PSA: Backup your important files

[DenverGP]

And keep the backups up to date.

I'm a computer guy, software developer for a living for the past 20+ years. I'm the one who set up my companies SQL server backups with multiple levels of backup.

But tonight in my personal machine, my main 2TB hard drive crashed. Hadn't done a backup in about a year. Backup didn't include several files which I now realize were very important to me.

I've been lucky in the past that any drive failures I've had were the slow kind, where the drive starts to have read errors and they gradually get worse. So there is time to transfer the important stuff off to a replacement drive.

This time it was instant. Machine was running along fine, went to some website in my browser and it looked like it timed out. Then I realized the machine itself seemed to be sluggish, then blue-screen of death. Now the drive just makes a clicking sound when it first spins up. After 30 sec, it gives up, and spins back down. It's toast. And the stuff I lost isn't worth the price of a data recovery service, so I'm just re-building from scratch and recovering the parts I did back up last year.

I'm so pissed at myself.

[DFBrews]

Wise words do your recommend back ups on ssd or conventional drives?

[asmo]

Wise words do your recommend back ups on ssd or conventional drives?

Backup to spinning disk. SSDs can start loosing data very quickly if they are not powered on.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/solid-state-disks-lose-data-if-left-without-power-for-just-a-few-days/

[HoneyBadger]

Backup to spinning disk. SSDs can start loosing data very quickly if they are not powered on.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/solid-state-disks-lose-data-if-left-without-power-for-just-a-few-days/

That's interesting. I wonder if that applies to SD cards the same way? I have several 32 and 64GB SD cards that I use for storage and backups. For example, once a year, I put about 200 pictures along with all of our important paperwork on an SD card and give it to my parents for safe keeping (for insurance recovery purposes). Should I be concerned?

Of course, that whole article was based on a presentation given by major HDD manufacturer, Seagate. Of course they want you to believe that their competition is the devil. [LOL]

[Dlesh123]

Also learning the hard way, I had protected against a hardware failure, with backup HD, thumb drive, and PDA, what I'd did not count on was a ransom ware that encrypted all of my spreadsheets and pictures. Affected all of my backups as they they were all attached at the time. And no, my stuff is not worth the 500 dollars ransom, even if you could trust a crook.


Urrgh.

and people wonder why I love paper.

[Skip]

Always a good PSA!

I use a combination of an external WD 1TB (which was surprisingly cheap) and then BluRay every six months or so (not cheap).

[kwando]

Redundant storage like raid is best. I use a drobo, and haven't had any issues (knock on wood because there ARE reports of drobos failing as well). My important docs like digital copies of paperwork, birth certificate, etc are on Flash drive (encrypted) in a small safe inside a larger safe. And I keep a copy at work as well (some frown on using work PCs for personal use)

[fly boy]

And keep the backups up to date.

I'm a computer guy, software developer for a living for the past 20+ years. I'm the one who set up my companies SQL server backups with multiple levels of backup.

But tonight in my personal machine, my main 2TB hard drive crashed. Hadn't done a backup in about a year. Backup didn't include several files which I now realize were very important to me.

I've been lucky in the past that any drive failures I've had were the slow kind, where the drive starts to have read errors and they gradually get worse. So there is time to transfer the important stuff off to a replacement drive.

This time it was instant. Machine was running along fine, went to some website in my browser and it looked like it timed out. Then I realized the machine itself seemed to be sluggish, then blue-screen of death. Now the drive just makes a clicking sound when it first spins up. After 30 sec, it gives up, and spins back down. It's toast. And the stuff I lost isn't worth the price of a data recovery service, so I'm just re-building from scratch and recovering the parts I did back up last year.

I'm so pissed at myself.

can you throw it in the freezer for a few hours, and then use as a slave drive and pull info off?

[Fentonite]

Thanks for the post. I just ordered a 2TB backup and a few thumb drives.

[Mazin]

Now this is the exact reason I'm building my own cloud. I'm sorry man I know the pain of losing data.

