For those who don't do backups:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/...s/magazine.php

Oops. Losing an entire edition of a print magazine because of failed backups.

Backup, people!. If there's anything I've learned from experience and watching others with and without backups, it's that they'll be needed - eventually.

Dana

Yep, I learnt that the hard way too. I had my PB stolen, and hadn't backed up EVER. I lost about 2 years worth of photos , work files, downloads, general stuff.

Now I have a HD plugged in permanently, do two full backups a week, and also have a smaller hard drive that I use to back up vitals like live work files, settings, prefs, iphoto......

Hopefully i'll never loose stuff again....

It's always good to backup important data. It can be hard finding a decent backup medium, which is why I don't backup frequently. I had a 40gb hard disk drive in my old machine that seemed fine up until I tried to copy the Mac OS X Public Beta off of it. Each read failed. A lot of which was recovered, but A/UX 2.0 and the OS X Public Beta were trashed.

However, some smart thinking prior to the crash ensured both the A/UX CD image and the OS X Public Beta disks were compressed and backed up to a remote machine.

Having 100Gb of work on my Dell fileserver is enough to loose sleep over. I'm so paranoid about losing it that I've done the following.

Installed a second hard drive in the Dell. I get Retrospect to automatically do an incremental backup each night. This alternates every week to another backup location on the same drive. Or I can get it to backup to another machine altogether.

I also have an external drive that I use to archive the same work directory - uncompressed - using SyncBack (Windows). That way if the Dell explodes and totals both the hard drives I at least have a drive with files I can access straight away. I don't keep any working files on my workstation including emails. That way if that machine explodes I can just get another machine, install the apps and start working - even if it's off the external drive.

For the really big jobs - 40gb+ - I started buying external USB2 drives to archive them to exclusively. If I'm feeling really neurotic I'll put two copies on there just in case. A $130 external drive to hold a job worth 500 times that is cheap and worthwhile.

I have 3 external drives which I use SuperDuper to back up my entire internal drive. I altrenate as I backup so I've got somewhere to go incase I have a spectacular fail in the middle of a backup. Backup your backups!

I'm similar to that, but with only 2 drives.

I can't wait for Time Machine so I can have that and SuperDuper.

Re Retrospect: Does anyone else freak out with compressed/non-standard file backups? I like backups I can use I don't care if they take up more space.

And for the mag: DOH! What were you guys thinking??!?!?

Yep. Am thinking of ditching Retrospect for that very reason. I used to go to a tape drive before my file sizes got out of control. Those things are scary when they get errors on them.

Eindhoven, yes I know, Eindhoven is near ... um, where is Eindhoven again?

Anyway, I use BRU for my little (well maybe big) network.
Bullet-proof.

Yep. Backup! Backup!.

Tonight I finally setup my raid 1 system and do away with the manual syncing.

Chris

I'm so paranoid that I backup to DVD as well each week. You never know when lightning will wipe out my 5 hard drives.

Somehow I think that Time machine will only be essential for certain types of malfunctions: software upgrades ie Safari 3 beta etc.

I'm not sure it will do much more than what Superduper does now.

You still need to backup a raid 1. It won't protect you from file corruption or accidental deletion...

I read the other week of a guy who was erasing and formatting drives. Something distracted him while he was doing it and he reformatted his raid 1 volume accidentally. Lost everything...

I back up to 3 or 4 locations, depending. Two Backup.app backups run daily. A SuperDuper to a HD image daily and Backup.app backups to DVD-RW every few days. Once Blue-ray drives become cheap enough and re-writable disks become available, I'll do a SuperDuper to HDVD probably.

Reviving this thread because in the last week on various forums I've seen someone:

- Lose an external drive and 160GB of important data that wasn't backed up
- Drop a macbook pro onto concrete - easily replaced the Pro, couldn't recover any photos from a large iPhoto library spanning a few years, including shots of kids growing up.
- Lose both drives in a RAID setup - not redundant enough, couldn't get anything more than filenames off it
- Require macdave to go through hours and hours of recovery to get back important files from a drive.

Do backups people - now. If you don't have an automatic setup in place, dump your photos, files, workfiles etc onto DVD, an external drive, upload them somewhere online, anything.

If you think to yourself "Can't afford another drive!", a mere ~$250 worth would do most people - would you be OK if someone came and offered to give you $250 if they could permanently delete every file from your HD? If you would, you don't need any more backups

Remember...

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who have lost everything due to no backups, and those who will lose everything due to no backups.

Also...

If you're running with no backups, you don't own your data - you just lease it from fate.

It *will* happen.

This community announcement brought to you because I care .

Dana

Well, then that would be three types, wouldn't it? You forgot those who do backups and are thus protected (to a point).

I was just thinking I should backup all of my web design work to DVD -- I've been slack in this regard. Also considering investing in a 1TB NAS for a backup of the HDDs of all computers in the house (which already have externals).

On that note, I've been wondering if there's a program that allows you to easily do backups over multiple DVDs. I would like, for example, to only backup what's changed or hasn't already been done yet so there's only one copy of the files on any backup DVD. It would make it easier to backup things like music, movies and photos where you don't need multiple copies and can't remember what's already backed up.

The hidden point being the only people who tend to be rigorous with their backups are those who've already lost everything .

*raises hand in that camp*

Dana