Randy Cassingham's Blog

Posted by Elizabeth Qld, Australia on May 10, 2009:

I have had the same computer for 7 years and last month upgraded the motherboard and installed a backup hard drive to make an exact copy of the hard drive. Should the original fail, I can just keep on going with the other drive.

LIke you that isn't enough for me, I have the same deal with an external hard drive which I keep at the office, so if the house goes up, the files are still there.

Losing a couple of decades worth of joke emails which are like your Jumbo Joke pages, would be more can I can bear.

Posted by Mike from Dallas on May 11, 2009:

When the only option for backup was using 3-1/2" disks, it was a pain to mark them all with which files, or go through the incredibly tedious process of a complete periodic backup to such disks. So naturally, one day I lost all my data. About that time, a new technology had just come out, streaming tape backups, which I immediately bought. It spent more time synching itself than actually backing up, so it went by the wayside before long. The next time, years later, I ran into such a problem wasn't actually a drive crash, but a corrupted OS. So I had to use old DOS commands to rescue my data files. Now, with 250-1000GB drives, it would be impossible except for the continually dropping prices on external USB drives. So now it's a lot easier.

Still, I really have to wonder about the OCD comments about backing up the backups on a backup system that's been backed up with backups on another backup system by backing up... Oh, forget it. Anyway, I used to do work for a major corporation on temporary setups that wanted redundancy for everything, JUST IN CASE of failure. (Of course, they complained about cost.) To show the futility of "planning" for ANYTHING that could possibly go wrong, I asked them about losing building power. You guessed it, they began insisting on building-size electric generators for those setups, just in case, you know. (You might have guessed that it's one of those companies currently begging the government for bailout.)

Posted by David, Portland OR on May 11, 2009:

For the price of that external hard drive, Randy could have bought almost four years worth of backup service from carbonite.com. The data would be stored (with strong encryption) in a world-class data center on highly redundant servers. Backups happen "all the time" in the background, so there's no risk of forgetting the backup.

The useful life of a hard drive is normally considered to be 4-5 years, so Carbonite is only a little more expensive but much more reliable and secure.

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The best backup solution is one that a) you'll do, and b) that works. Online solutions are definitely useful for some. -rc

Posted by Howard, Michigan on May 11, 2009:

My wife and I use each other's computers to back up our own files. For example, music collection on her PC, backed up to mine; pictures stored on my PC, backed up to hers. I then use a portable hard drive to back up both computers and store it in our safety deposit box at the bank up the street.

Posted by Matt - Wellington, New Zealand on May 11, 2009:

I have several PC's and Laptops at home - mainly for personal use. I run a dual portable harddrive backup. I keep one at my work office, and the other at home. Periodically I swap them. Works for me!

Posted by Chris (Melbourne, AU) on May 11, 2009:

"I've been incredibly lucky that in 25 years of professional writing work that I've never had a hard drive crash."

Amazing fortune. I've worked through four hard drive crashes in the past twelve months... no matter how well something's backed up, it's still agony to deal with the downtime and recovery process. Losing the boot partition means an evening of reinstalling the OS and setting up the unique combination of apps that this computer needs (don't bother suggesting ghosting/imaging, as the image changes constantly), and if that's on one of our primary servers, we're down for usually an entire day. Insanely annoying.

Still, if we had no backups, one disk crash would set us back months or even *years*. Considering that it costs us only a few minutes a week to prevent that, it's well worthwhile (behold the power of automated backups). Actually, one of the easiest ways to run backups is just to hang onto the old hard drive after you upgrade ("This ancient 40GB drive is too small, we need a terabyte for this computer now") and copy crucial files across to it. Works wonderfully!

Posted by Bernard in Brisbane, Australia on May 11, 2009:

I have a system similar to Matt in Wellington:

Stage 1) I have a 500GB drive in my desktop that stores a mirror of important files on the other drives. This helps if I have a single drive crash.

Stage 2) I mirror the mirror regularly (not nightly, though - I should fix that) onto an external USB drive, which lives in the safe (fireproof, but probably not data-rated).

Stage 3) I also mirror the mirror onto an external USB drive that's kept in my filing cabinet at work. I update this backup about monthly.

Selected files that are deemed to have a higher level of importance are also backed up onto quality DVD media (don't trust the cheap ones!), and kept in several places. All backups are randomly checked by opening some files to see if they're ok - I've not found a problem yet.

This keeps all our photos & emails relatively safe, though we could potentially lose a month's worth in the event of a fire.

I'd really like a NAS or home server, though, to share storage between the desktop & laptop (and before you ask - the important files on the laptop are backed up onto the desktop and then backed up from there).

Posted by Vincent - Auckland NZ on May 12, 2009:

To those who think that OCD backups are, well, obsessive, how would you explain to a producer (with his house on the block) that an entire series footage got burnt down with the production facility, last night? and then say that you thought backups were for crazy people? Different horses for courses, of course!

Posted by Cam, Baltimore, Maryland on May 12, 2009:

I got my first computer twenty years ago, but my first hard drive about a year later. I remember starting a project--a Ham Radio program that could send and receive Morse code. I had worked on the project and developed the entire program in sections. After an all-night session one Friday/Saturday, I finished the program. I made several copies on 5-1/2-inch disks. That afternoon I took a couple of copies of the program with me to show it to some friends at the local computer store. I could not retrieve the program. (A year or so later, I would have been able to recover it, I do learn how things work eventually.) But at the time, I had to re-create it.

I tried to keep copies of important files (photographs for example) on more than one computer. I finally set up a home network with three or four computers that allowed me to transfer any files I wanted to keep. It worked well.

However I only had one disk crash that took out everything. I had practically everything on another computer. Having the computers networked made it easy to keep copies of important files safe from a disk crash. I also managed to make about six CDs of important pictures and many other CDs of important files so that I would be able to reconstruct practically everything.

Posted by Yehuda, Israel on May 12, 2009:

Instead of burning your files to CD, you can use crashplan, which will automatically back up your files to your friend's computer (and his to yours too).