Letter to my BTfriends: BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVES!!!

[DaveS]

Preface: I am a firmware guy for a large hard drive manufacturer.

Yesterday one of my wife's good friends called her in tears because the hard drive in their PC had failed, and she had lost all of her pictures, emails, addresses, tax files.

In the storage industry, this is sometimes referred to this as a "digital house fire."

She asked if there was anything I could do - I had to finish breaking her heart by telling her that there was nothing I could do, but there were companies that might be able to get back some of the files - but it would cost $1000, which she doesn't have - plus, there are no guarantees as to what files, if any, are recoverable.

As a professional in the hard drive industry - I can tell you there are two types of drives:
(1) drives that have failed
(2) drives that will fail

If you have a drive that is over 5 years old, you are on borrowed time. But the truth is, any drive could go any time (just like your brand new car could break down).

This is me pleading with all of you - if you do not have your important files backed up, do it now.

I personally keep copies of my important files on 4 different drives - one on my laptop, one on our desktop, one on a NAS box on my network, and one on a USB drive attached to my desktop. Oh wait, make it 5 - the NAS backs itself up onto another USB drive attached to it. I also have many files backed up onto web services (like gmail, and picasa photos).

Most USB drives come with software that will do back ups for you. USB drives are getting seriously cheap - I just saw a 1TB USB drive for $99.

I have programs/scripts set up to do all of this backup for me automatically. But, I'm a geek.

[BobSch]

There are two kinds of computer users:

Those who have had a drive falures.

Those who haven't cried yet.

BACK 'EM UP, FOLKS!

[Hellrazor]

As a professional in the hard drive industry - I can tell you there are two types of drives:
(1) drives that have failed
(2) drives that will fail

I have been a heavy computer user since the Apple 2 days and I have only had major issues with one drive in all of those years. The drive died and both replacements died. I finally told them to shove the drive someplace and bought another brand. Either I was lucky or...

[Ed62]

I keep most of my stuff backed up. Several years ago, I talked my wife into putting all her recipes on the computer. A hard drive failed, and she lost all her recipes. And I had to live with her. Lesson learned. Now if I have a failure, I'll probably lose a little, but most of it will be backed up.

Ed

[jackellis]

I tried to get clever a few years back and lost a lot of my wife's data. Now her laptop backs itself up to a server automatically and I do the same with things that are important.

[leehljp]

Mine and LOML's laptops are on wireless auto backup daily. I decided to go this route back in April. LOML gave in to pressure from me to upgrade her 3 year old yet still working great laptop - to a new one. We gave the old one to a daughter as her second computer. Three weeks later that hard drive died.

If it had died while all of LOML's data was on it (and the last back up 6 months earlier) she would have killed me and I wouldn't be here. After that "almost lost it" situation, I went out and bought a wireless backup system. Been happy with it since. Works in the background well and we never notice it, even when we are surfing the web or using Skype. Doesn't slow down anything noticeably.

Last week, I had a file corruption problem related to a file. It sure was good to just retrieve the previous working file (from a day earlier) and replace the corrupted file. And all of this was done wirelessly and instantly.

[chopnhack]

I manually back up everything on to a second drive and some other files onto dvd's so thanks for the reminder!

[Greg in Maryland]

Dave

Thanks for the reminder. I've been negligent for the past few weeks on my backup schedule -- too busy and such.

Also everyone, just because you have backed up your files does not mean that the back up worked and you will have usable files in an emergency. Spot check your backup files to ensure they are viable.

I have been burned more than once with corrupt backup files to presume that the backups are always usable.

Greg

[leehljp]

Dave

Also everyone, just because you have backed up your files does not mean that the back up worked and you will have usable files in an emergency. Spot check your backup files to ensure they are viable.

I have been burned more than once with corrupt backup files to presume that the backups are always usable.
Greg

You are so right. If a corrupted file is backed up then your backup is corrupt too. If it corrupts during backup for some reason, the same thing holds true.

