I know data redundancy and keeping back-ups are already in practice with most of the adult/mature users here at Cemetech but I want to go over it for those who are less aware.

Back in 2009 I suffered a hard drive failure. I was devastated. It held all the photos I took for my school classes, there was no back up. At first the drive seemed okay, it clicked but I could still access my data. Didn't really click - pun not intended - in 19 year old me that I should take action ASAP. Well, at some point the drive stopped mounting and I never backed that data up. I held on to that hard drive ever since. I made attempts over the years to recover it myself by putting it in the freezer and even purchasing data recovery software. Nothing helped. From that point on I kept a back up of select photos - and eventually transitioning to full system & photo back ups a few years later.

I knew sending it in would be expensive, online places were advertising $500 to recover your data. That wasn't a lot but it wasn't something I could reasonably afford. Now, let's jump to 2015. I got a new job that pays considerably more and I figured I have nothing to lose, it's $500 to get my data back. Right?

I couldn't have been more wrong. The quote to recover my photos was USD$2400. That wasn't even the whole, 500GB hard drive. That was about 6 days of photos to be recovered. Would the price have gone up if I wanted more? I have no idea. But I learned that $500 was for a simple recovery, such as if a hard drive won't mount or was formatted, which the $100 software application accomplishes and I've used on a two instances (saving ~$1000 between myself and a friend it seems!). The plus side is, if they recovered 50% of the photos I pay 50% of the quote. I don't know if that's industry standard but it seemed reasonable.

I decided to mull over it for a while between some friends online, my family and, my former classmates. Here's some points we covered:
  • Points for recovering photos
    • Nostalgia
    • Access to locations, models and equipment only while with the school are represented in these photos.
  • Points against recovering photos
    • Not likely to recuperate the money by selling said photos.
    • If I haven't needed them since 2009 why do I need them now?
    • Money not well spent

There were a few others but what ultimately led me to my decision was that I could go on vacation to Maine (where the school resides) and take photos around there again and purchase a new lens all for about the same price as recovering the hard drive. I also have the photos I "graduated" with in an online shop and I have the same photos printed out and hanging on the walls around my residence, which were printed by me in Maine. I did not go through with retrieving my data.

How do I back up my data now?
Each person has a different methodology but in practice you should have a cold local back up, an off-site back up and, an online back up. That way if you lose your immediate copy, you have a back-up within your residence. If your residence burns down you have a copy at a friends, in a banks safety deposit box, or wherever. If there's an earthquake or a more broad disaster, you still have the online back-up.
Not sure if this is a universal definition here but: Cold meaning not connected to a computer, off/unplugged until needed. Hot meaning readily available, always on.


What you do at each back-up point is up to you. For my important work, like my photos, I keep on a RAIDed NAS which backs up to a single hot HDD once a week. From there I back that up to a cold HDD. I don't back up to an online service yet but will likely do so soon. For less important files, like my computer system and documents I have a 200GB iCloud Subscription as well as standard/Free Dropbox and Google Drive subscriptions.

As far as my non-work files stored on my computer, I keep my internal disk space small at 128GB so I can keep a full back up of all my documents on iCloud and can easily access anything from another Mac or iOS device from iCloud. I upload the important documents to both Dropbox and Drive so I can access them anywhere from any device. In my case it's mostly photography contracts but other critical documents are uploaded as well. I use Google Drive to create and edit word documents so those are rarely stored on my computer to begin with. I also back up my computer system with regular back-ups as well.

For those of you who back up your stuff, how do you do it?
For those of you who want to back stuff up, what questions do you have?
I use Time Machine and an external HD that sits behind my Mac.

EDIT: Also, upon reading your post, I realized that I hadn't backed up my computer since September 2014, so thanks Very Happy
Ivoah wrote:
I use Time Machine and an external HD that sits behind my Mac.

Oh nice, I use Time Machine too Smile
Use OneDrive.

It pretty much backs up everything, Word docs, photos, videos, even IE/Edge data.

That's all I have to say, but man, that's pretty devastating.
Crashplan is the Cloud backup service the cool kids go for.
hmm... I need to think about this for my new computer.

Should I get cloud storage or a backup Hard Drive?
Unicorn wrote:
hmm... I need to think about this for my new computer.

Should I get cloud storage or a backup Hard Drive?


I recently recovered from a HD crash, and I have Crashplan, so I wasn't too worried. it took 4 days to redownload everything. I now have a hot swap drive bay and 2 backup drives. As well as crashplan.
For small amounts of storage, a local backup is probably cheaper but not necessarily easier, and is less robust. Ideally your backups should be off-site, in case of a catastrophic failure (eg a fire). That might be as simple as having a hard drive that you back up to then hand off to a friend to hold on to.

My configuration puts most data on my NAS, which is backed up remotely with crashplan. Locally, the data is on a RAID so (ideally) I don't need to restore everything from backup in case of a disk failure.

Basically, local backups are okay if you don't have a lot to deal with. Otherwise I think an internet backup is the way to go, be it Crashplan, Backblaze (no Linux support but other than that they're my favorite) or Spideroak.
Currently I'm fairly lazy - I do have a backup, but it's simply an external hard drive and I probably only do it once a year. And it's always plugged into my computer, which probably isn't the best habit.

