Always back up

[The Vector Doctor]

My backup is based on Time Machine for the Mac, maybe that is the difference. As I said the drive had some directory corruption and the suggestion online was to let TM wipe the drive and reinstall EVERYTHING. Nothing was done manually

 

[signage]

An I thought those MAC's didn't have any problems:ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:


SORRY I JUST HAD TO DO THIS

 

[njshorts]

My backup is based on Time Machine for the Mac, maybe that is the difference. As I said the drive had some directory corruption and the suggestion online was to let TM wipe the drive and reinstall EVERYTHING. Nothing was done manually

ooh, for mac.... i do the same thing but also have a usb HD caddy with a 2.5" HD, have super duper running every week or so... might try that, would be much quicker (just change the boot drive in system preferences)

An I thought those MAC's didn't have any problems:ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:


SORRY I JUST HAD TO DO THIS

a hard drive is a hard drive, same hardware as in any other computer

 

[signage]

a hard drive is a hard drive, same hardware as in any other computer

Yea but he stated he didn't have a HD failure!

HD did not fail per se but there was a directory structure error which required a wipe and HD restore. I will look into it further though to see if the HD is actually failing somehow

 

[njshorts]

Yea but he stated he didn't have a HD failure!

I'm putting my money on a drive going bad... Journaled HFS is just about as stable as Ext3/4.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

It is a Western Digital hard drive I got from Newegg. So it was not blessed and made kosher by the wizards at Apple Corp. That could be a reason for its' possible failing


Is there a sarcasm smiley?

 

[The Vector Doctor]

ooh, for mac.... i do the same thing but also have a usb HD caddy with a 2.5" HD, have super duper running every week or so... might try that, would be much quicker (just change the boot drive in system preferences)



a hard drive is a hard drive, same hardware as in any other computer

I have Carbon Copy cloner cloning the hard drive to a secondary internal HD that does incremental every day and full's weekly. I also let Time Machine do hourly backups to an external.

Based on timing of the error and a known good back up I relied on the hourly Time Machine backup

My concern too was whether or not CCC had a clone of the poor structure? I don't know enough about how it works. I don't believe Time Machine is as advanced as CCC so that was the 2nd reason for using TM

 

[Tim Aucoin]

This is a great thread... thank you Eric!
I recently switched all of my artwork to a Mac Mini Server. Running off of that server is a DROBO drive with 14TB of capacity. All of my critical data is backed up with double redundancy daily and automatically using Carbon Copy Cloner. Overall it was a great $1500 or so investment. JB mentioned FONTS... great point! After reading this, I checked and realized that I have not copied all of my (10,000+) fonts to the server. I will do that today! Most of my fonts are purchased from Adobe including the huge investment I made in Adobe's Font Folio 11, and I can always re-download them from Adobe, but it is always a great idea to back those up also.

Thanks Eric for starting this thread, thank you JB for bringing up the font suggestion and thank you to everyone for all the great ideas!

 

[signswi]

How come nobody ever mentions online storage? I would think that would be a whole lot more secure than carrying around external drives.

In my opinion if you don't have offsite backup you don't have backup. Big fan of http://www.backblaze.com/.

 

[Joe Diaz]

We use www.carbonite.com. It is about $55 a year for unlimited backup. A very small price to pay for peace of mind. We have over 800GB worth of files that are backed up. The program runs in the background. I can select what folders I want backed up and every time I make a change to a file within those folders, it backs it up automatically. You can also remotely access those files from any computer online.

Sure hard drive failure is scary, but if anything were to happen to this building, like a fire or tornado or burglary, it wouldn't matter if external backup device or not.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

OK, here is a question. For those of you that use online backups.... is that your only backup? I do think it is important but would not want to rely on that solely due to the speed issue. For a few files it is a non-issue but for full restores the timing is killer

 

[Joe Diaz]

OK, here is a question. For those of you that use online backups.... is that your only backup? I do think it is important but would not want to rely on that solely due to the speed issue. For a few files it is a non-issue but for full restores the timing is killer

We also have RAID mirroring if one hard drive fails. We would be able to continue working and replace the bad hard drive at a more convenient time. But if our building were to be destroyed and everything within it, we would just have to restore our files online. It may take some time, but in that case we would have a lot of other issues to deal with too. Waiting for the files to restore would be the least of our problems, besides we wouldn't be able to do much with them until we got back up and running.