[sportbikeco]

Did you try the freezer trick?

[DenverGP]

tried the freezer trick, still no dice. I'm going to let it sit for a few days, try it again, and try the freezer trick another time, but I think I'm out of luck on this one.

[gnihcraes]

Unknown on how secure, but Google Drive and Dropbox.

Nothing I have is really of interest to a thief, so I'm not worried much about if it's Super Secure or will get hacked.

Google drive 100gig for $1.99 a month or something like that. I just robocopy my stuff out to the cloud and hope for the best.

Use truecrypt to secure the specific files I think might be worth something to someone else.

I need something easy and off site, always afraid of someone breaking in and taking my pc and related USB drives. Fire or flood risk too, I need it off site and making backups and taking them somewhere else is a pain.

Thanks for the reminder, I'm backing things up now.

[USMC_5-Echo]

tried the freezer trick, still no dice. I'm going to let it sit for a few days, try it again, and try the freezer trick another time, but I think I'm out of luck on this one.

I've always told my users "there are two types of people in this world, those that have lost data and those that will." With that being said,I could probably recover it for you. I just recovered my sister's laptop hard drive. It was a PITA and took a couple of days but got all of her stuff.

[cstone]

It's not IF but WHEN your drive will die.

SATA hard drives are so cheap today. Everyone here old enough to have used their first mainframe computer on punch cards knows what 256k of memory used to cost. 32GB USB thumb drives are practically disposable and go for $11. Seagate Barracuda EP 3TB 7,200RPM SATA III at MicroCenter for $84.99 today. Pick up a couple of USB thumb drives to keep multiple copies of your data. Burn DVD's with archived data.

When you upgrade a drive on a machine, unhook and remove the old hard drive and set it aside. It is a backup of old data and will sit in a drawer for several years without much degradation of the data it holds. Need data back off the drive, get a USB to SATA bridge cable and connect it to the computer like an external drive.

Digital storage is cheap. Get some.

[jgang]

Ok, so I'm smart enough to know I need to "back up" my laptop and desktop, but may not be doing it the "smartest" way. Is there a better auto back-up than manually transferring files? My current MO is simply copy any/all important files to a WD 1.5TB external drive from Costco about once a month. I think it works OK, but maybe there's something I'm missing. Sorry about your lost files. Painful....

[clublights]

Ok, so I'm smart enough to know I need to "back up" my laptop and desktop, but may not be doing it the "smartest" way. Is there a better auto back-up than manually transferring files? My current MO is simply copy any/all important files to a WD 1.5TB external drive from Costco about once a month. I think it works OK, but maybe there's something I'm missing. Sorry about your lost files. Painful....

On Mac I use time machine .... network full drive back up every hour .. wireless on my Macbook Pro. hardwire on my MacMini server
On my Windows( 8.1) work machines.. I use file history and back up to thumb drives ( micro sized USB on the laptop, microSD on the tablet both always plugged in to the machines) every hour of the files/folders I care about.

[cstone]

If you are using Windows, you can just use a simple command line like:

xcopy source destination /E /G /H /Y /D:mm-dd-yy

Once you have your source data defined and your destination set up, you can keep the line in a simple text file. Plug in your external drive when you are ready. Copy and paste the xcopy line into the command line and hit enter.

For those who don't use command line, Start, Accesories, Command line will get you the old timey C:/ prompt. Paste that xcopy line into that window and hit enter.

Free and simple. Do it ten times a day or once in a blue moon...your choice. If you want to get fancy, you can set it up in a batch script and have it execute on a schedule, but I like knowing it was done because I manually did it.

[Ah Pook]

External HD got a back-up last week. Crossing fingers that is enough.

[gnihcraes]

robocopy source destination /s /e /w:1 /r:1 (can add /xd c:\folder or /xf c:\data\file commands to exclude a directory or file)

it will skip or replace files that have or haven't changed. Easier to use if copying from/to the same locations. (like c:\data to h:\databackup)

:)

[brutal]

Or you could just install freefilesync and setup a batch to run in the scheduler.

