Backup and recovery of data ... do you do it?

[dedja]

Just curious what people are doing for backup and recovery of data from their PC's, laptops, media, photos, etc.

The reason that I ask is I've always assumed most people are extremely vulnerable when it comes to losing their data at home.

Why, because hard drives fail (not today, or tomorrow, but one day they will), houses ocassionally burn down, equipment gets stolen, and humans make stupid errors (eg. delete something they need).

Even though I'm in the IT industry, I still see workmates who don't do any backups of their data at home ... or backup and never test that they can recover

So, with this in mind, I make sure I do regular full backups of my data, store valuable data offsite (ie. photos and videos, important documents, etc), and perform a test restore every now and again.

When I had my laptop stolen a while back, the biggest hassle was getting a replacement from the insurance company, but once that was done, I restored my important data and away I went.

Anyway, enough of that ... what do you do to protect your data at home?

[Dissident]

I audit, first.
Work out what I have. In total.

Then, work out what I can't replace EVER.

Those things get burnt to DVD, as well as put on an external HDD that lives at another house.

Things in this include

- Photos
- Home Movies
- Work data (invoices, documents, working files from websites)
- Emails (PST files)
- Miscellaneous (things that I can't classify that I NEED)

I have a myriad of TV shows and movies, but only a select few are backed up. The rest I can get again from somewhere else.

[smac]

I have a HDD that I backup to every week or two, although my main priority on there is photos. Everything else can be replaced.

I also burn the photos to DVDs every so often as a safety net. The rest are just documents like resume's and letters or 'backups' of games I own and really don't matter if they get lost, I just back them up on the HDD because it takes no more effort than backing up the photos.

[Q.]

I backed up all my photos onto a second hard drive in my PC. A week later the first hard drive crashed

I should put them onto DVDs as well.

[dedja]

I audit, first.
Work out what I have. In total.

Then, work out what I can't replace EVER.

Those things get burnt to DVD, as well as put on an external HDD that lives at another house.

Things in this include

- Photos
- Home Movies
- Work data (invoices, documents, working files from websites)
- Emails (PST files)
- Miscellaneous (things that I can't classify that I NEED)

I have a myriad of TV shows and movies, but only a select few are backed up. The rest I can get again from somewhere else.

See, that's what I like, practice what you preach.

These are very wise words indeed ... as Dissident states, work out what's irreplaceable (or classify your data) and then plan a strategy around that. Remember to cater for the worst for the important stuff. The amount you spend to do this should be proportional to the worth (not monetary value) of the data. eg. photo data isn't worth much in dollars, but it's irreplaceable if you lose it.

The other thing worth noting is don't overdo it either ... you don't need to spend squillions to do it right.

If you're OK to lose the data, then fine, do nothing ... but it's worth thinking about that scenario before it happens.

[dedja]

I backed up all my photos onto a second hard drive in my PC. A week later the first hard drive crashed

I should put them onto DVDs as well.

Depending on how much photo data you have, might be worth investing in a portable HDD so that you copy and store somewhere safe, like another house or at work. The usb ones are slow, but fairly cheap and from memory, under 320Gb or so and you can get them just usb powered, so you don't need a separate power cable making them ultra portable.

[Dissident]

I have a DLink NAS unit. It runs two drives in a RAID formation, mirrored (Two x 1TB)

It's on my network as a file store, and I put everything on that as well as my PC.
Being a mirror, it also caters for a hard drive dying.

This is also on top of storing things externally.
(Means I can access photos/music/movies from other players without having my PC on)

[godoubleblues]

simple for me and it is really on the photos that I am worried about, maybe a few other files
but all backed up onto a portable hard drive

[Pseudo]

CDs - most ripped to MP3, burned to data CDs (8-12 albums per CD) and stored at my workplace

Digital music files - mostly copied to the work computer, via the MP3 player

Photos, videos - usually of the kids, so the grandparents all get copies

administrative/personal data - a copy lives on my USB thumb drive

On top of that, everything - an entire copy of the computer hard disk - goes on a portable HDD as well.

[Dirko]

Photo's onto disks, I have a disk/s copied for reformatting Hard Drive etc, music on a separate Hard Drive.

[Psyber]

As my C drive is a pair of striped Raptors for speed, I use Comodo Backup to back anything that matters on to another larger HDD in the same case.
Then I copy the more critical stuff to USB sticks and replicate it on my laptop.
Photos have a dedicated USB stick as well.

I have just bought an external, USB2 and eSATA connectable, hot-swap capable HDD casing.

[Dissident]

I can't imagine having striped drives makes it any faster..?

[dedja]

Well theortically read/writes will be faster in a raid 0 configuration but I wouldn't have thought it would make much of a difference on a home setup (assuming all you have on the C drive striped set is a windows OS) ... plus you realise that you're stuffed if one drive fails.

Using raptors would again theoretically improve R/Ws but I wouldn't have thought it would be a noticable improvement.

IMO it would make more sense to buy an extra drive and setup a raid 5 set if you've already gone to the expense of installing a couple of raptors.

[Psyber]

The striped Raptors did make a noticeable difference, but I agree RAID 0 is not a good choice for anything that matters much to you.
I use the RAID 0 pair as the OS drive and for some software, but I have it all duplicated on a prepared HDD I can whack in solo if one of the RAID drives fails.
I wouldn't use RAID 0 on a business computer or my only computer because of the loss risk.
I did it on this experimental machine to try it out when Raptors first hit the market, but I never bothered to get a card to support RAID 5, which the DFI mobo does not itself support.

I have another AMD64 machine set up as RAID 1 for important records and any business use, and an ASUS Core2Duo laptop with copies of some things on that too.
I am watching SSD pricing and reliability reports and may look at W7 on as SSD as an option further down the track.

[dedja]

Fair enough Psyber ... getting off topic but one final question on your setup out of interest.

I'm assuming you've got the windows pagefile on the striped set? If so, and even if you've chocked with RAM, you would see a definite performance improvement from paging.

[Psyber]

Fair enough Psyber ... getting off topic but one final question on your setup out of interest.
I'm assuming you've got the windows pagefile on the striped set? If so, and even if you've chocked with RAM, you would see a definite performance improvement from paging.

Yes.
I'm only using 2GB RAM with XP Pro, but later Im planning to convert the other AMD 64 to a machine with Ubuntu 64 bit installed and add VM Ware and/or WINE.
Then I'll add more RAM to that set up and see how it performs.
If I go to Windows 7 later I'll add more RAM to that machine too.

[Lunchcutter]

me and dh back up both pc's onto an external hard drive about once each month also take photos off and burn them onto disks for storage/organisation