Have you backed up your computer this year?

by lexilexi

Posted: 15 years ago 20 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

I've had 2 computers die in the last week.

My G5 started having kernel panics, luckily I got the 3 year applecare warranty and its looking like a new logic board. It's been gone nearly a week though.

My laptop just straight out died suddenly a couple nights ago. No warnings, instant doorstop. Like an old TV on the blink, screen went haywire and it froze, it won't even start up now.

Now I'm on the old G4 from the basement. A friend of mine was going to take it to the dump cos she couldn't be bothered to get $75 for it on ebay - but I took it off her hands; and it works great! You have to put coal in it and stoke up the boiler, firefox makes 'er puff a little but I've got a ton of work done in the last 48 and I would have been big-time stuck otherwise...

If you are in IM, I totally recommend:

a) getting a spare computer, nothing fancy, just something cheap that works. Imagine if the main machine died in the middle of a product launch or something.

b) using external firewire drives as your startup drive, using carbon copy cloner, and having an external backup too. That way, if the machine dies and you have to send it in, you can just plug the drive into another machine and off you go. I'm not sure what happens with PCs but for me, if I'm on external firewire, the actual machine becomes irrelevant and I'm good to go.

HTH,

Alex.

#backed #computer #year

Writing Warrior 15 years ago

2 computers down in one week! I feel for you!

I try to back up once a week, but I'm not going to lie - I sometimes skip 2 or 3 weeks in a row. :p
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Solidsnake Banned 15 years ago

I have my computer reformatted last September... I reinstalled my OS so no back-up yet..
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Puusep 15 years ago

Same here. I had my computer going down twice in december. I lost everything I had there. Good thing is that I had some stuff over the ftp.
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mywebwork

15 years ago

Aloha Alex

I use several computers. I keep all my data on a network file server - an old Windows 2000 server that still does a great job and doubles as a print server. I also archive to a network storage device, and make constant backups to USB flash drives.

One thing I'd like to point out is that you also need to backup the work you do online. I recently had a bad experience with a hacker on our corporate server, fortunately we seem to have resolved it but it was not pleasant. I wrote a post on my WF Blog about it (it's currently my only post!) if you care to read about it, it covers creating a Disaster Recovery plan which I think we all need. Not trying to hijack your thread, but I do include some important safety tips that I think every one of us should use to safeguard our data which is, after all, the core of our business.

I like your idea of the firewire drives - never considered that!

Bill

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Lloyd Buchinski

15 years ago

Originally Posted by mywebwork

I wrote a post on my WF Blog about it (it's currently my only post!) if you care to read about it, it covers creating a Disaster Recovery plan which I think we all need.

It's the first time I've ever gone over to the blog area for more than idle curiosity, and I really did appreciate the information that you passed on. Thanks.

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Evita 15 years ago

Just installed a new one as well..... lotta work.

I use carbonite.com for automatic backup online. With them you will be ALWAYS current on your backup.

Evita
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tommygadget 15 years ago

I have four laptops with the same work image on them. I also have several memory sticks with saved warrior threads In all seriousness, you MUST have a backup of all your sites, tools, logins and bookmarks on several types of media, both usb memory devices and dvd/cds.

TomG.
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AgileHosting 15 years ago

Multiple drive failures and massive data loss taught me this lesson well.

I now do nightly off-site/off-network backups (automagically), and weekly double external backups (sit-down-and-do-it type).

Every laptop drive I've lost, has gone catastrophically, with no warning whatsoever. (And considering I'm a geek, believe me, if there had been so much as a hint whispered within a 15 mile radius, I would have noticed! I'm insanely picky/paranoid about these things.)

So given the irreplaceable data I've lost -- including 6 yrs of photos -- I now sit my a** down and back things up.

Bailey
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- Bryan Zimmerman 15 years ago
  
  I back up everything once a day. I watched a friend lose everthing he had when his computer crashed. I've never seen him depressed like that. I have two external hard drives that automatically back up both computers at 3am.
  
