Backups are a good idea!

Rroff · 17 Sep 2016 at 15:44

Just reading this article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/artic...-burning-building-to-save-two-finished-novels

Someone needs to introduce him to cloud services :S personally I also keep a microSDHC card with anything really important either in my phone or wallet.

KIA · 17 Sep 2016 at 16:31

As well as the concept of offsite and offline backups.

Semple · 20 Sep 2016 at 12:22

Oh dear.

It's cruel to say, but i literally have zero sympathy for people like that.

I remember going through school, college and even uni where it was always iterated about backing up copies of your work. Even being on the blunt end of losing some work whilst at school - thankfully not hugely important but was certainly a lesson learned.

If anything looking at the probabilities of causes of data loss, i would say fire is very low on the list. He could have just as easily picked up a virus, or suffered from a hardware fault.

tom_e · 20 Sep 2016 at 12:24

No insurance, no backups. Sounds like a thoroughly sensible individual.

bledd · 20 Sep 2016 at 14:19

I can understand somewhat when someone working on a large video editing project or something may not having offisite backups that are always up to date.

But a novel? lol

I'm always very blunt on here when people ask for data recovery help.

"Buy a new hard drive, restore from your backu...."

Hopefully this will help it sink in for other members

Admiral Huddy · 20 Sep 2016 at 14:52

I'm normally ask people how they would feel if I erase their pictures on the PCs that are brought to me. The look in their faces until i explain but in a nutshell, that's the risk people take.

I personally have a second internal HDD which mirrors my data only on a daily basis, I then have an external hdd which i update weekly and keep that at work.

Rannoch · 20 Sep 2016 at 16:31

I also keep multiple backups, raid, several external disks and of course Dropbox in case the house burns down :eek:

Quartz · 20 Sep 2016 at 16:36

I have a WSE box that does a backup nightly. I have a USB HDD which goes in the car, and my brother has another USB HDD.

bimbleuk · 20 Sep 2016 at 16:37

Many years a go I witnessed a Netware engineer totally loose his confidence and basically had a breakdown after losing a customers data. Didn't test the backup before doing an upgrade!

He switched careers shortly after and I learnt a very good lesson that's always stuck with me.

Quartz · 20 Sep 2016 at 17:30

And EN World has gone belly up and is restoring from their last known good backup of 3 months ago. Backups are no good if you don't test them!

nutcase · 20 Sep 2016 at 20:07

Vargas said:
I also keep multiple backups, raid, several external disks and of course Dropbox in case the house burns down

RAID is not a backup.

KIA · 20 Sep 2016 at 20:40

nutcase_1uk said:
RAID is not a backup.

Perfectly acceptable as one of several backup locations.

Rannoch · 20 Sep 2016 at 22:52

nutcase_1uk said:
RAID is not a backup.

But multiple backups of that system is.

KIA said:
Perfectly acceptable as one of several backup locations.

Yep. I use Macrium to backup the whole system.

Doogles · 20 Sep 2016 at 23:28

I have a 1TB and 3TB external HDD I back the entire important parts of my PC onto, I use to put my games also onto the 3TB but no point as I can redownload em, unless I'm about to format the whole PC then I sometimes put some on it.

I'd like to use cloud storage for some of my stuff but my upload speed is too slow!

bledd · 21 Sep 2016 at 00:53

bimbleuk said:
Many years a go I witnessed a Netware engineer totally loose his confidence and basically had a breakdown after losing a customers data. Didn't test the backup before doing an upgrade!

He switched careers shortly after and I learnt a very good lesson that's always stuck with me.