Backup strategies

14 years ago

I've had to recover from several hard drive crashes and have also had to help other people recover from crashes.

I'm curious what approaches people use for backups.

I image my drive periodically. Between backups, I'll copy important files to another drive. At one time, I had software running that would do this automatically "in the background" but it used too many resources, so I stopped it.

The backup approach most people I know use seems to be along the lines of "Backups? We don't need no steenkeng backups!" And when the drive crashes, they hope somebody can recover the drive using some kind of recovery program and if not, they shrug and go forward.

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Comments (9)

owbist
14 years ago
I suspect bpgreen's last paragraph covers 90% of personal computer owners sadly. Too many also fail to create a set of recovery CD/DVDs to protect against a fatal crash. Many are first time owners of course.

Up until perhaps 3 years ago I simply wiped a drive and started over, it got rid of all the problems. Then I bought Acronis True Image but still fail to use it properly. All 3 currently used computers are backed up but I fail miserably with the incremental backups.

For those considering buying a new computer with Windows 7 you might be pleasantly surprised to know there is a built in backup program. It seems a slow process, my trial version took over 4 hours to create an image with only a few programs installed. The answer is simple of course, set the backup to run when you leave the computer, even overnight.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
14 years ago
I preach back up all the time and I have to say I wish I did it as much as I preach it LOL
I have not had a loss of needed data however, knock on wood!
I do have Acronis also, I do have online storage, I do have external usb hard drives, I have a lot of the really important stuff saved too, I have flash drives for each pc with all my essentials saved and I re-do those from time to time.
One pc does not have a recovery partition or dvds and I have not imaged it yet, bad bad bad! I have saved the data to back up, but not my OS image. The new acer laptop apparently does have some type of recovery program or partition, have not messed with that yet, it also needs to be imaged. But I have little to nothing on it at this point so no data to lose there.

I only use web based email nothing is on my pc.

I know from my personal experience talking to LOTS of people about computers over 90% of them have no form of backup, and most have no idea what a partition is. In addition they think if there is a problem with the computer it is not fixable and they go out and buy an entirely new computer. When they could have simply reformatted the pc.
I wish I could be the one getting all those computers that are being thrown out! I have a personal friend that has gone through about 5 computers to my one and the reason why is well it would not work right so it had to be replaced!

I have told them about backing up I have told them about recovery and reformatting, I have sent them links to FREE security programs to put on the pc and run, it does not matter.
We can only try to teach...
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bpgreen
Original Author
14 years ago
Ravencajun--you use Linux, right? Do you set up shell scripts with find -newer to automate backing up new files? I'm running Windows, but have cygwin and have thought about setting up a cron job to do something like that to back up a couple of folders. I think that would be less resource intensive than some of the commercial products.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
14 years ago
oh sorry was basically commenting on how I handle my windows boxes.

On my linux I only have one that I bother making backups and I just back up my Home to external.
I have not done that but I would think it could certainly be done.
Of course having home on a separate partition is a good idea too.

If Baldy happens by he could probably give some ideas.
baldy_linux
14 years ago
There is a program called Keep that has a lot of users. Easy to setup and it can be set to run at night or on certain scheme
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
14 years ago
Keep Application

I was over on freshmeat and you can find a lot of options for linux listed
bpgreen
Original Author
14 years ago
Thanks for the info on Keep. It looks user friendly, but I think I might go with a shell script running in cron.

On a larger note, it seems that even those of us who know better are really bad at backups.

So what's the answer?

I've been fairly good at periodically imaging my drive, but discovered that my backup drive is "in danger of immediate failure" when I tried to make it the new boot device.

Is there a relatively inexpensive RAID device that I can hang on the network and force backups for everybody?

Am I overly paranoid because of my wife's recent crash or am I on target?
owbist
14 years ago
Bpgreen wrote On a larger note, it seems that even those of us who know better are really bad at backups.

So what's the answer?

For those contemplating Windows 7 it will be easy enough because not only does it have backup software included as I noted above but it also automatically does the incremental backups to a set schedule.
DA_Mccoy
14 years ago
My position for the general user is as long as important personal data is backed up regularly; specifically, but not limited to financial data, bookmarks, and the on-board mail client address book, don't worry about system backups. Valued data, documents and photos should not be stored on the system without backup to begin with.

A clone of an existing H/D is not essential for the general user. I totally support backing up critical or wanted data, but entire systems I don't.

DA

Backup strategies

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owbist

ravencajun Zone 8b TX

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Backup strategies

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owbist

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