  I can't imagine losing everthing that I have like that
  
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nick1123 15 years ago

Anyone tried carbonite backup? It looks pretty slick and it costs $50 a year.
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- Bryan Toder 15 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by nick1123
  
  Anyone tried carbonite backup? It looks pretty slick and it costs $50 a year.
  
  I use Amazon's JungleDisk. It's cheap and amazing.
  
  Thanks
  
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  Andy Money 15 years ago
  
  I back up every week...as well as my server...and my databases...
  
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Richard N Adams 15 years ago

Nick1123,

I'm using Carbonite myself right now. I haven't had a crash so haven't actually had to get anything back but the software works well in the background. No noticeable slow down of my PC and I know things are constantly being backed up without me having to remember to do it :-)

Richard
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lexilexi 15 years ago

This is great, not at all a thread hijack it's exactly the kind of discussion I wanted to open up. I appreciate all the ideas.
I keep backups of all my web sites on 3 hard drives, also flash drives are definitely awesome for backing up the day's work every couple of hours.

Another tip - if you are working on a large, important document, create a new numbered version every so often.
Once I accidentally deleted most of a file before hitting save - and then copied over the backup copy with this file also! Adding a new number and keeping a few versions enables you to go back and pull data from an old version if you screw up the new version.

Another tip is to have a third backup in a remote location. That way you are covered against fire, theft or flood. The trouble is then that you have to go and get the thing every time you want to back it up - and my third location backups tend to happen once every couple of months. Still, it's really nice to have an extra archive - and you don't really ever want to be down to one copy of anything.

Two drives can die as easily as one and I think it happens approximately once in a lifetime...

I learned about booting off the external hard drive and using carbon copy cloner from a friend, years ago. He had a computer go down and even though the data on the internal drive was fine, he couldn't get the data off the drive to carry on working.
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- Jillian Slack 15 years ago
  
  I'm still amazed when I hear of people NOT backing up often, or they've never even heard of backing up. I'm not techie-minded and so it's got to be easy for me to do it without royally screwing it up.
  
  I lost a ton of stuff (including most of my master's thesis) several years ago and that was my wake-up call. Ended up piecing the thesis back together by going into my email and finding the "sent" files where I had sent pieces of it to my critique partners at various stages. It wasn't perfect and it took a lot of work to clean it up after putting those pieces together, but it was better than starting from scratch.
  
  A few weeks ago, after NEVER having a virus in all of these years online, I got one. It was a doozy. It hijacked my browser so no matter what I searched for and clicked on, it sent me where it wanted to send me. Big pain, but it was a relief knowing my files were all backed up nicely.
  
  I've been curious about Carbonite, too.
  
  Thanks
  
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GreatBiz 15 years ago

I use my backup hard drive as well as partitions within the same drive to backup. Occasionally, I will use my external drive. But I guess for most of us, we just don't have the habit.
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- Tyson Faulkner 15 years ago
  
  I've had similar experiences with losing business files and such because of a computer going out. The hard drive went bad and it would have been ridiculously expensive to try and get the data extracted by the 'pros.'
  
  Now I back up my important files when I think about it, but I have no real system.
  
  Is there some software that will automate this process? Maybe a small program that runs in the background and automatically backs up your HD to a defined source once a day/week or something?
  
  I really need to get better at this, it would be heartbreaking to lose some of the stuff I have on my remaining computer.
  
  Have you guys just found that an external HD does the trick for you? Or even an internal one?
  
  Thanks
  
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RichOnlineCEO 15 years ago

I've never had my mac die, maybe it never will
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krishananda 15 years ago

Just couple of months ago my PC, laptop, and modem (also my LCD TV) died because of lightning, I had surge protector for my equipments but the lightning came from the modem (cable tv) and through the network wires, shocking me to death since I was working at the time.

So don't just do backups, also prepare the surge protectors for electric outlets, tv cables, phone lines, etc.
Remember to have UPS also.

Even if you have backup devices ready, never know when these kinds of circumstances would happen.
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dsmpublishing 15 years ago

I back mine up every week. But i just have a laptop at the moment just moved from england to portugal and it died on me 3wks after i left england and i was forced to return home just to check it fixed but its perfect now!
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