Backing up your files

As a CAD system manager I have always been proud of the fact that I have never lost a file that has been properly saved. I hear on this forum from time to time the cry of "lost my disk and all my addresses".

I have been using a really well written piece of freeware to back up my data to a seperate disk for some time now nad I thought that I would share the info with my friends here.

The system seems very easy to use and has been bullet-proof so far. I use it in my current job as a travelling engineering designer (have laptop, will travel). I set up a profile for each major area and run a full backup each month and an incremental (modified files only) each week. When I am working on site at a clients I do a full backup of their files onto their system each night. So far this has been great. I found the software at the address below. It is free so check it out

http://www.xs4all.nl/~edienske/abakt/

Regards

Mike

Mike, that's great!

Some years ago I lost many hundreds of hours of printed circuit board designs due to a failed HDD. Heavens knows the equivalent value (and I never re-did them or recovered them). It really depressed me.

Now I back up onto an external HDD every month or so via the fast USB port.

God Bless My CD Burner.

No lost files at all, or at lease in the last three years.

Mike Clark

"Chance Favors The More Prepaired Person"

Alot of people today were not involved with computers in the 80's when you needed a healthy skepticisim about hardware longevity. It seems that many take for granted that HD's last forever and just don't worry about backups. I feel sorry for a whole generation of kids now that will never see any family photographic history because it will be lost in digital photo files on some crashed disk.

There was a news story here a couple months back that made me very angry--seems a research doctorate at UM lost her laptop with all of her many years of research data on it--she made the big night news because she was so distraught that she couldn't work. Geesh...I worked for companies that would flat out fire you in a blink for not having stuff backed up every night. Even loosing a few hours of information is silly. I thought that the news angle should have been how this idiot got to be a doctoral researcher in the first place!

Point is: Make very regular back-ups of everything you cannot afford to lose. Daily if need be. Don't assume your laptop is a safe place for data--it is not.

Computer systems give little or no notice before going belly up.

Recovering data from a bad drive is VERY expensive. A typical drive from a pc or laptop will cost 1000-2000 dollars or more whether you get all your data or not.

Another issue is the PLANNED OBSOLENCE of storage media.

The current "floppy disc" and CD burner are at least generation 5 & 6 in the media world. Countless volumes of data have been trapped on older media that is not supported by today's hardware and software.

With generations 7 & 8 already muscleing in, it won't be long before your floppy and CD data is useless, too.

He, he, he, he. I'm still using an Atari 400 computer! Try finding stuff for that. Amazing reliability though. 25 years an nary a hiccup despite power surges, thunderstorms, and kids playing with unplugging the power supply.

Yeah...my 800 is still going strong. PacMan forever!!!

and 16K of RAM no less! What a powerhouse.

Curt

PS: I also have several generations of Mac's here starting with an original in-box classic.

I was reading an article on HDD's in Scientific American a few years ago, and how the race for increased data density was pushing the limits of physics. I would FAR rather have 2 by 40GB drives that last a long, long time than one 80GB that one day suddenly crashes catastrophically.

I work in the industrial electronics business and we know that HARD DRIVES ALWAYS FAIL. It is not a question of if but when.

A couple of years ago an old school friend who is with HP research in Baltimore showed me their amazing setup. One can just take one of the multiple drives out and put it back in again. And data is popped around the system at 2.4 GBPS. Way above a simple analog / power electronics engineer like me! I just hope I nodded in the right places as he was explaining it to me.

I gotta put in my $0.02 here: at work and at home, I run a RAID (redundant array of inexpensive devices). At work, it's a 1.5 TB (yep, terabyte) RAID and at home it's a 500 MB RAID. These run RAID 3, provide RAID 0 speed, and will tolerate the loss of any single disk. When a disk fails, they squawk at me and tell me which one it is. I them swap the bad disk for a new one and rebuild the RAID. The controllers were made by NetCell which has, alas, gone under (I never had anything to do with NetCell, only a happy customer). But, it's a lead-pipe cinch that someone will pick up the line and re-start manufacturing once all the bankruptcy stuff gets worked out.

Two things can kill me, though: 1) if the RAID controller fails, I may well be toast though I have spare controllers, and 2) if two disks fail simultaneously (low probability, but still not zero) the RAID is lost.

RAID 1 is a mirrored disk: you have two disks that are exact copies of each other and the copying is done on the fly. This is like having an automatic backup runing constantly. If one disk is lost, there's always the other one. Again, these will fail you if both disks die simultaneously (or nearly so) or if the controller dies.

If you absolutely, positively cannot tolerate the loss of any data, ever, you need to do multiple, at least daily backups and store the backups off-site.

RAID 0 controllers are quite cheap and, for the cost of a controller and extra disk (which together cost about as much as a USB drive), worth the peace of mind.

Kim Elmore

How do you back up ?
Actually I have No back ups and have lost my sytem from time to time ....
But for me the computer is just a communucation life line not bussiness or income related in any way. Just an expensive toy. Noting of real value lost when I have to restore.

Well... Funny this theme should come up here.
I earn my money working for an American software vendor (CA).
My job is technical support for the Brightstor Arcserve backup system that CA delivers.
I can tell you i have heard the most fynny and horrible stories in this area.

Kim

I have a Dell Latitude and backup to an external USB HDD. I guess there's no way one can do a RAID on these things?

The HDD died on my last Dell, and this tiny one (physically) is also bound to die sometime.

LAST EDITED ON Oct-18-06 AT 06:26 PM (CST)
 
To do any kind of RAID, you must have at least two internal HDDs. If you have room for two and have an open PCI slot, you can do RAID 1.

Remember that this isn't a panacea, but a level of redundnacy that ALMOST always gives you time to implement a fix before all is lost.

Kim Elmore

P.S.: I should also add that a bootable RAID system preserves more than your data: it also preserves your OS installation, so you won't have to re-install your operating system and all your software. Of course, you may *want* to regularly reinstall your OS. The same is true of a good backup system: you can backup everything needed to restore your entire system, data, installed software, and the operating system. Restoring form such a backup can be challenging, but it's oftne well worth the trouble.