PDA

View Full Version : It's BACKUP WEDNESDAY! Yay!



JillSwift
October 21st, 2009, 11:14 AM
It's Wednesday(ish), time to back up!


Do you have any data sitting on your hard drive that you'd just hate to lose?
No patience for sector-by-sector data recovery?

Then it's time to pop a CD-R or DVD-R into that drive and make yourself a backup.

Or copy it on to an external hard drive for a "soft backup".

Or pop it on your cloud server so they can lose it for you. :biggrin:



This BACKUP YOUR DATA reminder is brought to you this week by your friendly neighborhood reminder-er.

NovaAesa
October 21st, 2009, 11:51 AM
Good reminder, I backed up just then.

stinger30au
October 21st, 2009, 12:39 PM
every few days is the go

just depends how important you think your data is

t0p
October 21st, 2009, 12:50 PM
Or pop it on your cloud server so they can lose it for you. :biggrin:

Heh. Quite. Sidekick anyone?

But my big question about your personal backup regime is: do you keep your backup CD-Rs/DVD-Rs/external HDD on the same premises as your primary storage? If your house burns down and takes your computer with it, will your backups also go up in smoke?

I'm pretty slack in my backup practices. I used to take all my disks to the office, so if my house was hit by a meteor the backups would survive (depending on the size of the meteor). But since I started working from home, that all ceased.

I've recently started backing up some stuff to my Gspace storage. But that's putting my future in the hands of some drunken Google sysadmin. The Sidekick episode should have taught me the folly of that. But I'm completely useless when it comes to learning from other people's misfortune. It takes a bit of misfortune of my own to drive the message home. ;)

Tristam Green
October 21st, 2009, 01:06 PM
Heh. Quite. Sidekick anyone?

But my big question about your personal backup regime is: do you keep your backup CD-Rs/DVD-Rs/external HDD on the same premises as your primary storage? If your house burns down and takes your computer with it, will your backups also go up in smoke?

I'm pretty slack in my backup practices. I used to take all my disks to the office, so if my house was hit by a meteor the backups would survive (depending on the size of the meteor). But since I started working from home, that all ceased.

I've recently started backing up some stuff to my Gspace storage. But that's putting my future in the hands of some drunken Google sysadmin. The Sidekick episode should have taught me the folly of that. But I'm completely useless when it comes to learning from other people's misfortune. It takes a bit of misfortune of my own to drive the message home. ;)

Guess what.

If you send your backup tapes offsite, you're entrusting them to some future drunken [insert random data company name here] vault administrator to spill coffee on, or entrusting them to some future drunken van driver to get in a wreck or run over your tapes.

Paqman
October 21st, 2009, 01:23 PM
rsync + anacron + RAID1 NAS = every day is backup day!

(Well, actually not every day for all my data, but some of it is)

t0p
October 21st, 2009, 01:32 PM
Guess what.

If you send your backup tapes offsite, you're entrusting them to some future drunken [insert random data company name here] vault administrator to spill coffee on, or entrusting them to some future drunken van driver to get in a wreck or run over your tapes.

Oh sneck! That's me screwed then! I may as well just go dropkick my computer into the river.

EDIT: *punt... SPLOOSH*

Mornedhel
October 21st, 2009, 01:46 PM
Oh sneck! That's me screwed then! I may as well just go dropkick my computer into the river.

EDIT: *punt... SPLOOSH*

But he has a point, ultimately your backup *is* exposed to hazards, unless it's a multi-redundant array in a nuclear-proof sealed bunker with its own energy source (and probably even then, there's always the risk of massive squirrel invasion).

Backups lower the chance of losing all your data, they don't eliminate it.

(I rsync my personal data on a single external hard drive. Frequency is "every time I remember to". Reliability is "please don't drop the pretty eSATA drive". My work data is mercurial-cloned both on a distant server hosted I don't even know where and on a USB pen drive that I keep on my person -- it isn't sensitive.)

SirBismuth
October 21st, 2009, 02:08 PM
I backup mail and bookmarks to a flash drive, and server. Critical docs also go on the server. The server itself is backed-up daily.