On my system, I have incremental backups. After the original full backup, it backs up only changed files. But it does not overwrite the original file until the backup HD becomes full, and then only after it asks me. At least I hope it asks me! With the system I have, I can go back and back and back to the point I find the original or subsequent revisions and any in between. VERY helpful.

[Uncle Cracker]

Hard drives are so inexpensive these days that nobody should be without a backup drive. I have 3 identical external drives. The first 2 are my primary system drive and a redundant backup. The third does daily incremental backups, and is then disconnected and moved to a different area of my house. I can scoop them up at a moment's notice in an emergency, and then just let the rest of it all burn...

One other thing... The original CD's for all my software are stored in a fire-box at a friend's house.

[shoottx]

I can vouch that the cost of recovery for an 80 gig hard drive is $1007.93.

The cost would have been higher if I did not send my unused back up disk drive to save the recovered data. The place I used recovered every bit of my data.

Suffice it to say the back up software problems are resolved and there is a regular back up routine

[RayintheUK]

My system has two 500 gig drives - one is a complete (daily) back-up of the other. A friend asked me if I could look at his son's 500 gig USB drive, which had become inaccessible. I connected it up and - after several fruitless hours, I tried a demo of a piece of software that actually showed the files and folders on the drive. I returned the drive to him with a recommendation that he download and run the full version of the software.

I am, apparently, much better at "that sort of thing" than he is, so I was persuaded to do the download and recovery on my machine. I duly downloaded the full version and ran it. It found the external USB drive and I set the software on its recovery work. On completion, it asked if I "wanted to save the changes?" I clicked on "OK" - but it made no discernible difference to the external USB drive. What it DID do, however, was to trash the partition table of BOTH my hard drives!

Vista Ultimate's partition table repair didn't work at all, so they're now with a friend of mine who is a computer forensic scientist, working for banks and police forces around the world. I'm hopeful, but dare not ask, as he's so busy. Everything recent could be lost forever, so back up to another machine or an external drive, not just on the same machine. I was one of those who thought it would never happen to me and that I was safe enough, but I was wrong. Back it up NOW!

Ray

[os1kne]

Around 6 months ago, my wife and I went out to dinner with some friends of ours. The husband is fairly tech-savvy, has a fairly stout PC with 4 hard drives. Earlier that day, he was wiping out one of the old drives to be removed as he suspected it was near the end of its life. Using one of those super-duper file destroyer programs, he accidentally destroyed all of the files on his E: drive, instead of his F: drive. The E: drive contained over 10 years of digital pictures of their children, tax records, and pretty much every bit of important digital information they had. Needless to say, he didn't eat much that night.

Shortly after that, I picked up a 500GB USB drive for about $100 and have been backing up our data approximately monthly. About a month ago, my wife had a consulting engagement (her first since our son was born a year ago.) My wife did a ton of prep work over 3 months, making Powerpoint presentations, etc.. She was to fly out on a Monday morning. The previous Thursday, she called me at work saying her laptop had died and she was screwed. I went home at lunchtime and showed her how to use the backup drive. She only lost about an hour's worth of work and I looked like a hero for a while. (Fortunately, her laptop happened to die on the last day of warranty, so we were able to get it fixed almost free.)

Anyway, for the relatively small cost of these backup drives they are great insurance. Good luck.

[just started]

Hank, what is this wireless system you are using? I haven't heard of that yet.

Art

[leehljp]

Hank, what is this wireless system you are using? I haven't heard of that yet.

Art

It is an Apple system called "Time Machine". I don't fully understand the overview writeup - as most of it says Windows and Mac compatible. But one spot just mentions OS X only.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB...zkzOA#overview

Here is an older (6 moths ago) review from ZedNet that is linked to CNet.
http://review.zdnet.com/product/netw...-1tb/32818587/

Both of them say that this works on a Windows environment but there are a few details that are not in the Windows setup.