Where is good place to post pictures

[ShrimpBurrito]

A family member had a hard drive crash at work, and for whatever reason, a good chunk of the data had not been backed up. So they took it to some place to do a recovery, just like what Bill did, and they searched just for data as well. Total cost was ~$1,500, and they didn't recover everything. The larger the file, the harder it is to recover. If you use Outlook for email, the mail file is almost always large, an thus you usually lose some of it.

There are lots of different ways to do backups, but just like any insurance, it does cost a little bit (but not much), and you need to make the effort to set it up. But one thing I think it CRITICAL to backups is that they be automatic. If they are manual, it just won't happen consistently, or even regularly, guaranteed. And since it doesn't take much more money or effort to make it automatic, it always mystifies me as to why someone would choose to do manual.

Dave

[MudDog]

I started with a Commodore 64 (ahh, the good old days) and have been in IT management for the last 21 years.

At work we always had RAID on our Unix and Windows based servers and tape backups. I would not trust RAID alone, as I've seen numerous RAID Controllers fail that have caused the entire array to become corrupt (and these are high-end RAID controllers).

For personsal data, I started with CD's, then when that became unmanageable switched to DVD's and then when that became unmanageable switched to a Xiemta network disk that was mirrored.

The problem with the Xiemta or a USB drive is convenience. If the data is important, it should always be off-site. What if there is a fire and you are not home at the time?

With it needing to be off-site, how often are you going to go get it, bring it home and refresh your backup and take it off-site again?


A few years ago I switched to online backup. There are a lot of offerings with mozy and carbonite being the dominate players.

I choose mozy.com and since then they were acquired by EMC (a MAJOR player in the storage market) - so I don't think they are going anywhere and being a public company they have SaS70 and ISO Certifications on their data center operations.

You choose what folders you want to backup up and it automatically does it in the background when your computer is idle. The data is encrypted with up to 256 bit blowfish encryption (most financial sites only use 128 bit encrpyption).

I have over 100Gb of photos, documents and music backed up.

Pricing is reasonable ($5.99/month for 50Gb, $9.99 for 125Gb...with up to 4 months free depending on contract duration) and it's convenient - I don't have to do anything to keep it current.

It also support versioning....If I had a 500 page book and opened it to write the ending credits and in the process deleted pages 200-250 and saved it that way, mozy keeps several prior versions (under windows, right click the file, select mozy restore and then select which version I want to restore).

If you're just copying files to USB drive or Flash drive without keeping multiple versions, the file may become corrupt, infected with a virus or you may do something to the file (like delete 50 pages) without knowing it...without versioning, you've lost data.

[ShrimpBurrito]

I've heard good things about Carbonite and Mozy......

I started with a Sinclair ZX-81. It had a membrane keyboard, a whopping 16 KB memory pack the size of a brick (the on-board memory was 1 KB), and a thermal printer with paper about 5 inches wide. To load programs, you used a cassette player, and you had to know exactly where on the tape the program started (the tape counter came in handy), and you had to make sure the volume was set correctly.

Dave

[Bill]

Dave -

$1500 for a scrape? Wow, I paid about a tenth of that, and thought I was getting hosed. Perhaps a more expensive scrape would hae recovered more.

You are right about big files being harder to recover. Just like Outlook, email files in Thunderbird tend to get huge - hence my loss of email.

As for automatic backup? The only reason I can think of why it would not be good is pilot error. If I mistakenly delete a file, a RAID system will dutifully duplicate that deletion, and do it instantly. And there is no way to get it back. I know, nobody ever deletes a file without meaning to - certainly I never have!!! With a manual backup, or scheduled automatic backup, you get a second chance.

And unlike RAID, a portable drive gives you the option of offsite storage. Maybe your neighbor will let you keep it in his garage. Or maybe just a small fireproof safe ... All I know is I've gotta do something. I don't want to go through this again.

Bill

[MudDog]

Originally Posted by ShrimpBurrito

I've heard good things about Carbonite and Mozy......

