OH CRAP

"Don't store all your eggs in one basket"

You can never have too many backups. The worst part of my job as an IT Engineer is to explain to someone that they have lost the photos of the kids cos they never backed up. (Thankfully that doesn't happen too often)

Backup also gives you an excuse to pick out your favourite photos and burn them to DVD. And to be properly paranoid - store copies with relatives in one of those zip cases. Then you will never loose the irreplaceable pictures. :)

The example I always throw at my clients is the Twin Towers. Many of the companies in those buildings just backed up to the other tower as they knew nothing would ever effect both buildings at the same time.... :(

Cook more disks. Expect the unexpected, and it will never happen. :D

+=+=+

Also - don't store all your data on an external hard drive. Or that vital "only" copy of an essay or important document on a flash drive. Too often I have seen these dropped or corrupted - and they become very hard/impossible to recover. Spare hard disks are cheap - blank DVDs more so - photos are irreplaceable :D.

+=+=+

Of course, we all learn the same way by loosing data once... :D
 
I agree. I've recently bought a rather spiffing 750GB Seagate FreeAgent external drive for extra backup. I already have a mirrored RAID in my system. It's great to know that if a disk dies, everything survives and even if my RAID controller blows or something else more serious which nobbles my entire array, all of my music, videos and work survives still.

The big question everyone should ask themselves is what would happen if their disk suddenly and completely broke and how much would they be willing to pay if that happened to be sure of not losing everything. Unfortunately, too many people only ask themselves that whilst the horror of serious data loss begins to sink in.
 
I lost a terabyte of music this weekend when my 1tb Lacie decided that it was gonna break. Oh well, I had it backed up so now it just persuading Lacie to RMA it (which is very difficult)

But if it hadnt have been backed up, I would have cried...
 
I lost a terabyte of music this weekend when my 1tb Lacie decided that it was gonna break.
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:eek:

Only thing I would be highly annoyed at if my slave drive died or i accidently formatted it (:P) would be the music, everything else ultra important I keep backups off (work stuff, family photo's etc).
 
XysteR said:
Whats the best way to backup. Software, media etc? Blank DVD's seems like a bit of a chore to me.
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I agree with the problems of backing up to DVD-R - even Blu-Ray \ HD-DVD isn't big enough to backup 1TB of data. So I only cook my most important stuff - and a lot of that I cook twice, and snail-mail copies back to my parents.

500GB Hard disk £60 - so cheap it's kinda silly not to buy spares :) Think of the cost of rebuilding the collection - even if it had to be restored from DVD - so it is worth investing in backup.

£20-£40 would put a hard disk into a caddy. Simple to use, easy to drop. (And reformat it to NTFS if you only use it on XP, etc as it is more hardy to errors that FAT32)

In my house I have my collections of music \ video on my "server" which I backup onto a secondary "backup server". Both machines are built with old hardware, a quality PSU and jammed full with hard drives. No clever mirror software used (yet). Just a DOS script to copy files over the network.

My Drives also get partitioned. So the OS and Apps can sit on partitions away from the data. This means I have Norton Ghost copies of these partitions ready to rebuild them if needed.


If you don't have the space for lots of machines around, Mirror RAID is actually easier than it sounds. Most modern motherboards allow you to install a pair of drives to store your data on. This means you get a backup without any effort.

Personally I don't use RAID as it still doesn't stop you from accidentally formatting that partition :D. Or if a power problem hit the motherboard and\or IDE controller, it can fry both drives. So two physical machines in different parts of the house does me. :) (No screens - all remote login)


Last suggestion - online backup. Programs like http://www.crashplan.com/ let you back up to your mate's computer. So you give your mate a USB Hard drive to attach to his PC. Then both install this software. It keeps your data automatically in synch by copying over the "changes" you have made. If you have a disaster, just a few clicks and the data comes back :) (I have only briefly experimented with this program, but it looks good. And free is always good. :))
 
to the OP, did you have to go and reassign files in the end then and check to work out what they are?

dunno why it was looked over but the first thing someone said was getdataback. its one of the best pieces of software i've worked with. i've only had a couple partitions dissappear over the years, can't remember why they went AWOL now but they did. also recovered some stuff for rents when their comp restarted and partition table was gone.

getdataback has always gotten over 100% of files back for me and never had a single file with a weird name or extension. everythings been brought back intact, file name intact and working fine. its been flawless, and its gotten more than 100% back because i've found files i'd deleted, on purpose, ages ago that i also retrieved not just stuff that was lost when partition table was gone. takes a while but it does a deep scan of basically every 0 and 1 on the drive. they work by essentially making a temporary partition file table which when you choose what to back up it checks where to get the data from, from the "new" file table.

i know looooads of people who have done silly stuff or had failures and used getdataback with very few problems. the only issue i've had getting stuff back was the first time i needed to years and years ago googling and trying so many bits of crappy software till i hit getdataback. the other issue is most/all of the demo's for this kinda stuff won't find everything on purpose and limits what you can see, which also means you really can't tell if you buy the thing if it will find anymore.
 
I just bought a Thecus N2100 to keep all my files on, nicely backed up with the built in RAID.

Installed my 400gb hard drive with 10 years of photos (backed up until 6 months ago) and a lot of other stuff (not as bothered about all that, films, music etc).

Anyway, put the hard drive in the Thecus, turned it on and set it up - expected to see all my files but instead it seems to have automatically formatted it. :(

So, I put it back in to my Vista machine (this one) and tried to access the hard drive, seems the Thecus has changed the drive to something else (I suspect the Thecus is a linux box or something). Does anoyone have any tips on recovering my data, I'm well gutted right now.

I'm running active recovery but maybe I should be running the partition one? :(

EDIT: Just cancelled the scan (wanted to see if it had picked ANYTHING up) seems it has! All *** full directory structures are there! WOHOO! Just recovering it all with Active partition right now.
 
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