Cautionary backup story

[kumar]

Yes, an external drive is definitely a must, I think. Now they are so cheap there's no excuse. My latest desktop has an E-SATA connection so transfers are really fast. As for manual copies, I get what you are saying. What I found was, however, that I'd forget to do it as often as I should have. Having it automatic means I don't have to worry about it. The most I loose is maybe a few hours. I run a decent sized company from my computer, so if something happens to my data it costs us real $$.

[lucky9]

I'll agree that a business should have an automatic backup system. It should probably try to be as good as a mirrored array.

[joany]

I installed a second HDD for backups (an external drive would work, but transferring data to the external would be too slow with my machine).

My VirtualBox folders and my / (root) and /home are on three separate partitions so I can back them up separately using Acronis True Image. (There's no point in backing up everything if I only make a change to one of these.)

All other data, such as Thunderbird email folders, photographs, music, and important documents are stored in sub-directories in a fourth partition. I use Lucky Backup for these (clone mode).

If the main HDD crashes, everything can be retrieved from the backup HDD. If the backup HDD crashes, the original data are still on the main HDD. No worries, unless some catastrophic event takes out both HDDs.

If I had multiple computers or a laptop, I might try other backup methods. But for me this works best.

[uncle mark]

No worries, unless some catastrophic event takes out both HDDs.

FWIW, I did have that happen -- a blown PSU took out the mobo and both hard drives. That's what forced my migration from M6.5 to M8.0.

I now back up to an internal drive, back that up to an external drive, and back that up to a NAS box. If my house burns down I'm hosed, but otherwise I think I'm covered.

[GoManutd]

if you really have sensitive stuff that you absolutely cannot afford to lose, ever, uncle mark's approach, along with some form of offsite backup is really what you would need.

keep in mind that if you use DVDs or CDs as backup media that these don't last as long as everyone originally had predicted. the better quality can last years, lesser quality can begin failing within 18 months.

one crucial component to backup schemes is periodically, and religiously testing restoration procedures to ensure the procedures are correct AND the backups are valid. cannot tell you the number of sys admins that i've talked to who did daily backups only to find that something went wrong with the media, the backup process silently failed, etc.

[joany]

FWIW, I did have that happen -- a blown PSU took out the mobo and both hard drives. That's what forced my migration from M6.5 to M8.0.

I now back up to an internal drive, back that up to an external drive, and back that up to a NAS box. If my house burns down I'm hosed, but otherwise I think I'm covered.

Holy cow!! What a bummer. I might have to reconsider getting that external HDD after all.

[DBeckett]

My routine is almost identical to uncle mark's except I occasionally make DVD copies too.

[lucky9]

I'm with DBeckett on this. I use top of the line media and only store optical disks in jewel cases. I have backups of data on DVD that are over ten years old. I expect them to outlive me.

[GoManutd]

you'll certainly get a lot more life out of the top quality discs, but they don't last forever. archiving companies, like iron mountain, have been rethinking the use of optical discs for longterm storage because they do fail.

[uncle mark]

Holy cow!! What a bummer. I might have to reconsider getting that external HDD after all.

My external is a USB-to-SATA dock I got from NewEgg for like $20, with a 200G drive stuck in it that I salvaged from a fried machine.

I back up about 100G with Lucky Backup. The first run took forever of course, but now they take 3-10 minutes depending on whether or not I've added ISOs since the last.

The back up I do to the NAS box takes forever. I gave up trying to get Lucky to work across the LAN, so now just do it manually on a weekly basis on a smaller subset of my data (I omit all the ISOs I've collected -- most could be recreated from download or disk if needed).