Definitely a great article, comic! I do have a lot of photos, videos and data that I'd be upset if I lost, so I'm going to review my backup plans now Smile
Unicorn wrote:
Should I get cloud storage or a backup Hard Drive?


Get what is most sensible to you. I'm probably the minority in this following statement, but all of my media is legally bought and is easily replaceable so I don't back that up as often; my media is on an external HDD which gets backed up very inconsistently. My computer backs up every hour through Time Machine, hourly back ups are kept for the last week (I think) then it gets consolidated into a daily backup.

More important documents such as ones required for legal purposes are backed up on the cloud, and the standard amount of space most places give (such as Dropbox, Drive, iCloud, etc) are more than adequate to back up those documents.

My philosophy with back-ups is that you should always have access to one locally, and that an online full-system back up should be a last resort. As rfdave mentioned, it took him 4 days to recover his data from online. Plus, if you have a monthly data cap, it can likely saturate that limit.

I also decentralize a lot of my stuff. My computer itself keeps very little permanent data. All of those documents and files are offloaded to Google Drive or an external, allowing me to quickly reinstall my OS or bring in a new computer should this one fail. It's happened; being able to boot a new computer, restore from a ~30GB system back up from a local drive and plugging in my external drives is a very satisfyingly quick way to get back on my feet. Those 30GB are mostly installed applications and their settings/preferences.

But to succinctly answer your question, start with an external HDD while utilizing common cloud options - e.g. Google Drive & Dropbox.
Dropbox isn't a backup solution. Just sayin'
solarsoftware wrote:
Use OneDrive.

It pretty much backs up everything, Word docs, photos, videos, even IE/Edge data.

That's all I have to say, but man, that's pretty devastating.


The only caveat is that I won't be able to create a new backup/delete it in 2 years (Bing Rewards)
I'm having a hard time understanding you, Eight. You can only have one back up or am I reading that wrong? And what does Bing Rewards have to do with it?

allynfolksjr wrote:
Dropbox isn't a backup solution. Just sayin'


I mentioned it along with others that it's a great option to back up documents to, not that it should be a back up solution; I never mentioned online backup solutions. Just sayin' Rolling Eyes
I cannot stress the importance of backups enough, but I must admit, many people (including myself) don't really care about them unless they have a bit of a scare.

I certainly learnt my lesson a few months ago.

For around 6 months, I had been developing software for my Product Design work for school on Linux Live CDs, saving the code to a memory stick. For months and months, this system worked fine.

The main reason for using Linux Live CDs was because I didn't want to put my windows partition at risk by installing
Linux.

In February, I decided I wanted to flash CyanogenMod to my phone. I downloaded an OS image and stuck it on a memory stick. Incidentally, this was the memory stick with all my code on.

Before installing CyanogenMod, I wiped my phone. I ticked all the boxes for formatting in my recovery manager, not realising I had also selected "USB-OTG." When I read the verbose, my heart sank:


Code:
USB-OTG Successfully Formatted


It was all gone! Months worth of code!

I decided not to be angry about this and instead, used it as a learning curve.

My original thinking was that there was no hope of data recovery, but I decided to have a go, nonetheless. As it happened, I'm glad I did, because I was able to recover most of the code.

So, the message here is to backup! You could avoid a lot of potential disappointment and anger if you do so.

This event also made me review my (at the time nonexistent) backup system. Now I:

- Use version control and web hosting for big projects (BitBucket & GitHub).
- Have a permanent Linux installation on my computer.
- Store any important files on an external hard drive as well as my main drive.
- Have data recovery tools installed, just in case anything messes up.

As well as this, I'm looking into the possibility of finding/creating a tool to backup data off memory sticks whilst they're plugged into my computer
Edit: I accidentally read your post wrong and missed the part in which you stated that you got back most of your code. However what I wrote below can still help other people get their data back.

Did you do a quick format? If so you can/could have gotten your data back.

Whenever you accidentally format something or accidentally delete something and want the data back I would advise you remount it as read-only as to prevent any changes written to said memory device. Then you do a full image of said storage medium. I am talking a full raw image including free space. I use dd for this purpose. This is the way to go in case you mess something up you can just start over with the same image whereas if you attempt recovery directly on the storage medium and you mess up the data will be gone forever.
I seem to have managed to take backing up seriously without learning the hard way first, unlike most people. Perhaps I had already gotten a taste of what can happen when I had a once-in-a-lifetime TI-OS crash on my TI-82, taking my all my written programs with it. (This was before I had a computer or link to back it up.)

Sometimes I make mistakes and have lost things, but with the measures I have taken, it sure hasn't amounted to much in the big picture of things. I know what kinds of things can happen when I do a good job of backing up, though:

1997-1998: My first PC was my aunt's old plain-vanilla 386. The HDD was a whopping 40MB, so I relied heavily on floppy disks for archival, but it also made the HDD easy to back up with floppy disks. I didn't have the original DOS installation disks, which complicated things. As I learned more, I realized I needed to make a boot disk, have all the files needed to prepare a hard disk and get MS Backup up and running (it would not run from a floppy disk), so I could bootstrap my backups. I did test runs to determine when I had all the necessary files, and did everything I could to increase the chances that I would be able to recover the entire system in an actual emergency (without actually formatting the drive to test--I wasn't quite that brave). Fortunately, this emergency never occurred with this system.

