Do you backup?

Viro

Viro

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This will hopefully be a thread where everyone comes and shares their backup strategies (you do have one, I hope ;)). Say what medium you use, frequency of backup, what you backup and any *horror* stories you might have that would spur others to backup frequently!

I'll get the ball rolling. I backup to CD-Rs once at the beginning of every month. I don't have that much data as all my photos, word documents, latex files and source code all fit onto a CD easily. I don't use and iPod and all my music is on CDs so I don't back these up.

I've got no horror stories but this is what happened to a friend that finally convinced me to backup regularly. I had a friend who had completed his PhD and is lecturing. One day, his laptop got nicked and on it he had his thesis, his post-doctoral work, etc basically 5 years worth of work. Now he was lucky since he did an *annual* backup so at the most he lost a year's worth of work. As a PhD student myself, I can't afford to lose a year's work, so now I backup frequently onto CDs catalogued by the month.
 
Back when I was younger I didn't back my stuff up. The hard drive on my 3400 took a dump and I lost everything I had ever created from 6th grade up to probably 10th grade. Now that I'm older I have learned. The iPod holds my music and pictures (most important stuff in my opinion). My bank records, keychains, and other sensitive/important things are backed up on an encrypted disk image on a usb keychain. Then the whole user folder is backed up on an external hard drive. The one problem with this is that the laptop and hard drive are together almost all the time, so if something happens to the laptop (theft, fire, etc) chances are the same thing will bite the hard drive. And that's why the iPod and keychain are used; they're almost always on me and separate of the other stuff.
 
Documents I'm working on get backed up daily to a USB memory key.
My documents folder is backed up monthly.
iTunes music and iPhoto libraries are backed up evary time I get a significant amount of new stuff there. I tend to backup iTunes for every 600mb of files I've added since last backup.

I also make a backup copy of all my software CDs immediately upon buying any new apps or games, and keep these backups in a separate location to my originals.
 
I've shared my horror story before here in the forms. I'll just do a brief recap.

I have an external firewire hard drive that was formatted in FAT32. OSX interacts with it just fine, but there was this one time that it caused me much grief. I was moving data off that drive onto my iBook's hard drive in preparation to reformat it into HFS+. Stupid me, I did a "Move" operation instead of a copy operation. I'm just use to they way a "Move" works in Windows which is: it automatically makes a copy of the file(s) into the destination first. Once that succeeds it deletes the files from the source to produce the effect of completely moving file(s) from once place to another.

That's not how it worked in OSX. During the file move operation, something went wrong and it could not complete the move operation. So I hit cancel to get out of it. Bad idea. It still thinks I want to move the files out of the souce location, so OSX went ahead and deleted all my files from my FW hard drive! The files on the destination (my iBook) were also deleted, and I mean gone, not even in the Trash bin. So that was about 7 gigs of data out the window irretrieveable. That day, I cussed and swore till the angels cried. Stupid OSX and stupid me.
 
Lycander: Similar thing happened to me only a couple months ago. I lost several important word documents for school and work as well as over 2500 photos from the past 3 years. About 11 gigs of files in general... unbelievable. Ironic thing is, I was backing it all up to an external drive because it was all so important.

Now I have a little 20 gig drive for backup purposes and a larger drive for normal use. I can't even tell you the tantrum I threw over that f-up. :mad:
 
I use an external 80 gig drive to back up with. I hook it up and do the backups and then disconnect it and turn it off. I do this roughly once a month.

my worst horror story is this:

I made my own database in filemaker to keep track of all my finances because i dont like mym or quicken and such. i have tried them. well this database has gotten out of hand with "well i can add this option" type of things. I have spent close to probibly 400 hours working on that database. I got done working on about 7 hours worth of updates i was doing to it and then went to bed. i woke up in the morning and my 3 month old drive was making scratching metal noises and would not work correctly. data lost, but i had it backed up from before the changes so i marked it up as 7 hours of work lost, no biggie. i redid the work in the next few days over my lunch hours at work and such on my laptop. I got it almost done to the point i was at before and my two week old laptop was stolen from my car (along with 600 bucks damage to the car and my stereo and a digital camera and my palm). getting pissed at this point. i redid the work a third time on a road trip to texas (from rochester NY) and burned it to a cd every couple of hours and kept the cds in a different location from my laptop in case it was stolen again.
 
I back up my home directory weekly (on fridays) to a local FW disk (using rsync). Moreover, I backup more or less monthly to a remote server at my faculty (sftp upload). Every time I have to travel with my PB (which is often), I take a USB-stick with me with all the important files I'm working on at the moment.

No horror stories though ... luckily. :D My Macs have never failed me up to now (and counting) :) .
 
up until recently, all I really backed-up was my iphoto albums - every quarter to external firewire, and once a year to DVD.

then about a week ago I decided to backup my entire HOME directory, because I had just come across PsynchX. then this past monday I hosed my whole system (was trying to remove the extra language packs to free up space on my PB, and rendered the keyboard unrecognizable...yeah, stupid mistake by someone who should probably know better). thank all that is holy that I did an entire backup 2 days prior to my boneheaded mistake.
so all is back to normal did a completely new install and actually freed-up about 15gb from my hard drive, so it was a good thing all in all.

now that i'm back in business, I set CCC to create a backup disk image of my newly restored system, and also set PsynchX to do weekly backups.

cd/dvd media is kinda sketchy, with the talk lately of it only having about a 7-10 year shelf life...I hope that's pessimistic, but guess we'll see. I've got plenty of stuff laying around on burned CDs and DVDs...
 
as of now, no. because im on windows, my files are all over the place. as soon as i switch, ill be backing up my home directory on a weekly basis to an external drive.
 
quiksan said:
now that i'm back in business, I set CCC to create a backup disk image of my newly restored system, and also set PsynchX to do weekly backups.
Click to expand...

Maybe you should dump PsynchX. If you go to the Carbon Copy Cloner site and look at adding this plain version of psync (the download is down the page) it will directly integrate with Carbon Copy Cloner's preferences and it will do scheduled backups.
 
Seems like a lot of people use an external hard drive to back up data to. How reliable are these?
 
Do you backup ? That's like asking "do you use protection" :eek:

I have a big Lacie FW drive that's actually bigger than my iMac's HD. I use a cron job to copy the contents of my home folder (minus ~/Music) to it every two days.

I also mirror my ~/Documents to my iBook since I do a lot of work on that too, so it's kind of like a second backup of my critical files.

In times of (perceived) imminent emergency I tar my entire ~/ and upload it to my server (one of which is in-house).
 
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