Do You Regularly Back Up Your Important Data?

[arwalden]

If so, do you back-up your entire system, or only the "my photos" and "my documents" directories?

Have you ever lost data because of a hard disc crash, or a virus, or a hacker, etc?

Keeping regular backups is VERY IMPORTANT you know. You never know what horrible event is awaiting your computer or your server... so do it now!!

:popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:

[billyskank]

1. Back up

that's that thing you wish you had done, five minutes after your hard disk dies, right? :7

[bridgit]

2. no, but i prolly should huh...

x(

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

3. A message to the wise

[mccoyn]

4. I've copied stuff when I get a new drive.

On my 80 GB harddrive at home I have a folder called OldDrive. In that folder is a backup of the 20 GB drive that preceded it. It has a folder called OldDrive that is a backup of the 6 GB that survived from the 9 GB drive that preceded it. There is an OldDrive on that with a 3 GB... Despite all this elaborate safty measures, I've never had to go into an OldDrive, except once for my resume.

That 9 GB drive has a bit of a story. I dropped the computer while the harddrive was spinning and it crashed. After some scan disk investigation I discovered that it was only the last few GB of the disk that wasn't working, like only the last head was damaged. Fortunatly a recent defrag meant that there was almost nothing on that part. I copied the disk to a friends computer, partitioned the drive to not use the damaged section and rebuilt my computer. The drive still works today.

[swag]

5. Why would I do that?

[Blue-Jay]

6. Almost never, aside from work stuff.

I'm a dumbass like that.

[qnr]

7. yeah

yes, daily schedule, to local and off-site
entire system (within reason, have 1TB worth of drives)
yes, HDD crash

[mainegreen]

8. What, I thought that's what RAID was for?!

You know, so you don't need a backup!

:P

[Lady Effingbroke]

9. A couple times a week.

Just the usual stuff - music, photos, Word documents, etc.

[Call Me Wesley]

10. Oh, I just had to learn it the hard way.

My motherboard gave up, harddisks were fine. Into repair ... It comes back with a new motherboard, and formatted harddisks. This was really nice. :sarcasm:

[bridgit]

11. when our HD crashed, we lost some 3 weeks worth of work & links...

to clients & report templates/portals and such, we still have the HD and need to recover some data i suppose, but have been back up for some time now...makes me wanna cut a disc just thinking about it
:scared:

[Call Me Wesley]

13. Same here ...

It was really, really fun.

I'm still recovering what I can get. But it was pretty nice to see in the beginning that all you really could do was playing Solitaire ... :eyes:

[Medium Baby Jesus]

12. I just came in to post the exact same topic!

How weird is that? Anyone who forgets to backup is just CRAZY!

:popcorn:

[arwalden]

17. Crazy Indeed... Or A Big Jerk.

Pick one!

:popcorn:

[TommyO]

14. Backup, yes!

Regularly? Well, um, er.... I've never been bitten yet, but I do copy my important data to an external drive when I remember to do it. Fortunately, Apple is going to make it much easier for me to do backups with their new Time Machine software (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html) which will be part of OS X Leopard when it's released next spring.

[FuzzySlippers]

15. I don't....

but my techie friend does. No worries there. ;-)

[kwolf68]

16. Yes and Yes

If so, do you back-up your entire system, or only the "my photos" and "my documents" directories?

--Yes, I use CD and FTP uploads and multiple directories for important data


Have you ever lost data because of a hard disc crash, or a virus, or a hacker, etc?

--Yes I have. I lost nearly all the music I had recorded with my band as well as some individual musical work. I still have that hard-drive, but it appears all my song files are gone when going into it through Dos. Oh well. I have one cassette tape left to prove to anyone I used to play music.

[AZBlue]

18. I regularly mean to...

That probably doesn't count, huh?

[trof]

19. I even back up my backups.

And then I back that up.
I've almost worn out the reverse gear on my computer.
;-)

:hi: bub!

[RoyGBiv]

20. Yes ...

Entire system, including boot sector, but on different schedules. /home /var and /etc are backed up daily, just before the automated virus scan. /data (music, video, etc.) is backed up to DVDs when I get the mind to do it with the entire partition backed up to a separate drive whenever I add something to it. Everything else is backed up monthly automatically or manually whenever I make a significant change.

I have lost data due to a drive crash, but not in a long time since I do backups regularly. I have more often lost data because I was stupid and used rm -f when I shouldn't have.

Never technically lost data to a virus. I did lose some data due to a shitty anti-virus program I used *very* briefly on a Windoze machine that detected something as a virus that wasn't and deleted it without allowing me the opportunity not to delete.

I've never had a cracker break into my system. They've tried, of course.

Related Story:

I was messing around with a friend's Linux box once because he had a sound issue I was trying to help him fix. I noticed at some point his drive (a 160GB, IIRC) was 90% full and mentioned this to him since at that level, performance takes a hit and some things can stop function properly. He said, "Oh, yeah, I know. I'm getting a new drive soon." I had to wonder what was taking up all the space since he doesn't collect video, doesn't game, and had all his music on a separate drive. He told me "Backups. I have a job set to do one every day and store it. I don't usually delete the old ones."

"What kind of backups?"

"My /home directory."

"Where are they backed up."

"In /home/<name>/archive/home.tar.gz."

"You backup your home directory and save it in your home directory?"

"Ummmmm, yeah ..."

And then it dawned on him.

[Nicole]

21. No

In my defense though I don't have any important data on my computer.

I do burn cds of music but I do that as I buy them.

Photos I want to keep are either printed out or stored on a website album. I delete them from my computer after that.

I've never lost anything to a crash, virus or hacker.

[Ediacara]

22. Locking

We should all back up our data Allen, I agree.