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When did you last perform a backup of your computers
Be honest ! (The story so far)
I have worked in the It industry for over 20 years, in that time i have been responsible for very large and complex “mission critical” systems around the world. You would think therefore that I, more than anyone would recognise the need for a sound backup policy.
On Monday the hard disk on my main pc crashed. It is Wednesday now and I am still looking forward to at least 2-3 more days of re-building before everything is back to normal. This includes having to send the broken disk off for recovery.
The final bill (not including wasted time) will exceed £1,000.
Please, Please make proper backups, including recovery disks etc.
If anything should come out of this debacle I would like to think saving some of you from a similar fate.
Of course this won’t happen to you because you all backup your systems religiously…………………………don’t you?
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16 Replies
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I know what u mean… my own personal gear has a RAID Mirror drive, (2 hard drives working together, if one fails the data is safe)
The network at work is a large server, but our biggest problem is the designers, they make massive files and take digital photographcs at 8million pixels!. So, we had a RAID 10 (or 01) system (4 harddrives) and that failed several times and had to be rebuilt over the last 2 years. I have gone through about 4-5 Maxtor harddrives in total. We also have a backup which is running constantly, one for revisions of artwork and the other for offsite harddrive removal.
Our main artwork drive is 304GB and has 402MB free, oh dear, looks like trouble at the end of the day.Backing up 300GB is not easy, tape system are costly so we use removable harddrives, but it takes some good thought and planning!!!!!
Anyway, must start work.
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Last time i backed up was same as you michael 🙁 h/d crash and sent drive away to recover as much as possible which they managed about %40 recovery 😕 not good, Auto backup now every night before the system shuts down, but im sure 1 day that will go wrong aswell lol, 🙄
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just found out our backup stopped 1 week ago!
not good, one guy lost a corel file too!! -
It would be interesting to see what % of us do back up.
It seems such an obvious thing to do, but we all do it?I had my unit completely renovated last May, trying to work at the
same time (nightmare) and in the process an 8’x4′ board got tipped
over, right on my pc while it was not in use.
A day later connected it all back up and nothing! lost the hard drive!
Had I backed up? NO! only on my young sons pc did I have my info
but I had deleted this about 2 weeks previous to free up his disc space.
I had to send hard drive out and fortunately they recovered all what
was on it to the tune of £600.
Backed up ever since funny enough. -
i keep meaning to get myself a proper backup device , but with drive sizes these days , nothing is cheap….
so what i have done to try and cut the cost is buy a copy of GHOST…
i have another drive the same size as my master in the machine….
this is set to backup every evening after i have gone to bed
GHOST is £35 , second drive was £50….
just a thought…….
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Ahem. About every two or three months. 😳
That isn’t as bad as it sounds because as most of our work is repeats there isn’t actually that much new stuff being saved on a daily basis and anything I do lose can usually be re-created fairly quickly.
However, I’m off on holiday soon and I like to leave a current backup in case there are any problems whilst I am away so, today’s the day! 😀
On the other hand, my office lady backs up the accounts to a zip disc every night because it would be a nightmare recovering that information!
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it is great idea Steve, Norton Ghost does work well.
Steve, drive sizes isn’t as bad as u may thing…
Hard drives :-
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products … d=4&stid=2Also, one of these portable drives isn’t a bad option either
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products … _uid=88356in our place we have 4-5 designers/managers working and 4-5 production guys, if it does all stop, might as well send the staff home and call in a recovery team! If we lost the clients work, it would be such a struggle to get back into some kind of rythm.
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Dave…..
When i said drive sizes , i meant getting a backup system to cover the size of drives these days….
Ya know , buying a DAT drive to cover 250gb isn’t cheap……
And to be honest , any backup systems (like tape) doesnt do a drive image thats bootable…
although its not gunna work for everybody , a second drive , that ghost does a complete image to (inc boot) is the best way for me….
if my primary drive goes down , yank it out , change my second drive to primary via jumpers , and i’m off again in 15mins…..(grab a new drive , lop it in as secondary , and start imaging again)
there are not many backup solutions that are this easy , a lot of them require you to get at least back to the operating system , and the backup software you where using + the drivers for your backup device , before you get to “restore”…..
But , so far , i have not tried USB one touch backup systems , reason is as above , getting it back isnt as easy as putting your secondary drive as primary without having to dig out Win disks & drivers……
I found a prog once , that would use 2 IDE drives as a mirrored pair….
it worked , but say i edited a 50mb picture , i had to wait for it to save twice…..i need to move faster than that !!!
ghost for me………
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Having a RAID pair like Daves is good as the controller should save to the 2 discs at the same time, you can also set it to split the file onto the 2 discs making the system faster or have 4 discs running as a split backup pair, meaning you get the data split for a faster save plus it’s backed up onto 2 drives.
I backup usually once a week but didn’t last week 😳 so I’m doing it now as you’ve reminded me.
Once read some statistic that said more than 50% of business’s that lose their data through no backup go out of business!
Steve
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yeah, thats why I use removable harddrives in a second machine down the hall. I use a program called FileBackup by Maximum Output, it transfers everything to two backups on spare machines, it does this throughout the day and if one of our designers has a corrupt file, they can go back 3 revisions of the file 😀
The removable is a little tricker, but we have harddrives in drive-cages and we are supposed to swap out for the risk of theft/fire/flood.
In Windows XP, not certain but there is a software raid built in where it mirrors the drives. However I prefer the hardware RAID mirror and it runs at full speed!
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DAVE. my new raid 1 system has just started to come up with errors then the only way to continue is to let it mirror up again about 40 mins.
windows shows a error “delayed write error ” thought i could switch this off but cant find it.
it also thinks i have removed a drive so swapped cables around incase dogy connection – about a month since i built it and been fine till a few days ago any ideas.chris
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thats scary Chris, the “delayed write error” could have been created due to some issue. Let the mirror re-create and see how performance is. Listen for “tick-tick-tick noises”.
“Enable write caching on the disk” is located in XP, Visit Control Panel, in “System”, then “Hardware” tab, then “Device Manager”.
Look at the “Disk Drives” node, in there you will find your drives, find your raid drives and double click. Click “policies” and there is the tick at the bottom.
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thank you but
quote :Click “policies” and there is the tick at the bottom.is Grey out
chris
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maybe your raid is different and they blocked that 1
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We set up a system not too long ago (following a break in and the production pc nicked)
1. Production files backed up to a removable drive weekly
2. All files archived on monthly basis to CD’s indexed and stored.
3. Accounting and database backed up daily to laptop – that goes with me.Not perfect – do we do it as we should – not really – I am looking into these remote offsite backup facilities – like quickbooks etc. Has anyone else tried these?
Chris
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For those noN Technical types and for thoe not creating a lot of data as simple solution is to get an external harddrive.
Create a briefcase on the drive and or computer and drag the files that you cant do without to the beifcase.
Whenever you open the broiefcase this will update the information with th new version or any additions.
It can take a we while for the fist copy to set up but after that the copying times should be quite short.
Cost less than £200 skill required very little.
We Bakup or creative to dvd every few days. We dont have much repeat use so no need to backup up to a harddrive that will just fill up. When we print large format typical file size is up to 800mb.
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