Back Up, Back Up, Back Up
My external hard drive died yesterday, where in I keep all my photo’s since I joined the digital age, plus other stuff ; CV’s, letter, application forms, programs that I’ve purchased etc.
I’ve tried my best (and I do know about these things honest) but without some additional hardware and software it’s pretty much irrecoverable.
Why? do you ask, do I keep my photo’s on an external drive, well I had a computer crash a few years back that could only be recovered by a complete new install that wiped the whole hard drive and all the pictures and so forth.
Luckily I have a mild case of OCD and they were all saved to CD-R’s and easily restored (but time consuming to reload)
So ever since then everything is saved to an external hard drive, which is in itself backed up to another external hard drive on a regular basis.
This other hard drive is kept in a secret Disaster Recovery location (my brothers house), well away from the original and only brought together on back up days*
This is in case of fire, flood theft, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arriving.
A bit long winded and a bit of a dull post . But at least if disaster does occur, I only lose about a months worth of files at most, normally less. Rather than 10 years worth.
So, Back Up, Back Up, Back Up
*If you think that’s a bit extreme, when I lived in the Land of the Rising Sun, my concern over tsunamis or earthquakes and subsequent fire etc was such that I used to do a monthly back up burn to CD-R’s and post them back to the UK for safe keeping.
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4 comments:
True. It's time I bought myself another external hard drive and ran two copies of everything.
"True. It's time I bought myself another external hard drive and ran two copies of everything."
Don't just think about it, Mark, do it. You can get 1.5TB USB disks from the likes of Maplin for about £100 these days.
When I used to do this sort of stuff for a living I had to give serious thought to arcane factors like the primary database server being located in a building next to the Thames, so the fallback server would not only need to be in a different building, but one away from the flood plain.
Or, and I kid you not, how far away the fallback server needed to be to survive a tactical nuclear attack on central London. I have to admit we didn't put too much effort into meeting that particular spec. writer's arsecover requirement.
I had the pleasure of being burgled last month. Chummy took my laptop. It's got Windows Vista on it so I wish him well of it. Fortunately I only lost a couple of days' relatively unimportant data, but it got me thinking properly about offsite backup in the domestic environment. There's not a lot of point having your data backed up to a second drive if everything goes up in smoke in a house fire or if your friendly local burglar decides to pop both primary and backup drives into his swag bag.
offsite backup in the domestic environment.
It's the way to go , mine is at my brothers in his fireproof safe
Ah yes. It has to be external HD's as well, you ever tried backing up gigs and gigs and gigs of software ? I collect something called TOSEC (don't look, it will eat up hours of your time) and a "full" set is obscene in gig usage. The mere idea of backing it up to DVDs gives me the shivers.
My CV and all that stuff is on 3 different PCs across an assortment of hard drives and probably on a memory card somewhere, as well as "hidden" on my blog if I need to download it whilst out and about.
Steve
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