PSA: Backup your important files

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.