Three days later the supervisor told me that he had no backup files. The tapes were not writing correctly, and hadn't been doing so for months. It was not just my work that was not backed up, the whole company's databases and all systems had no backup. I know, they should have checked periodically, but they didn't.

I remembered that I had given the supervisor some old backups of mine to keep from when I was working at home. There were two sets of around 80 1.44mb diskettes. He had looked at these very disdainfully at the time, but he had kept them. I'd also given him the program disk for the backup program, and that took him a day to find.

We restored from the first set of diskettes, but one disk was corrupt and it stopped. The second set worked.

From that day on, I took responsibility for my own backups.

[Winston]

Backup without verify is indeed risky.

[kysham]

Mike-Photos, your backup regime makes me rethink how I "casually" did my backups! Thanks for the insight on how it was done, your way.

[Mike-Photos]

Mike-Photos, your backup regime makes me rethink how I "casually" did my backups! Thanks for the insight on how it was done, your way.

There's a saying that there are two types of people in the computer industry, those that backup, and those who have not yet lost any data. Once you lose data, you understand why you have to backup.
As Winston correctly points out, I rely on myself to initiate the backup. I do it every day, come what may. If you are not going to do this, it's better to use a more formal backup product that manages the process for you.

[kysham]

There's a saying that there are two types of people in the computer industry, those that backup, and those who have not yet lost any data. Once you lose data, you understand why you have to backup.
As Winston correctly points out, I rely on myself to initiate the backup. I do it every day, come what may. If you are not going to do this, it's better to use a more formal backup product that manages the process for you.

I don't come from the computer industry, so all this is very new to me. Now I have to seriously look into my backup capability (I'm just using a laptop + external HDD at the moment, with backups into DVDs). Looks like I had now been kicked out of "those who have not yet lost any data" group and have to enroll myself into the "those that backup" group....

Thanks for the pointers!

[Mike-Photos]

I have a brand new computer, less than four months old, and on Saturday morning my Drive C crashed!
I had more than enough backup to recover properly, even considering that my computer guy wiped my primary backup from my second drive to get a head start on reformatting over the weekend.
However, I found I had an issue. I use WinZip to create backups in a job, but I use a batch file and the old DOS PKUNZIP to test the backup file, and PKUNZIP was not finding errors in the file, and there were some errors - 4 files had errors. I had to use two different backup sets to recover all my files correctly.
Besides correcting that issue for future backups, I must admit that I failed to observe the last and very important rule of backups:

Test your recovery procedure from time to time

Maybe earlier backups would not have had zip errors, but maybe they would have. At least I could have possibly discovered that my testing of the zip file was inadequate.