WHY you should keep good backups...

[Gizmokid2005]

So...Flash drives have become the staple to keeping your documents with you, right? Well of course they are!!

Personally, my flash drive has had my Email, IM, School documents, etc on it. I don't keep them anywhere else because it's nice to have it all in one place and not having to worry about where I put something because it's all on my flash drive. I have a 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT which is a BEAUTIFUL flash drive. It's VERY fast and it's not too bulky. I've never read any issues with Corsair, always heard good things about their service and their products, plus the reviews for this drive were amazing, so I decided I"d give it a shot. Now I've had it for 4 months and it's been nothing but a blast to use.

Well, I keep regular backups of my computer...and by regular I mean nightly and weekly. Yes, I have a 400GB ext HDD that is dedicated solely to backing up my computer. I tried to setup backups of my flash drive, but they never succeeded, in part, I presume, because the flash drive is FAT32 instead of an NTFS file system. I did do an occasional backup of my flash drive when I was thinking about it and my last backup was on 10/15 and it looks like I just backed up my documents and the file structure of my programs, but not the actual apps.

Last Friday, SOMETHING went haywire. I'm not sure if the drive just lost it or if my computer did something to it, but the drive became useless. I could see the drive in windows, but I couldn't access it or do any type of maintenance, up to and including formats and chkdsk in command prompt. The drive is "read-only access". I tried it on 2 different XP computers with the same results. My Mac didn't even see the drive. I finally decided to uninstall all instances of the drive on my desktop and then plug the drive back in and see what happens. Well, the drive would list contents and would work...for all of about 3 seconds, before it would return to it's unresponsive state...so I was very frustrated and had spent about 2 hours working on it when I decided to try it on my laptop with ubuntu, just to see if anything would work.

I plugged it in and it saw the drive. I opened the drive...and VOILA!! Files!!! Well...that's good and bad news at the same time.

I always leave Thunderbird and Pidgin open on my flash drive when I go to bed, just force of habit. Well, I was able to pull all of my school files off luckily and they were still intact, no corruption at all. So with that relief I decided to try and see what I could scrounge up in the way of programs.

Well, the Thunderbird and Pidgin folders were pretty much corrupt, can't do anything with them...and for some reason, looks like Firefox and a few other random folders did too. Most of that is replaceable...except for my email that I had saved and my chat logs.

So, I was able to save the VERY important stuff and I was able to restore most of my email from Thunderbird and Pidgin from my backup from 10/5/07 so all is....pretty well.

Now I have an RMA with Corsair to get it replaced and all will be well.



[/rant]

Moral of the story:

BACKUPS ARE KING!

[Mathster]

didn't we learn all about backups when Martin backed up the forum???

[Gizmokid2005]

Yup...thats the sad thing...my computer is backed up VERY well...just my flash drive was neglected...

[cauzomb]

Too much junk in the trunk to see behind you when you........ back it up...

[Red Squirrel]

I do full backups of my systems nightly with my backup server. (here is how I am setup: http://www.iceteks.com/articles.php/backupserver/1)

But what has been worrying me more and more is if I get a house fire. I've been thinking about how I can setup an offsite backup solution. I run a UO server and the drive is 80GB, so I need to look into backing up the most critical stuff on that box. But things such as encryption have also come to mind, really need to be sure to use strong encryption. Don't like my personal stuff being on a server thousands of miles away. Automating it is also a tricky task. For now I just do them manually and use 7zip password protected archives, but thats probably not very strong encryption. I need something RSA would "wow" at.

[Gizmokid2005]

That's not a bad solution. I don't have a server to setup though and I CERTAINLY don't have enough hard drives for a server like that. I just use DriveImageXML to do my nightly backups on my PC. It's simple and I don't have to worry about my network failing.

My solution works until I get more computers...when I eventually get my place and all the computers I'm going to have that will definitely be in my mind in the way of backups...by then...storage will be CHEAP so it won't be a problem.

[Red Squirrel]

yeah in the time I built the backup server 300GB drive was the max without paying crazy. So I got 3 300GB drives I rotate around, 1 for my PC, 1 for the server, and one is a mix between the two, if theres a fire and I'm here I'll just run out with that drive in my hands and whatever drive is not in the server downstairs, (probably would not be safe to go get that one given the gas line is like right above)

Only issue with my setup is the drive trays, if they stop making those type then I cant get more drives, that and they're IDE which is getting harder to find these days.

[Gizmokid2005]

Yeah...All but one of my drives is SATA and the one that isn't, was an old IDE drive that I had in my old ext case that fried. So now even my backup is SATA and I can use eSATA if I want.

[Mathster]

if your worried about a fire, have you considered a fire resistant gun safe?

there is a small hole in the bottom to pass a power cord and network cord thru. set your server in there.

About the only other option is set another server at a buddies house, but thats gonna eat alot of bandwidth with daily synchronizations.

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I've thought of getting one of those fire safes but I'm sure it still gets quite hot in there, not sure if electronics can handle that. I would just put the backup drives in there. I assume they're water proof too so it would save from flood, and if I ground it, it would probably save from small scale EMP (like a neighborhood transformer explosion or something). Now that I think of it, may be a better idea. I could even store it in the shed, though not sure if a HDD can survive well at -50C. I've heard of people putting them in the freezer, but think it only gets like -10 in there.