# It's World Backup Day!



## ksouers (Mar 31, 2011)

Have you backed up your computer today?

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_new...s-world-backup-day-have-you-secured-your-data

Regular, consistent backups should be a part of everyone's computer maintenance schedule.
And that means copying to a device that is separate from your computer, not just to another directory on the same hard drive.

For what it's worth HMEM is backed up 6 times a day to 2 remote computers (backup to one computer, then that one gets backed up).


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## mklotz (Mar 31, 2011)

As it happens, yes, I did my weekly backup this morning.

First Thursday of every month I do a complete backup to an exterior hard drive.
On the remaining Thursdays of the month I do a differential backup to the external drive.

The hard drive is large enough to contain three months worth of backups. 

Every three months I dump all my stuff to DVDs which are then housed in a location away from the computer.

I have very little sympathy for people who tell me they can't send me some picture/program/etc. because "I lost it in a hard disk crash just last ...". They probably let their good measuring tools lie out on the bench to rust as well.


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## bearcar1 (Mar 31, 2011)

Oh I definitely have to agree with you Marv about doing backups. It just seems so irresponsible to me to not perform something so very basic. There really isn't any good reason not to. I also have to laugh at one of the latest TV commercials that is being aired now. It is the one where the family returns from vacation and finds all their high end electronics has been stolen except for the boat anchor they have for a computer. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not making fun of boat anchors as I have been known to be a bit behind the technology scale myself. The bottom line was the computer wasn't worth a dime to the thieves and the family winds up purchasing the latest and greatest bells and whistles with ice cream and sprinkles laptop as a replacement. The wife is completely stunned that the place they purchased it from, transferred all of their personal files over ...."even out tax files ?" she asks. Now what's wrong with that picture folks. My point of this whole thing is to stress to users NOT to keep that sort of personal information on your hard drive. Sure it's handy when you need it but it can be stolen quite easily. do back ups and keep that information stored safely and securely locked AWAY from the computer and clearly identified so as not to be confused and treated like last years vacation pictures. Todays data storage and retrieval methods have advanced so much since the 12" floppy diskette (remember those? yeah? you ARE old) that one can not take any chances and should take steps necessary to safeguard it just as one would their cash or jewelry. 

BC1
Jim


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## Troutsqueezer (Mar 31, 2011)

But wait, I saw on Yahoo! just yesterday that you no longer need a desktop computer nor a video camera, MP3 player, still shot camera, GPS because it can all be done on an iPhone and with Cloud Computing, who needs storage anymore? These are all going away, according to the article. 

Yahoo! is a good name, I think...


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## rake60 (Mar 31, 2011)

I have been at my current job for 9 months now.

I'm responsible for keeping the computers that power 27 production manufacturing machines running.
As of today, I have viable back-ups for 24 of them, partially loaded back-ups for 2 of them and
very little ready for 1 of them.

Anybody want to bet on which one will fail first?

I'm working on it Chief! 

Rick


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## shred (Apr 1, 2011)

Funny thing, a friend had his house robbed a couple years ago. They swiped all his computers except the old ratty one he was using as a home server which does automatic nightly backups.

He was able to use the restored backups to eventually track down the thieves when they turned on his old computer and started using it.


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## KC6UVM (Apr 1, 2011)

I used to do IT support for CA dept of corrections at a prison in San Luis Obispo, CA back in the day (till 2003 when I broke an ankle in a motorcycle wreck) when most of the inmate data was on a HP Mini and we had to train a cop on the 1st watch to do the backups. He (or she) was signaled by Sacramento at a line printer in control and the cop would enter the cold room and run the backup sub-routines. Backups were done locally and sent to Sacramento off site. There were several hundred unnetworked PCs and a few Macs and it was difficult to get the users to do regular back ups. This was in the day when we (IT) ordered tape backup machines to do the work. :'( Getting the users to do their back ups...  Well, when computers crashed and we didn't have a backup...  We could only do the best with what we had.  :wall:


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## arnoldb (Apr 1, 2011)

Yep - regular backups Thm:

And just as important - and depending on backup methods used:
Regularly test that you can actually restore your backed up data.

I've seen many a user proudly producing up-to-date backup media after a crash, only to find the media corrupted or the data was encrypted and there is no easy means to decrypt it or the user forgot the passwords that is needed...

Then there was the case of a company I worked for that backed up 2 Gigs of data every night to a 250Mb Quick-tape... Turned out the previous sysadmin diverted all error messages to /dev/null in the custom-written backup scripts so no-one realized that for years their backups had been overrunning the media...

Regards, Arnold


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## Iron Cat (Apr 2, 2011)

well just a bit late for world back up day. last night the boss picked up a 1.5TB external backup drive from the wally world place. came with back up software to do auto backups .It was installed and a backup done the world is safe now.
Tins Cat


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## rake60 (Apr 5, 2011)

I may have jinxed myself with my first post here.

Monday morning one of our production machine computers refused to start up the software
due to a corrupt database.

No problem, I'd backed up all of it's databases last month. 
The CD was damaged and the computer wouldn't read it, *BIG PROBLEM!*

Now my production machine machine PCs have backups on double CDs AND *thumb drives!*

Computers.....  :rant:

Rick


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## ksouers (Apr 5, 2011)

Welcome to the world of IT, Rick ;D

That's why there are ALWAYS at least two copies of everything. If your data and code doesn't change much, and you can fit all the machine copies on one or two DVDs, I'd do just that. Make a copy each week and take it home. When you had about 5 or 6 copies at home then you could start to rotate them. You need to make sure you can rebuild the machines from bare metal with minimal fuss.

You're in a production environment, it's worth the trouble to get the extra copies. The plan is to turn a disaster into a simple inconvenience.


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## milotrain (Apr 19, 2011)

Two major things about backups that have increased the usability of backups for me.

1. Backup to the same device that you use on the machine. If it's a laptop 2.5" drive then backup to a laptop 2.5" drive that has the same interface.
    This is important because if the OS drive takes a dump swapping physical drives is a 15min job where as copying 200GB of data from a backup will take about an hour or more.

2. Keep another backup of everything, and if not possible then the important files, off site. Use Backblaze or Dropbox. It's cheap and now you have dual redundancy, with off site protection.
    This is extra useful when you are on the road. If your machine goes down you can grab another laptop at the local bestbuy, lock it to your internet backup, and suck down all the important documents. With a hard backup you don't have this feature.


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