Do you back your shit up?
 

I have lost my hard drive twice... Once I recovered 95% of it and the other time it was gone. Dead... So I was watching 60 minutes and they were talking about Mozy. They back your shit up online.

I have to say... This makes backups fucking easy. Mainly because you don't do anything!

I have an external drive but I always forget to hit that little button to make it backup... Perhaps it has some kind of scheduler.. I dunno...

But Mozy is free. Can't beat that.

I am disorganized and always lose a ton of stuff whenever something crashes.

Yes, I back my shit up. Was burned once like 10 years ago, and has made me paranoid since.

Probably should do it more than I do. But I have the most difficult, and essential things backed up on ext HD's.

yes learned the hard way after losing 150 gigs of pics :/

If they looked like the one for your avatar the world is a better place because of it.

Yep ,I use a nice freeware app called Cobian that backs shit up without me having to do anything

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:(

with hard drive prices as low as they are, why would you not backup your shit?

grab a 500GB external for $100 or so, backup via USB or firewire and not worry...

Raid 10 for teh win...

who doesnt back up ? an external 500 gigs cost nothing.... no reason not to do it

External hard drives on the same premises as the drive it is backing up is NOT a real back up.

You need secure, offsite storage too.

Mozy is good, I use it, but as it is free, it is not to be relied on.

I have a drive stored at a friend's house that gets a weekly update, Mozy and a mirrored bootable version of my internal hard drive.

Oh, and DVDs of massively essential data at my Brother's place.

You only need to lose data once to become this paranoid!

no need, I run maccie ;) pro yo ;)

offsite is a must but do your homework on who you trust with your data, free isnt a reason to just dump data somewhere, would you keep your cash in my safe because I wont charge you any fees?

Definitely - Rotate 2 500gb external USB drives and one is always off-site!

I don't backup nothing

Never had offsite backups. Too many secrets on my computer (eg. gigs of tranny pics) I never want anybody to know about.

But I have 3 computers and basically have copies of the same important files on all three comps, so if one crashes I have the others. I also have one external harddrive, but I have yet to regularily back things up on it.

I've lost all data before and it blows. Having the other computers with settings and programs all ready to go in case one computer dies has been ideal for me.

Might have to grab that.

Got a URL or easy to google?

google: syncback

freeware and you don't have to do anything .. just setup a schedule for your daily backup/synchronisation and you're gtg

Luckily I keep everything that matters on another external drive, and I keep it in triplicate, I have like 4 external drives and two of them are mirror images of one another.

I am horrible about remembering to hit that button too, to back everything up, so I need someone or something to TELL me to do it. lol

I backup important data from my hard drive to DVDs once every few months.

How can you rely on external drives? If one drive can die why can't another?

Well, there is a microscopic chance they die at the same time :)

Sure I back it up so I don't have to worry

Yeah, I got myself an external 1tb drive to store everything on. However it's not really a back up as an external source to store everything.
I am considering getting another one or two to make mirror/backups occasionally.

I have been lazy about it. I should do it more.

I have 2 dedicated servers. Each one stores its own backups as well as a backup of the other server. Then my local dev server has a cron job that will download the most recent tarballs once a week (just in case something were to happen to both servers at the same time).

Wtf ... I just flush it.

I don't know about you but I'm in the porn business. The last thing I want is for my files to be backed up on somebody else's computer.

Good one :1orglaugh

Hehehehhe, also!

Yes I do. And I'll beat the fuck out of anybody that tries to cross me and...

Oops, I just realized you meant DATA back up :error

:1orglaugh

my pc's girlfriend is a glock ... back'd up.

Drive failure recovery - RAID
Disaster recovery - 2 x 1TB external drives that are swapped each time I visit mum. Encrypted so she can't snoop on my data. :D

just upload the backups to rapidshare, it doesn't cost a penny

never enough, I keep losing stuff over the years (lazy? busy?)
thanks for the link V.

Current MozyPro pricing for business accounts:

Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month
Server Licenses: $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month

If you've got more than a couple of hundred gigs to back up you're probably better off buying software that can do the same thing, but save to your own server...

So do a personal account for unlimited and $4.95.