 

[njshorts]

I have Carbon Copy cloner cloning the hard drive to a secondary internal HD that does incremental every day and full's weekly. I also let Time Machine do hourly backups to an external.

Based on timing of the error and a known good back up I relied on the hourly Time Machine backup

My concern too was whether or not CCC had a clone of the poor structure? I don't know enough about how it works. I don't believe Time Machine is as advanced as CCC so that was the 2nd reason for using TM

there's one way to find out... boot from the second drive. it may end up being a waste of 5 minutes, but could save you a few hours.

online backup is a good option, but not as secure as having your own USB drive/server. data can be compromised easily, especially with cloud computing backup. i wouldn't store anything on a cloud server that would upset me if it were compromised (quickbooks, passwords, etc).

 

[signswi]

Carbonite's good, I found Backblaze to be cheaper in a business environment. $50/year per computer unlimited vs. paying for bulk GB, which is pricey if you're like me and work on extremely huge files. Carbonite Pro would be hundreds/month.

 

[signswi]

ok, here is a question. For those of you that use online backups.... Is that your only backup? I do think it is important but would not want to rely on that solely due to the speed issue. For a few files it is a non-issue but for full restores the timing is killer

raid 5 nas

 

[signswi]

there's one way to find out... boot from the second drive. it may end up being a waste of 5 minutes, but could save you a few hours.

online backup is a good option, but not as secure as having your own USB drive/server. data can be compromised easily, especially with cloud computing backup. i wouldn't store anything on a cloud server that would upset me if it were compromised (quickbooks, passwords, etc).

Hell of a lot easier to walk into your house and steal your USB external than to crack 128bit+ AES encryption in a datacenter with 24 hr security and biometric security measures. Cloud concerns are over rated, just be sure to deal with reputable companies and it's a lot more secure than anything you could come up with.

 

[signmeup]

I'm backing up my backup as I type. I just installed a Seagate 500g portable hard drive. It's doing its automatic thing now.

I have a problem with XP wanting to check my extra hard drive (drive E) at startup. It starts to check the drive and then goes into an endless refreshing of a long list that keeps repeating. The only way the computer will boot is if I hit a key before disc check starts.

I'm wondering if I'm backing up some problem as well as the files.(which are already backed up on DVD)

 

[njshorts]

Hell of a lot easier to walk into your house and steal your USB external than to crack 128bit+ AES encryption in a datacenter with 24 hr security and biometric security measures. Cloud concerns are over rated, just be sure to deal with reputable companies and it's a lot more secure than anything you could come up with.

encrypt your usb drive and don't leave it out on the kitchen counter... problem solved.

i'm not concerned about someone walking into a dc and taking the hardware, rather being on the same node as an idiot with easily-compromised software, or the server software itself being compromised. it happens hundreds of times daily, to every host regardless of reputation and preventative measures. the only true way to secure your data is to take it offline, it's a simple fact.

 

[signswi]

Have fun recovering an encrypted external once you get the click of death. A NAS with at least RAID 1 is a much better solution for onsite.

Online backup solutions aren't shared hosting which is what I assume you're referring to with the "same node as idiot" line of argument. Backup companies don't allow external execution of commands as a hosting company has to, the access levels are completely different. You should have both onsite and offsite for obvious reasons (fire, tornado, tsunami...) and as long as you do due diligence with your vendor, as you should for anything, you'll be fine.

Note that most security breaches that concern customers have to do with database hacks, which isn't possible with a good backup host (two-key passwords encrypted by additional keys, etc. not just a sql database of all customer passwords) or the above scenario (breaching older software on a shared host to gain root and access to all user accounts on that host).

In any case we're getting a bit too specific, a good backup scenario includes onsite and offsite solutions with multiple redundancies.

 

[phototec]

Have fun recovering an encrypted external once you get the click of death. A NAS with at least RAID 1 is a much better solution for onsite.

You should have both onsite and offsite for obvious reasons (fire, tornado, tsunami...) and as long as you do due diligence with your vendor, as you should for anything, you'll be fine.

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