But, I usually have "Backup Friday". :)

B

CharlesA
October 21st, 2009, 02:35 PM
Almost everything gets saved to my server, which "syncs" up to an external drive hourly (which is probably overkill.. but meh..) I've thought about buying a drive to store off-site (bank safe deposit box or something I guess), but it would be a pain to "refresh" that backup unless you had two drives and swapped them out monthly or whatnot.

solitaire
October 21st, 2009, 02:54 PM
I have a more Zen like approach to backups...^__^

The biggest thing I need to keep is my emails which is collected by gmail apps account and I have a local copy of my emails too. (so that;s covered)

The majoritory of what's left is not unique, so I can get them again relativity easily. The bits that ARE unique are scattered, multiple times, over 4 or 5 different hard drives, there's no hard and fast plan to the backups, just disks i've used as a temp backup and forgotten about between upgrading Ubnutu every 6 months! lol

I also stick stuff upto my SpiderOak online backup every so often ^__^

If I loose something I loose it! If it's important, their is probably a disk with the data somewhere! ^__^


but saying that! I'm trying to build a FreeNAS server for backups and storage! ^__^

toupeiro
October 21st, 2009, 03:53 PM
external 500GB drive, rsync and cron. My backups are for Disaster Recovery, not archival. I don't care about static incremental changes on my own machine. I prefer the seed/delta methodology.

JillSwift
October 28th, 2009, 11:28 AM
Bumping this thread to say:

It's Backup Wednesday!



Take a moment to save yourself a headache later. Important data you would really hate losing should be on a verified CD/DVD or whatever backup medium you like best.


"Back up my hard drive??!?! But, I can't find reverse gear!!"

amitabhishek
October 28th, 2009, 11:35 AM
Will seek help for procrastination. ;)

lisati
October 28th, 2009, 11:40 AM
Guess what.

If you send your backup tapes offsite, you're entrusting them to some future drunken [insert random data company name here] vault administrator to spill coffee on, or entrusting them to some future drunken van driver to get in a wreck or run over your tapes.

Tapes?:confused: I haven't used a tape-based system for nearly 17 years!



edit: I remember this because it was about the time Mrs Lisati & I were getting ready to formalize our relationship, circa October 1992. I plugged the z80-based machine in, and it promptly failed with a puff of smoke.

JillSwift
October 28th, 2009, 12:17 PM
Will seek help for procrastination. ;)
Eh. You can seek help later. </rimshot>

amitabhishek
October 28th, 2009, 01:06 PM
Eh. You can seek help later. </rimshot>

Can lol now.

Bachstelze
October 28th, 2009, 01:12 PM
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b39/BKey/Anime/Rozen%20Maiden/Suiseiseki/Suiseiseki38.jpg

I'd like to interject here. What you're refering to as "Backup Wednesday" is in fact Wedesuday ~desu

JillSwift
October 28th, 2009, 01:14 PM
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b39/BKey/Anime/Rozen%20Maiden/Suiseiseki/Suiseiseki38.jpg

I'd like to interject here. What you're refering to as "Backup Wednesday" is in fact Wedesuday ~desu

BACK UP, Desu! Just back up! :p

Mighty_Joe
October 28th, 2009, 01:55 PM
I'm having a "Restore Wednesday". My home media server gave up the ghost over the weekend. Bought a new hard drive yesterday, installed Ubuntu Server and now it's several hours of swapping and copying, copying and swapping.
Thanks previous backups!

JillSwift
October 28th, 2009, 02:14 PM
I'm having a "Restore Wednesday". My home media server gave up the ghost over the weekend. Bought a new hard drive yesterday, installed Ubuntu Server and now it's several hours of swapping and copying, copying and swapping.
Thanks previous backups!
Yay backups! =^_^=

Mornedhel
October 28th, 2009, 03:02 PM
Tapes?:confused: I haven't used a tape-based system for nearly 17 years!

Tapes are still the best removable media for massive storage and rolling backups, y'know. Serious enterprise backup systems back up on tape (1 TB tapes). Works well as long as you don't need random access, only sequential.