I wonder if there's an rsync for Windows. After a bit of initial fiddling around it could be run as a regular scheduled task, syncing changes between your local machine and the copy of files on a remote server. Set and forget.

^ I should reword that, "set and forget" type operations are no good when you have a crash and discover the last time the backup process successfully ran was in 2006...

I sure do.. every night at 3am ... I lost my stuff last year around this time.. never again !!

:2 cents:

You could put the data in a rar file. If you use a good password no one should be able to get in it. The only known methods that work (that I've seen) are brute force which only works on weak passwords.

Although I would just keep two backup copies in different places if it's that important to me(not online). If you don't want anyone getting into the data just encrypt it or put it in something like a password protected rar file. You could also store the backup drives in a lockbox so no one tries to plug it in and fucks it up.

It's funny though, I don't think anyone here said jack about S.M.A.R.T. features. If you use software such as http://www.hdtune.com you can see when there's a problem with your hdd. If people would just do that most data lost to bad drives wouldn't happen.

Mozy, aren't they the ones with that commercial about the guy having a computer failure..... which was actually a stove blasting out of no where, into his backyard and landing on his laptop which made it spontaneously burst into flames for no reason?

SMART is a system that attempts to provide early warning of impending failure. I've experienced a number of drive failures, but I've only seen one drive actually "trigger" a SMART warning prior to taking all of its data off to nowhere land.

A hard drive is a mechanical device that WILL fail eventually... not MAY... WILL!

i always keep important stuff on some sort of centralized storage in multiple locations.

I'd say RAID is probably a better early warning system than SMART. RAID will disconnect a drive pretty much as soon as it starts playing up, and a manual inspection of the SMART values will usually show why (eg reallocated sector count has suddenly changed from 0 to 50). SMART is obviously going to be more conservative before announcing a drive has failed; if the trigger thresholds are too low then it's going to significantly increase the warranty load on the manufacturer.

Yeah, if you're not using hardware raid you're just an idiot. It's so lost cost these days, that it just makes sense. I keep a monthly backup, or so, off site. Otherwise, I've had drive fails, I haven't lost whole raid arrays ever though.

To raid, or not to raid? That is the question.

We keep rotating BOOTABLE backup copies of our desktops and
our servers by using Clonebox. We can grab a single file or directory
lrom the back up, or boot the whole thing up and use the machine as
it was last night, yesterday, last week, or last month. To protect against
fire, burglary, etc. Clonebox provides off site back up, which we like.

Given what we do, we are of course very much aware of these types
of issues, so to some extent we continue to use our old multi-layer system
with DVDs in the safe deposit box, a local rotating on a USB drive using
an older, more basic version the technology which later became Clonebox, etc.

I do now and I learned the hard way too.

All my work for the month of Sept. Gone, capputskys , no more , vanished. I almost cried. Ok I cried but just a little :)

With all of the posts about RAID, I should mention something about a
\common misconception. Many people seem to think that RAID is a backup
of some sort. You ask them about backup and they say "we have RAID".
For those who are reading this and aren't clear, let me say it very clearly:

RAID IS NOT BACKUP.

RAID will not help you when you accidentally delete a file or mess up a
setting or a database. RAID will not help you when you get hacked.
RAID will not help when you get a virus. RAID will not help when your
important files, like your password file and Windows registry are wiped
out because the drive is full. RAID, on your server, will not help when
your host disappears Alphared style. RAID will not help when your
power supply shorts, blowing your drives. RAID is simply and only a
way to reduce the chance of the physical failure of the drive itself,
when used in combination with proper monitoring systems. RAID
without proper monitoring is almost worthless because you don't know
when one of the drives fails. RAID doesn't even help THAT much
with making the hardware more reliable. A RAID rebuild is one of the
toughest jobs a drive will ever be asked to to do so it's common for
the "good" drive to fail in the middle of a rebuild. In fact, with some
RAID configurations there's a better than 50% chance that the rebuild
will fail. So all RAID does is make it a little less likely that you'll be
taken out by the drive hardware itself failing. It does not protect
you against most of the causes of data loss - RAID is not backup.