Wow . I never back up my files, except really important files and projects.

Me neither I need to set up some backup scripts. I've got a 160gb external hard drive, but I don't use it for anything, and I've got quite a bit I don't want to lose on this computer. I'm thinking of making a folder each time I update the backup and have it's name be the date (YYYY.MM.DD format). And then backing up my SDK folder, Documents, and maybe one or two others. Not to derail this topic, but any other folders I should back up?

For a long time, I would back up to CD-R (CD-R because I personally found CD-RW way too unreliable; needless to say, I went through a lot of discs, but at least they're dirt cheap ), and more recently DVD±RW using the ‘dar’ backup program while also creating ECC files using DVDisaster in case discs start to go bad (which I used to encounter constantly in the past, though in more recent years I've had very few problems). Problem is, that method requires an enormous amount of advance planning and is extremely tedious and time-consuming, so I ended up doing it less and less often.

Now, I've picked up an external 1TB HDD a little while back and just run a command to transfer everything, important or not, from my internal 320 GB and 80 GB drives. That's a lot simpler.

I'd really like to keep offsite or at least out-of-the-house backups too, but haven't been able to come up with a practical plan for that yet.



Go through and look inside all your folders and ask yourself, “If I just suddenly irrecoverably lost everything here right now at this moment, would I care?” If the answer is “yes” or “maybe”, back it up.

I just bought a 16GB USB drive today to backup various aspects of my computer and my entire portfolio, and hopefully my website(s) if I ever decide it's worth backing-up.

I also plan to back-up my portfolio to DVD's for a harder to accidentally erase alternative.

I'm not a member at Omni, but has DJ thought of "expiring" old attachments?

I would like to correct a few things for you Kerm. I *used* to pay for the hosting, but since it moved i have not. Im second in line to do so tho. And it appears that my back-up was not needed and they used a different one, probably because i wasn't online at the time.

I <3 the Time Machine. It keeps smart incremental backups, so folders that haven't changed actually get linked to their previous iteration.

At some point, incremental filesystems with snapshot support (ZFS for Solaris family / *BSD family, btrfs for Linux) are going to become really useful for backups.

The vast majority of us aren't going to use that kind of filesystem for the years to come, though... Since btrfs isn't stable yet, MacOS X.7/.8 might be the first OS to propose a filesystem of that kind, in a stable shape, on a large scale.

Yeah, versioning/snapshot-based filesystems would be awesome. Being able to selectively roll-back files when a mishap occurs without having to have remembered to back them up beforehand would sure be helpful.

At first, about half of the icons and every attachment seemed to be missing. This was fixed a while later.

Windows has had this built in since Vista.



It's come in handy when I've accidentally deleted files, thinking that I'd committed them to version control beforehand (when I hadn't).

I beg your pardon, I stand corrected. Since you were making a backup, I naturally assumed that yours was the one used. It sounds like the backup that was indeed used was an older one though, which is unfortunate. And I wasn't aware that Omnimaga had switched hosting at any point; is it no longer at 1 and 1? Kevin is paying for it again?

Also, ComicIDIOT, I think that's a great it.

Could you finish that for me please

I think he meant idea, not it.

Yes, we are not using 1 and 1 anymore, and kevis is indeed paying again. Though if anything happens i will be the one paying it. But yeah, it sounds like it was a older back-up. Im going to try to back-up more often.

I kept absolutely everything on a 4 GB thumb drive (which I lost). Bad idea.



How do you enable that?

My friend is giving me a 2gb flash drive, so I'll have that, a 4gb drive, another 2gb, and a 160gb hard drive. I think I'll try to think up some backup scripts, possibly in C# or more likely a .bat.

That's what I think to, but I'm just checking because the 'd' the 't' are different fingers when typing, so he could have not finished his idea/sentence.

Database backups are being one weekly (the db was not affected by the downtime, but someone deleted one of his post, which caused people to think posts were lost too), unless a major update is being done, in which case we do an extra backup prior performing changes.

The site files are backed up monthly, since all Canadian ISPs got bandwidth caps and the site is 3.5 GB (most of that are MP3s, AVIs, WMV and file attachments). I normally do the backups, but other admins are in charge of doing it for a while right now.

With the exception of last Summer, all admins, both OmnomIRC maintainers, Geekboy1011 and Rcfreak0 had access to the site files and panel for almost one year, now. During Summer, only me and Rcfreak0 still had access, though, because we wanted to do a password change, but not only other admins were misinformed and did one password change after another without keeping other admins updated, but the last one to do so mistyped the new FTP password, locking everyout out of FTP for 6 hours after this was solved (it took 6 for 1and1 FTP password changes to propagate).

Rcfreak0 was in charge of paying hosting for one year, but the agreement was that as long as I was still around, I would paypal him the required money. Since the hosting move I am the one doing payments once again and everyone who had access to the files before this Summer got access back, although only one single admin is allowed to perform password changes since then.

And indeed Omni still runs on a shared hosting. It just runs on a higher-end and less crowded one than 1and1. (1and1 hosted close to 2000 sites per server)

System control panel, System protection, Automatic restore points. By default I believe it only monitors the system volume. You may need Business or higher (I don't believe it's included in the Home versions, though this may have changed in 7).

Another place to stick backups is on something like SkyDrive. If you have a Live account (Passport/MSN/Hotmail etc) then that's 25GB of free online storage. Live Mesh (part of the Live Essentials suite) lets you automatically synchronise a number of user-defined folders between your PC and your online storage. You can also edit Office documents stored on SkyDrive using a free web-based editor. It's all rather nice - and free!

(Alternatively there is Dropbox, but they only give you 2GB, only syncs one folder with an irritating "My" prefix and doesn't have the document editing stuff - at least not the last time I tried it).

Oh, thanks. Too bad that wouldn't be too useful for me