The Real Dave
October 28th, 2009, 03:36 PM
I've been way too lazy with my backups :( So the world decided to remind me of their importance by killing the superblock in my / partition, and making the heatsink on my backup server fail. Its a PIV, so it won't burn out the mobo, but it'll throttle itself to nothing. I seriously need to get rsync working :)

Time to boot up clonezilla :)

xuCGC002
October 28th, 2009, 03:40 PM
It's Wednesday(ish), time to back up!


Do you have any data sitting on your hard drive that you'd just hate to lose?
No patience for sector-by-sector data recovery?

Then it's time to pop a CD-R or DVD-R into that drive and make yourself a backup.

Or copy it on to an external hard drive for a "soft backup".

Or pop it on your cloud server so they can lose it for you. :biggrin:



This BACKUP YOUR DATA reminder is brought to you this week by your friendly neighborhood reminder-er.


Unforunately(?) I don't own an optical drive, and cloud servers are out of the question. So I guess I'll just use a 4GB microSD card. Speaking of which, I only have 2GB free on my disk at the moment, I should consider asking for a new HDD during the holidays. At least that would free up my only IDE port to a DVD drive. Which I kinda need for some of my games that I haven't installed yet in WINE/Linux.

megamania
October 28th, 2009, 03:51 PM
The biggest thing I need to keep is my emails which is collected by gmail apps account and I have a local copy of my emails too. (so that;s covered)
What do you use to backup your gmail account?

I've been thinking about backing up my email for a while now (after discovering the wonders of exclusively using gmail's web interface), but still haven't done it...

SunnyRabbiera
October 28th, 2009, 04:16 PM
I have a separate /home partition so I really dont worry about distro upgrades, I am also not using Ubuntu right now, I am on openSUSE 11.1.

JillSwift
October 28th, 2009, 04:18 PM
I have a separate /home partition so I really dont worry about distro upgrades, I am also not using Ubuntu right now, I am on openSUSE 11.1.
Backups are hedging your bets against the unknown. NO EXCUSES! BACKUP! :p ;) :D

lisati
October 28th, 2009, 07:04 PM
Backups are hedging your bets against the unknown. NO EXCUSES! BACKUP! :p ;) :D

Well said.

JillSwift
October 28th, 2009, 07:40 PM
Unforunately(?) I don't own an optical drive, and cloud servers are out of the question. So I guess I'll just use a 4GB microSD card. Speaking of which, I only have 2GB free on my disk at the moment, I should consider asking for a new HDD during the holidays. At least that would free up my only IDE port to a DVD drive. Which I kinda need for some of my games that I haven't installed yet in WINE/Linux.
Any backup beats none at all. =^_^=

SuperSonic4
October 28th, 2009, 07:43 PM
I have plenty of backups ^.^

Unfortunately they're hopelessly out of date xD - still I can rebuild :D

CharmyBee
October 28th, 2009, 08:16 PM
I backup, but trying to fill the capacity of the DVDs is problematic. My important files are small files. Because of this, I often procrastinate until I hit 4.34GB of files enough for a DVD to be burned.

It's strange since I have spindles of over 100 DVD-Rs to go through, and i've only used 30% of them for distros.

JillSwift
October 28th, 2009, 08:17 PM
You could do it multi-session, yes?

JillSwift
November 4th, 2009, 08:57 PM
Once again, we find that it is
BACKUP WEDNESDAY!
If the data isn't important, why do you have it? =^_^=




Data backups have been known to prevent hair loss (not alopecia areata, but from pulling out clumps).
System backups prevent sore throats (no need for all that maniacal yelling).
Off-site backups are nice. (Couldn't think of a joke.)


Have fun!

pwnst*r
November 4th, 2009, 09:33 PM
oh boy!

CharlesA
November 4th, 2009, 09:40 PM
Off-site backups are handy.