2003-ish: My laptop died. I had been keeping backups on CD-Rs regularly. The latest one was from a couple of days earlier, and I had barely done anything since then, so I was able to be up and running quickly with my data on the PC I borrowed with virtually no real loss.

A few years later: I discovered that one could buy an adaptor to hook up the laptop drive from my old laptop to my PC's IDE port (I just assumed it was some sort of proprietary interface). So I did so and checked out what had been on it. I found there really wasn't any additional data at all that I needed to recover since that day the laptop broke down. I really did have virtually everything from that backup disc already!

A couple of years ago: I found my ancient floppy disks and managed to image almost all of them to my PC (surprising, too, since they weren't stored in the most optimal environment in the world). Then I fired up VirtualBox and tried my hand at reconstructing that old PC. I had some weird bugs with MS Backup (not sure if it was a bug in VirtualBox or what), but eventually somehow managed to get DOS and all software and data restored and run Windows 3.1. Wow, I had really done my homework so many years ago! I then spent a little while relishing in the nostaglia.

Within the last few months: Some of my video DVD-Rs started developing bad spots. I had been using a program called DVDisaster to create and store extra ECC data to recover some bad sectors. No problem. But one disc was 100% unreadable--no recovery. ECC data is useless if you can't get any of the original data. I went into a frenzy over the next few days to check every single disc and make sure I didn't lose any more. Fortunately, this was the only unrecoverable disc. The programs on that disc happened to have some episodes from a TV series that was still airing, so I was able to rerecord those. This made me realize that I started using DVDisaster back when I didn't have the HDD space to keep full ISOs or transcoded copies of the video. That's no longer the case. I will now be keeping *full* backups of my stuff on at least one other storage medium. (DVDisaster is a royal pain to use, anyway.)

And here and there, I accidentally overwrote or trashed files and was able to recover them from my regular rsync mirrors. No problem.

Maybe this will motivate someone. Smile

ElectronicsGeek wrote:
My original thinking was that there was no hope of data recovery, but I decided to have a go, nonetheless. As it happened, I'm glad I did, because I was able to recover most of the code.


Good to hear! Another moral is that when something goes wrong, don't panic, but look for possible recovery routes. They're not always there, but don't jump to early conclusions. I had something similar happen to me when I had an old 386 and decided that it would be "cool" to store my data on a floppy disk instead of the hard drive. (Yeah. I was a teenager.) I had also turned off overwrite confirmation in MS Backup because it annoyed me. So, one day I go to back up my system and left the wrong disk in the drive, and overwrote it without confirmation. Whoops. Fortunately, MS Backup did not overwrite all of the sectors on the disk, so I was able to reconstruct significant portions of that huge, 1337 QBasic program I was working on. Also, I made sure to turn that confirmation prompt back on!

One other thing people often overlook: Backups are only half of the story. Make sure your backups work and that you actually have a recovery plan! Try to simulate a disaster scenario and make sure you can actually recover your system with only the backup media you created. I really should do that with my external HDD rysnc mirrors, for example. Can I really restore my entire OS with the data on them? Do I actually remember the encryption keys? Do I have a Linux boot CD that can actually read and access the volume with only the software in the CD image? Did I organize the data in a manner that I can actually reproduce the original filesystem layout easily? Do I even know the command to rsync the data back onto a fresh drive properly? etc.
That's quite the story. I think it's safe to say that the TI-OS crash was you learning the hard way about backups.

Travis wrote:
One other thing people often overlook: Backups are only half of the story. Make sure your backups work and that you actually have a recovery plan! Try to simulate a disaster scenario and make sure you can actually recover your system with only the backup media you created. I really should do that with my external HDD rysnc mirrors, for example. Can I really restore my entire OS with the data on them? Do I actually remember the encryption keys? Do I have a Linux boot CD that can actually read and access the volume with only the software in the CD image? Did I organize the data in a manner that I can actually reproduce the original filesystem layout easily? Do I even know the command to rsync the data back onto a fresh drive properly? etc.


This is really good advice and something I fail to check. I've taken all of my backups for granted. They've worked when I needed them to. I should really check my Photography & Websites backups though. Sadly, it's through my NAS and I won't have a good way to test that back up without either (a) replacing all 5 drives or (b) deleting the existing data. I'm doing my homework for my next NAS and it will support a non-proprietary backup service*, such as rsync, so that I can restore more easily.

*To be honest, I have no idea what method my NAS uses to backup but since it doesn't say "uses rsync" or whatever I'll assume it isn't until I find out otherwise. Interestingly, I can use the NAS as a "NetBackup Server" which enables "other NAS OS and rsync-compatible devices" to use the NAS as a backup point. So it's plausible my backups are rsync compliant.
i backup my computer every week, because i have lost something important once, a lesson for me
  
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