Got Back Up??

[Bob_VT]

I run a HP Desktop as my primary computer with a 1 tb hard drive with a 1 tb backup. Well early Monday morning the hard drive died without warning.

I ordered a new hard drive from HP which arrived yesterday (fast!) and installed it last night. After waking to computer with the new hard drive I found the windows image file on the back up from Saturday 9/28 and installed it.

The only trace that this event happened is in the bank account and the biggest lesson learned is to back up your computer! The back up drive is worth every penny of money and effort.

 

[bigdee]

Oh, the agony of losing a hard drive and I learned the hard way. I now run two OS and two hard drives. I use a program on the linux os to back up daily to the hard drive that has the windows OS on it.

 

[southkogs]

Good score Bob.

Those TB drives are so inexpensive these days, there's really no reason for someone not to have a redundancy built in to their home computing.

 

[Boomyal]

They say it is not a matter of IF, but a matter of TIME! I have an Acronis imaging disc around somewhere but do not have the patience to figure out what to do with it.

 

[southkogs]

Mac came up with TIME MACHINE in the OS which makes the process really easy, even more you can do your backup to iCloud which is pretty cool for the average user. I thought Windows did something similar to that in the last iteration of Windows, but I don't know for sure.

 

[MTboatguy]

My windows version 8.1 backs up as I go, it does a quick running back up all day long while I am using it, so I am never far behind if something happens, I also have all of our computers on the network set up to run a back up everyday at 3 AM on a 5 drive raid system attached to the network. But you did good Bob, it is too bad most don't!

 

[sublauxation]

I back up the important stuff a couple times. A couple years ago I moved my office. Got everything set up Sunday night. Monday morning when I went to fire it up my hard drive was fried. I wasn't worried because I had what I thought was a full back up external hard drive. Turns out it was also fried. That was a bad Monday!

 

[achris]

I worked in 'IT' before the term was formalised. I was a computer hardware engineer in the 80's. Saw a few companies who's bosses said that doing backups would cost them too much time... until they lost the data drive (in those days, a data drive was a 14" removable drive, capacity about 5MB, yes Megabytes, or 1 photo from a decent DSLR camera!)... A couple of them went under because of it, a few survived, and became the 'poster boys' for doing backups.

Here's what one of the multi platter 14" disc packs looked like. That's 200MB of data...

As far as my own backups go, I have a desktop computer and a laptop. Both are configured as closely as I can, same data structure. They act as backup for each other. I also have a TB drive that is the data transfer drive between the computers, so that's a backup as well.... I also run Crystal DiskInfo weekly to check the health of the drives in both machines (desktop has 2 HDDs and 1 SSD, laptop has 1x1TB HDD).... Crystal also checks any external HDD plugged in at the time... My wife's computer HDD has over 22,000 hours! :thumb:

Chris.....

 

[bruceb58]

I have a network Synology box configured in raid configuration that my computer back ups to at 3am.