Irihapeti
November 4th, 2009, 10:04 PM
Off-site backups mean one less thing to worry about when the fire alarm goes off in your apartment building. (Happened to me recently.)

pwnst*r
November 4th, 2009, 10:31 PM
Off-site backups mean one less thing to worry about when the fire alarm goes off in your apartment building. (Happened to me recently.)

yikes :( hope everything was ok

Irihapeti
November 4th, 2009, 10:43 PM
yikes :( hope everything was ok

Everything was fine. Someone had deliberately set off one of the fire alarms - why, I do not know. It was a good wake-up call, though (literally, in many cases: - you are less in awe of your neighbours after seeing them shambling down the stairway in their night attire :) ).

I remember thinking at the time that it's pointless having a backup if it's going to go up in smoke along with the computer.

pwnst*r
November 4th, 2009, 10:47 PM
Everything was fine. Someone had deliberately set off one of the fire alarms - why, I do not know. It was a good wake-up call, though (literally, in many cases: - you are less in awe of your neighbours after seeing them shambling down the stairway in their night attire :) ).

I remember thinking at the time that it's pointless having a backup if it's going to go up in smoke along with the computer.

ah, that's good. certainly makes you re-evaluate things.

fela
November 4th, 2009, 10:49 PM
I'd fill 100s of DVDs if that were my backup medium. Instead, I backup to my home server and my 1TB backup drive. That way, all files on my desktop are expendable.

sefs
November 4th, 2009, 10:53 PM
I only do backups every 6 months. That great day occurs 1 day before the release of a Ubuntu RC.

cariboo
November 4th, 2009, 10:58 PM
The server backup is being done as I read this thread.

FuturePilot
November 4th, 2009, 11:01 PM
I usually do backup Saturday. Is this wrong?

ElSlunko
November 4th, 2009, 11:02 PM
Backup done and reinstall ETA 2 hours! I did some heavy tinkering and borked some stuff. Luckily I've done this enough times that getting back to square one isn't very hard :)

ZankerH
November 4th, 2009, 11:05 PM
I keep encrypted backups of everything on 2*2TB disks, unplugged and kept in a safe in the basement, updated Mondays and Fridays.

Nemain
November 5th, 2009, 01:46 AM
I did my very first back upp in September this year, when I dual-booted Vista with Fedora. Where I put the CDs I have no clue... and they're kind of out of date now :rolleyes:

JillSwift
November 5th, 2009, 02:11 AM
I usually do backup Saturday. Is this wrong?
Yes! You are angering the backup gods!







(Of course not, silly. I just picked Wednesday to campaign for the backup habit.)

FuturePilot
November 5th, 2009, 02:13 AM
Yes! You are angering the backup gods!







(Of course not, silly. I just picked Wednesday to campaign for the backup habit.)

LOL cool! :D

eragon100
November 5th, 2009, 07:03 AM
unless it's a multi-redundant array in a nuclear-proof sealed bunker with its own energy source (and probably even then, there's always the risk of massive squirrel invasion).


http://www.krystal.co.uk/technology/datacentre/

Like that place?

JillSwift
November 11th, 2009, 02:33 PM
This
Backup Wednesday
is brought to you from a recently restored hard disk.



Yep, thank goodness I practice what I preach. I destroyed my /home partition on Monday, then overwrote most of it when I was messing around with installing Fedora 11.

It's nice to be able to make a mistake like that without also suffering the loss of all my cat pictures. =^_^=

fela
November 11th, 2009, 02:44 PM
The worst thing is when you lose all your data not from user error, but a hard disk failing. That's what happened to me (I got a nasty head crash and the click of death on my main 750GB HDD). Now I've learned my lesson and I backup.

Luckily I did have all my photos backed up already though, they were the only priceless things on it - there's no way to recreate lost photos.

beercz
November 11th, 2009, 06:11 PM
Every day is backup wednesday for me!!

cron + rsnapshot.org (http://rsnapshot.org/) and remote server = peace of mind!

Run my backup 4 times a day!!

My living (http://lidd.net) and peace of mind depends on it!

koenn
November 11th, 2009, 07:11 PM
Again ?
What is this ? It looks like every wekk there's a backup wednesday !
I thought backup wednesday only came around once a year ...

Barrucadu
November 11th, 2009, 07:19 PM
*backs up*

Irihapeti
November 11th, 2009, 10:42 PM
It's Thursday in my timezone, but that's an irrelevant detail.

