What backup does everyone use?

[Mike Grant]

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! 😮

What will happen if that drive crashes ………you will loose EVERYTHING! 😥

Zip disks do it for me. Big enough but not too big to loose everything in case of accidents. Once a zip is full I back it up to another zip just in case one disk decides not to work.

[Lee Harris]

Whats a backup……… :lol1:

[Michael Lafferty]

Make a backup of your backup !

All the designs I have done are backed up on numerous CD’s
Invoices that I need are saved on a work computer, then my laptop and finally USB memory stick.

Recently tried Norton Ghost, a good program I thought, save me a lot of time when the inevitable happens. 2 months after this backup, sure enough, windows protection error. A chance to use the 4 DVD’s it took to backup (which I had checked twice after completing the backup) when half way through the last DVD, up came disc compression error. The backup had failed on DVD’s which had checked perfect and been stored perfect. Luckily all the important stuff had been backed up separately.

I have since spoken to other people with the same problem. So I would say make a backup of your backup. I lost a days work on that computer which I use solely for sublimation printing.

Here’s a tip for your computer, especially a work one. Install 2 hard drives, one with your windows operating system and programs, the other drive with all your files, designs, work in progress etc…. This way when your windows o/s fails (and it will) you can reinstall without losing any files, which are safe on your second drive, but don’t forget to back this up.
You can always reinstall your windows o/s, but you can never replace those lost designs.
I know people partition their hard drives, but you can still lose everything, having 2 drives lessens the risk.

Oh and did I mention, make a backup of your backup !

Michael

[Terry Gall]

I used and Archos 20mb external drive. It was ideal as it was small and portable and I always had my files to hand. However, you guessed it, one day it died, losing me quite a lot of valuable work, including many designs, quotes etc.

I have now bought a 40mb version, but now copy across new files to my home pc evey night. Takes a bit of time, but not as much as redoing all the lost work.

Cheers

Terry 😕

[Gary Davis]

Have a RAID 1 array, which is the first line of backup then everything put on CD every few months.
With a RAID 1 array everything is backed up “on the fly”.

[David Norris]

We’ve just bought an Iomega REV that uses small cartridges like the old zip disks (35GB of data uncompressed or 90GB with compression) this replaced our old DAT system that expired recently.

The server is set to perform back-ups as and when new files are created or existing files are updated (a cartridge is then taken off site every night – just in case).

[Mark Shipley]

Lee,

A ‘backup’ is an effect customers can have on you 😉 😮 😉

Mark

[George Zerbino]

In-shop backup of all data files accross 4 separate hard drives.

Then whole lot stored onto external 300gig drive, take the drive home and burn everything onto dvd-r.

Takes AGES the first time round, much quicker on differential/incremental successive backups.

Make sure you have at least one working backup stored off-site. I know of people doing the backups and leaving everything in the same office. You can guess what happens should a fire start….!

[Michael Lafferty]

When labeling CD/DVD’s always use the correct ones, not address labels.
Drives now spin up to 10000 rpm, causing improperly labeled discs to shatter.

If writing on your disc, use a proper CD/DVD safe pen. Some pen ink’s might look alright at the time, but they are slowly eating through your disc and in a few months time are useless.

[Vince Francis]

quote :

What will happen if that drive crashes ………you will loose EVERYTHING!

I’m sure a computer boff will be able to restore the hard drive if it does.

Its when you pour soldering flux in your laptop and fry it that you cant 😳 Yep thats what i did at work.

Guess i wont try that one again. I only backed all the info up on CD the day b4, so i have 2 thank myself lucky i did. It always pays to back up important info

(mmmm gonna do it more often though lol)

(:) (:)

[David Rowland]

FileBack PC by Maximum

http://www.maxoutput.com/FileBack/

We put some drives in the spare user pcs and get the server to copy the data when it’s not too busy. Cheap backup and very comprehensive but we do have tonnes of data.

[Craig Darlington]

I use Retrospect to back-up automatically at the end of the day. The media I use is a Miglia RAID setup with 3 removable drives, which are rotated first thing in the morning. One of these drives I take home every night. I have tried zips (flaky), floppies (not big enough), cds (too slow) and portable hard drives, and this set up is by far the best yet.

[Peter Shaw]

40Mb after 11 years?? Do you only work part time? My backups go back about 16 years and are well over 1Gb.

Our backup system has all data files saved to one machine. We have a program that then copies our data files onto another machine when it detects changes every 20 minutes. Thus if the main “server” goes down we can immediately switch to the “mirror” machine. At end of day all new/amended data files are copied to DVD and taken off-site. Every 3 months or so I move the data from our main working directory to a History directory for months older than the last 3. This is automatically mirrored as above as well. The History files are then copied to their own DVD twice. One is kept in the office and the other off-site.

Sounds more complex than it is. It only takes a few minutes daily and a half hour every 3 months. The rest is self-maintaining.

Never lost any data yet!!! (Famous last words)

Peter

[KevinGaffney]

Very much full time. About 75% of our business is repetitive safety signage. Continually using same files to produce these. Often go a couple of weeks without having to produce a new flexi file

[Peter Shaw]

A couple of weeks without creating a file. That’s fantastic.

I have an increasing problem of design time as we go heaver into digital print.

Peter