Freefilesync can also handle versioning, for the moments when backing up infected files that overwrite your copies just won't cut it.

[Danimal]

Deleted

[Goodburbon]

I've been trying to back up data for the last month, I finally gave up and manually copied.

My wife is a photographer and photo hoarder. One of her 3TB portable back up drives died so I set about setting up a raid on a remote machine to back up data.

Well, Linux and I didn't get along and I lost all digital music I had and the 10TB raid 10 would only show up as 2TB.

So I set up another Win7 machine. no software raid unless you have pro....I have ultimate.

So I ordered an inexpensive SATA raid controller....which despite the packaging and sales info only recognizes 2 TB...

So now I just have a Win 7 machine with 27TB of HDD in it... On the bright side I did recover the 3TB.

[RblDiver]

I'll admit I don't really back up my home machine, but it's good that work backs up our stuff. I meant to clear out a working directory of some files, and ran "rm *" (for those who don't know Unix, that's removing all files from a directory).

Well...I was in my home directory instead of my working one. Whoops! Didn't lose anything "critical," but it would be a pain to recreate some of the things. But thankfully work does a backup of the home directories periodically so they'll have my stuff back to me soon.

(Also good when in the database, you run the wrong command and change everything EXCEPT the one thing you wanted to change, and have to revert back to that morning's backup and recreate what had been done later that day lol)

[al_g]

Wise words do your recommend back ups on ssd or conventional drives? Neither. You want off-site backups and these days a cloud based backup just makes sense. At my current job and previous company I've had to do risk analysis on CrashPlan and after digging into the product I prepaid for a four year subscription and use it at home.

[Hound]

A couple of things to think about:

1) I just had a drive crash like the OP did, hardly noticed because I had it setup in a RAID 1 configuration. This means the drives are mirrored. It was a simple task to switch to the mirror. RAID is the Redundant Array of Independent Disks and there is to much to go into on this post but it is worth it if you are looking at something like 3TB of photographs for the wifes business or even just for what many of us have as memories. It is easy to setup now days, research it.

2) Even if you do use a nice "personal cloud", which probably already has a nice RAID 5 setup you are not safe. Have a spare either physically ready or preferably in "Hot Standby". If you do lose one drive you are only one more from losing the data and then..... Also enable notifications via either text, email.... Something. Nothing like thinking you have it all covered only to find out you first drive failed six months ago and now the second one is gone.... Along with ALL of your data.

3) Have an offline backup.... Of the backup. For a Mac this can be as simple as a large drive in an enclosure that you will hopefully take quarterly backups of the main system with. Just plug it in and let it do its thing. Come back later when done. Some might be saying WTF.. A backup of the backup.. This is getting ridiculous!!! Even if you do one of the first two options above or have some other backup itmay not be enough. I work kn security and recently it has become more prevalent to see 'Ransom Ware'. These are nice little gifts from the bad guys that do things like wait for a 'drive by' attack on your system. You go to a web site to order some new tires. The site is legitimate but compromised. When you click on that link to see what new set of Michelans cost it also download and runs some code. This code encrypts any drive it can fine and then pops up a nice message telling you that if you ever want to see your data again you have to fork over 1000 Bitcoins or some BS like that. If your backup is plugged in/ available..... Ya it will get it also. Oh the joys of modern tech.

Be careful out there.

[Rumline]

I used to do the external hard drive thing but last year I started using CrashPlan online backup service. I chose it because you get to keep the only encryption key which I have printed out in my safe deposit box as well as other places. The downside is if you lose it, your data is gone. iDrive is their main competitor and they have even more features but a 1TB limit. They're both $60/year. Both of them support automated backups to other computers on your network, via VPN, etc, which isn't really anything you couldn't do without it, but it makes it easier to centrally manage multiple copies of your data and that part of the program is free.

Automated online backups are way easier than any home-grown scripts / media rotation I came up with, plus it's offsite. Just set it and forget it until you need a restore. But maybe I should bring back the external drive in addition, just in case.