I think I'll do a separate backup to take offsite.

schauerlich
November 11th, 2009, 10:44 PM
Time Machine backs up every hour. It's always backup wednesday here!

Now that I think about it, I should do an offsite backup. Hmm...

fela
November 11th, 2009, 11:06 PM
Time Machine backs up every hour. It's always backup wednesday here!

Now that I think about it, I should do an offsite backup. Hmm...

Time machine sounds cool actually. I should implement something similar on my server using rsync or something, I shouldn't think it would be that hard. Would you know of anything like this?

schauerlich
November 11th, 2009, 11:07 PM
Time machine sounds cool actually. I should implement something similar on my server using rsync or something, I shouldn't think it would be that hard. Would you know of anything like this?

cron+rsync gives you something similar, but not exactly the same.

fela
November 11th, 2009, 11:16 PM
cron+rsync gives you something similar, but not exactly the same.

Well the only thing that I'd want is something that backs certain files to a certain location at a certain interval, but first checks if it's already backed up. If it is, then overwrite with a new backup if the file to be backed up is newer, or else skip that file.

I wouldn't need it to backup multiple copies of each file, just the latest one, as this backup would be purely for protection against drive failure - I leave user error and its consequences in the users hands :P

So I guess my needs are slightly different from Time Machine's purpose - Time Machine is essentially a desktop app not a server app, and it's not built for protection against drive failure.

FuturePilot
November 11th, 2009, 11:18 PM
Well the only thing that I'd want is something that backs certain files to a certain location at a certain interval, but first checks if it's already backed up. If it is, then overwrite with a new backup if the file to be backed up is newer, or else skip that file.

I wouldn't need it to backup multiple copies of each file, just the latest one, as this backup would be purely for protection against drive failure - I leave user error and its consequences in the users hands :P

So I guess my needs are slightly different from Time Machine's purpose - Time Machine is essentially a desktop app not a server app, and it's not built for protection against drive failure.

You can make rsync do exactly that. rsync is very powerful and configurable.

schauerlich
November 11th, 2009, 11:19 PM
Well the only thing that I'd want is something that backs certain files to a certain location at a certain interval, but first checks if it's already backed up. If it is, then overwrite with a new backup if the file to be backed up is newer, or else skip that file.

I wouldn't need it to backup multiple copies of each file, just the latest one, as this backup would be purely for protection against drive failure - I leave user error and its consequences in the users hands :PThat's basically what rsync does. I don't know if you can make it so it overwrites the last backup or not. But I'm not sure why you would want to do that... what would happen if a backup was interrupted? What if the connection is poor and the data is corrupted in transit? Now you don't have any backup of that file.


So I guess my needs are slightly different from Time Machine's purpose - Time Machine is essentially a desktop app not a server app, and it's not built for protection against drive failure.

What do you mean?

fela
November 11th, 2009, 11:20 PM
You can make rsync do exactly that. rsync is very powerful and configurable.

Cool, well I knew it could, just haven't got round to it yet.

fela
November 11th, 2009, 11:22 PM
That's basically what rsync does. I don't know if you can make it so it overwrites the last backup or not. But I'm not sure why you would want to do that... what would happen if a backup was interrupted? What if the connection is poor and the data is corrupted in transit? Now you don't have any backup of that file.

I'm pretty sure USB is quite reliable ;) I'd use a USB HDD for backing up onto.


What do you mean?

What I mean is, Time Machine was built so that you can recover a file if you accidentally delete it, and you can recover older versions of it aswell (as it backs up multiple copies over time). This isn't what I want. I want a simple one-backup to prevent data loss in case of disk failure.

schauerlich
November 11th, 2009, 11:27 PM
I'm pretty sure USB is quite reliable ;) I'd use a USB HDD for backing up onto.Hard drives are quite reliable too, until they fail. Same goes for any piece of hardware, including USB. That's the point of backups: to protect against hardware failure.