I started with a Sinclair ZX-81. It had a membrane keyboard, a whopping 16 KB memory pack the size of a brick (the on-board memory was 1 KB), and a thermal printer with paper about 5 inches wide. To load programs, you used a cassette player, and you had to know exactly where on the tape the program started (the tape counter came in handy), and you had to make sure the volume was set correctly.

Dave

LOL - I had NO storage when I bought my C64. I'd spend hours writing/entering program code, run the program a few times and happily lose it when I turned off the computer.

I eventually got the cassette drive (execute load command, wait 3 minutes for the loader screen to come up that would inform me it would be approximately 20 more minutes before the rest of the program loaded) and then the floppy drive. It was great...64k of memory and a 170k floppy drive

I once accidentally did a quick format of my hard drive. That wiped out the boundary definitions of all of my partitions (I like multiple partitions). It set the drive to be a single partition, consuming the entire drive and said it was empty, but I know it did not do a format.

I spent hours online looking for a tool to reset the partition table. Then I spent 10 minutes fixing it.

A scraper could have recovered the data. I was able to put it back to bootable with all applications runable.

[ShrimpBurrito]

Originally Posted by Bill

$1500 for a scrape? Wow, I paid about a tenth of that, and thought I was getting hosed. Perhaps a more expensive scrape would hae recovered more.

Yep, I couldn't believe it myself. The drive wasn't even that big....maybe 300 GB. It was a government computer, so perhaps the "scrape" was much more intensive or the damage was more significant than what you had. This was also a few years ago.

Originally Posted by Bill

As for automatic backup? The only reason I can think of why it would not be good is pilot error. If I mistakenly delete a file, a RAID system will dutifully duplicate that deletion, and do it instantly. And there is no way to get it back. I know, nobody ever deletes a file without meaning to - certainly I never have!!! With a manual backup, or scheduled automatic backup, you get a second chance.

That's a definite disadvantage against a RAID setup. RAIDs ONLY prevent against disk failure, and nothing else. But they protect your entire system disk as a volume, including all your applications and settings, so downtime can literally be 10 minutes if you have a failure. But if a virus infects all your Word docs, they are infected on both disks. If you delete a file, it's gone. You can get around both problems on non-RAID drive backup setups by keeping multiple versions or doing incremental backups - these sorts of backups can be done with software utilities that operate in the background, and function much like Carbonite and Mozy's client applications.

With this sort of backup, the breadth of your "safety net" is limited only by the size of the backup drive. If you do daily backups of 100GB and your backup drive is 1 TB, you can store at least around 10 days of history. So if on day 7 you realize that you accidentally deleted a file or realize you got infected with a virus, you can still find your files intact on your drive for 3 more days. In reality, depending on how you configure things, it's often much more than 10 days of safety net because you don't change every file every day, so it will take longer to fill up that 1 TB drive.

Originally Posted by Bill

And unlike RAID, a portable drive gives you the option of offsite storage. Maybe your neighbor will let you keep it in his garage. Or maybe just a small fireproof safe ...

This is true. You could even store it in a Pelican case in your backyard. But I can virtually guarantee you that if you choose this route, you will eventually become lazy. I did. And when you need a backup, you will lose alot more data. Is that important? Well, only you can decide that.

The network drive I have is more than just a drive enclosure. It is basically a mini-computer, so it has alot more functionality than just a USB drive. In addition to automatically making an automatic backup locally, it does the automatic remote backup on my brother's unit at his house. But if you didn't want to go through configuring a backup at your brother's house, it also is easy to configure it to automatically do remote backups on third party servers, just as Amazon's S3.

Dave

Originally Posted by ShrimpBurrito

That's a definite disadvantage against a RAID setup. RAIDs ONLY prevent against disk failure, and nothing else.
Dave

I believe that this is true for some RAID configuration but not for others.

Striping, where each file is spread across multiple drives, has a better data repair capability. I think this is RAID5.

But I have never seen a mother board for a PC that can do that.

The last time I looked, mainframes were running 5 9's of reliability. That is 99.999 percent of uptime.

That is 6 minutes of downtime per year, for a system running continuously.

During that time, any part can be swapped out on the fly, disks, memory, cpu chips, etc.

The reliability of PC systems could easily be improved, but consumers would not want to pay the price to achieve that.

You get what you pay for.