What I mean is, Time Machine was built so that you can recover a file if you accidentally delete it, and you can recover older versions of it aswell (as it backs up multiple copies over time). This isn't what I want. I want a simple one-backup to prevent data loss in case of disk failure.If my drive fails, all I have to do is install a new drive, boot up the OS X Install DVD, select "Restore From Time Machine Backup", select the Time Machine drive, and it will copy the latest backup (following hard links back for files which weren't modified) over onto the new drive. It'll be just like it was. How is that not preventing data loss in case of disk failure?

fela
November 11th, 2009, 11:34 PM
Hard drives are quite reliable too, until they fail. Same goes for any piece of hardware, including USB. That's the point of backups: to protect against hardware failure.

Well isn't that why I'm backing up in the first place? Having my data mirrored across two hard drives (virtually anyway), more than doubles my chances of not losing any data. More than doubles, because the backup HDD is only powered on for a certain time each day/week, whereas the HDD in the server is powered on + spinning 24/7.


If my drive fails, all I have to do is install a new drive, boot up the OS X Install DVD, select "Restore From Time Machine Backup", select the Time Machine drive, and it will copy the latest backup (following hard links back for files which weren't modified) over onto the new drive. It'll be just like it was. How is that not preventing data loss in case of disk failure?

Well you can use it in case of disk failure (didn't know about that), but that wasn't its chief purpose when it was designed. Its chief purpose was to prevent data loss from accidental deletion, not hardware failure. Otherwise it would have a one-backup strategy to save space. BTW as you seem to know so much about it all may I ask is Time Machine enabled by default on new Macs? Cause if it is then they must ship with two HDDs by default?! Or is it something you have to get an external HDD for? (or extra internal of course)

schauerlich
November 11th, 2009, 11:40 PM
Well isn't that why I'm backing up in the first place? Having my data mirrored across two hard drives (virtually anyway), more than doubles my chances of not losing any data. More than doubles, because the backup HDD is only powered on for a certain time each day/week, whereas the HDD in the server is powered on + spinning 24/7.Right; what I'm saying is, if you only have one copy of the file on the backup drive, and the backup is corrupted in transit, you end up with one real copy (on your main drive) and one corrupted backup. Now, if you man drive fails, you have nothing. See my point? If you have an incremental backup, even if the current backup is corrupted, you at least have a slightly older version of your files.


Well you can use it in case of disk failure (didn't know about that), but that wasn't its chief purpose when it was designed. Its chief purpose was to prevent data loss from accidental deletion, not hardware failure. Intentional fallacy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_fallacy)


Otherwise it would have a one-backup strategy to save space. No, because the designers didn't think that was the best strategy. This way, you can do both, and you have less risk of corrupted backups.


BTW as you seem to know so much about it all may I ask is Time Machine enabled by default on new Macs? Cause if it is then they must ship with two HDDs by default?! Or is it something you have to get an external HDD for? (or extra internal of course)It is installed by default, although it is turned off. When you connect an external hard drive for the first time, it offers to make that drive your time machine backup.

fela
November 11th, 2009, 11:59 PM
Right; what I'm saying is, if you only have one copy of the file on the backup drive, and the backup is corrupted in transit, you end up with one real copy (on your main drive) and one corrupted backup. Now, if you man drive fails, you have nothing. See my point? If you have an incremental backup, even if the current backup is corrupted, you at least have a slightly older version of your files.

Maybe I'd do that if I was running the CIA/KGB/FBI/MI5 :) My files aren't important enough for that, and besides they're already backed up at other places such as clients anyway. If the server's disk broke right now then it wouldn't be an utter catastrophe. A LOT of it is backed up in lots of places.

OK so you were right that Time Machine was also built in case of disk failure. But it was definitely also built in case of user error, something I don't have the responsibility to protect against in this case as this is a server - only trustworthy + responsible people are handed the password.


It is installed by default, although it is turned off. When you connect an external hard drive for the first time, it offers to make that drive your time machine backup.

Right, cheers :)

schauerlich
November 12th, 2009, 12:11 AM
Maybe I'd do that if I was running the CIA/KGB/FBI/MI5 :) My files aren't important enough for that, and besides they're already backed up at other places such as clients anyway. If the server's disk broke right now then it wouldn't be an utter catastrophe. A LOT of it is backed up in lots of places.Your data isn't that important, but you're bothering to back it up? It's not like it's a RAID array, it's just a simple mechanism to protect against failed backups. You could achieve the same thing with having one revision back.


OK so you were right that Time Machine was also built in case of disk failure. But it was definitely also built in case of user error, something I don't have the responsibility to protect against in this case as this is a server - only trustworthy + responsible people are handed the password.Right, I'm sure only stupid people accidentally delete things.

The Real Dave
November 12th, 2009, 12:13 AM
For another 58 minutes, its still Wednesday :) Go backup people :)

I would, but I'm currently re-installing 9.04. My backups server is down and inaccessible, and of course, thats gonna be the time when ext4 decides to play up. I've decided to go back to ext3 now.... :(

fela
November 12th, 2009, 01:24 AM
Your data isn't that important, but you're bothering to back it up? It's not like it's a RAID array, it's just a simple mechanism to protect against failed backups. You could achieve the same thing with having one revision back.

Nah well my data is worth backing up. What I said is it's not important enough as to worry whether the backup has failed or not. I will know if it has failed as the only likely cause of failure would be a power cut to the drive - in which case I'd know about it. So yeah.


Right, I'm sure only stupid people accidentally delete things.

Responsible isn't the opposite of stupid. I meant responsible as in 'people who know what they're doing on the computer and are careful to not do anything stupid on it.' You don't have to be stupid to do stupid things.

wulfgang
November 12th, 2009, 02:06 AM
I backup on wednesday also. I have three harddrives, 40gb for ubuntu, 80gb for media, and most importantly 30gb for backing up important files.

King_Critter
November 12th, 2009, 03:14 AM
I suppose I should back up sooner or later. Especially as right now, my primary computer is a laptop that I take everywhere with me. That adds the problems of theft, and a greater chance of user-induced hardware failure (e.g., dropping it).

One thing I just thought of, after reading some comments about off-site backups, is: bury it. Just put it in an airtight container and bury it a foot down in your backyard. Simple, cheap, effective. Unless you have some really aggressive moles. :P

JillSwift
November 12th, 2009, 05:00 AM
One thing I just thought of, after reading some comments about off-site backups, is: bury it. Just put it in an airtight container and bury it a foot down in your backyard. Simple, cheap, effective. Unless you have some really aggressive moles. :P
Heheh, if you can find an airtight, water tight, non-corroding, non-corrosive container. ;)

Seriously, the only way to guarantee that data is never, ever destroyed is not not have any data in the first place. :p :D

RPG Master
November 12th, 2009, 05:18 AM
I've recently started to backup my data once a week with Back in Time (great app!) because of a recent accident.... :'(

Megrimn
November 12th, 2009, 07:03 AM
right.. Just wondering, what's a good program to use to back up your files to CD/DVD?

Irihapeti
November 12th, 2009, 07:51 AM
right.. Just wondering, what's a good program to use to back up your files to CD/DVD?

Good question. I used to use Cedar Backup but I found it - or the burning software backend - was damaging too many DVDs. In the end, I put together my own routine, using TAR and a CD/DVD writer backend, all held together by terrible bash code. Later on I changed from TAR to DAR, which is supposed to be more suitable for disks. Bash code is still terrible, but I've learned a lot from doing it, and the backups get done.

Of course, you can just archive your files with any archiving program and burn the CD/DVD with brasero, k3b or whatever works for you.

Anyone else here use optical media for backups, or am I the only storage media dinosaur?

handy
November 12th, 2009, 07:58 AM
I have a No.2. box, that is a full tower with 3 drive drawers in it.

So it is easy to get it to do a variety of tasks, controlled by which drive(s) is/are stuffed into it.

One of the systems that I use is specifically for backup. The system has a couple of drives - 2GB = FreeNAS boot, & 1TB for FreeNAS storage.

When required I start No.2. up & with those two drives in, & backup across my NFS LAN.

After which I shut No.2. down & remove, or at least disengage the drive drawers, so as to protect them from any kind of a power spike.