Have insurance! Have offsite backups!! PLEASE!

[Desert_Signs]

My shop was burglarized yesterday morning. They didn't get a whole lot, but a bunch of tools. However, they saw my cameras and must have assumed my server (with ALL my customer files - artwork, designs, etc etc.) was the camera DVR or something because they snatched that.

2 years worth of customer files gone. Irreplaceable. I have insurance, but it's not going to pay a designer 2 years of work to re-create. The tools and stuff are covered no problem. Easy to replace.




And now the good news. I back up to the cloud (dropbox for business) every night, automatically. I didn't lose even a single file.

If you're not backing up your stuff OFFSITE, what are you going to do if this happens to you? BACKUP YOUR FILES!!

 

[reQ]

Effin lowlife scumbags... i hate people like that so much i can't even explain. It was good back in the day, that if you steal - you get your arms cut off. We should do it today also.

 

[Kwiksigns]

Do you not have an alarm system?

 

[rjssigns]

Yikes!!! Makes me rethink cloud backup.

 

[niksagkram]

Good advice! Back-ups are essential. Even if you are not robbed, what if your hard drive craters and you can' retrieve any data? We have two on-site mirrored back-ups, which back up our important files every night. The one drive is on-site permanantly, the second I switch out with a duplicate drive every week, and take it home, that way we have a backup safely off site, and, at the most we loose a week of work if both on-site drives crash.

Mark

 

[Pixels Are Bad Mmmkay?]

We started using Carbonite within the last year or so and I'm sure it was a wise investment.

 

[Desert_Signs]

Do you not have an alarm system?

Yes. Have them on video and everything. They didn't waste time.

 

[Desert_Signs]

We started using Carbonite within the last year or so and I'm sure it was a wise investment.

Yup. It's cheap. It paid for itself 1000 times over just this one time.

 

[Kwiksigns]

Thats crazy. we've been broken into once but they just hit whatever change was in the register. and broke a window and 2 doors before getting in. cameras are a must. there are so many drunks here and our parking lot seems to be a haven for illegal activity because it is hidden from the main road. that's good that you got it all backed up.

 

[Desert_Signs]

Thats crazy. we've been broken into once but they just hit whatever change was in the register. and broke a window and 2 doors before getting in. cameras are a must. there are so many drunks here and our parking lot seems to be a haven for illegal activity because it is hidden from the main road. that's good that you got it all backed up.

One of my cop buddies is looking into finding them. They were driving a rented uhaul pickup. All the decals on it and everything. He's hitting up the places near here getting info on who's rented one in the past 48 hours. Then doing a look up on the names to see if any of them are known knuckleheads...

 

[Kwiksigns]

One of my cop buddies is looking into finding them. They were driving a rented uhaul pickup. All the decals on it and everything. He's hitting up the places near here getting info on who's rented one in the past 48 hours. Then doing a look up on the names to see if any of them are known knuckleheads...

It always helps to have those cop buddies.

 

[Baz]

Good advice! Back-ups are essential. Even if you are not robbed, what if your hard drive craters and you can' retrieve any data? We have two on-site mirrored back-ups, which back up our important files every night. The one drive is on-site permanantly, the second I switch out with a duplicate drive every week, and take it home, that way we have a backup safely off site, and, at the most we loose a week of work if both on-site drives crash.

Mark

That's what i do also. And my offsite backup is a dual mirrored drive so i actually have two copies off site!!

I also backup the Windows image file. I do that whenever i update or upgrade my software.

You can never have enough backups!!

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

That sucks! Thats the one thing I dread about our move to a new shop (theft and vandalism).

We use onedrive mainly due to cost but unlimited storage and office for $72/yr is well worth it.

Hopefully your insurance doesn't make a crappy situation worse, let me know if you need anything in the mean time.

 

[Desert_Signs]

That sucks! Thats the one thing I dread about our move to a new shop (theft and vandalism).

We use onedrive mainly due to cost but unlimited storage and office for $72/yr is well worth it.

Hopefully your insurance doesn't make a crappy situation worse, let me know if you need anything in the mean time.

Thankfully the guys were idiots. I really don't even know why they bothered breaking in. They stole my wife's computer which is an el cheapo Gateway all in one. $199. They left my designers computer which was $2000. They took a BROKEN air compressor. You can watch the guy start rolling it, the piston falls out, he picks the piston up - puts in back in- and keeps rolling it. LOL. On a work table there was 3 trays. 2 of them were empty, we put parts in the trays when we are taking a car apart - one of them was full of snap-on sockets and wrenches. They took the 2 empty trays and left the one with all the tools. They unplugged the cords from one of the office phones and took those. Just 2 3' cords. But not the phone. They took a tub full of squeegees. From doing the property list, they probably got $2k worth of stuff, but could have gotten nearly 20 times that in 1/2 the time if they knew what they were doing. Walked right past $5k in inks. A complete stereo system. Mac Mini. Drills, etc. Tweakers....

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Thankfully the guys were idiots. I really don't even know why they bothered breaking in. They stole my wife's computer which is an el cheapo Gateway all in one. $199. They left my designers computer which was $2000. They took a BROKEN air compressor. You can watch the guy start rolling it, the piston falls out, he picks the piston up - puts in back in- and keeps rolling it. LOL. On a work table there was 3 trays. 2 of them were empty, we put parts in the trays when we are taking a car apart - one of them was full of snap-on sockets and wrenches. They took the 2 empty trays and left the one with all the tools. They unplugged the cords from one of the office phones and took those. Just 2 3' cords. But not the phone. They took a tub full of squeegees. From doing the property list, they probably got $2k worth of stuff, but could have gotten nearly 20 times that in 1/2 the time if they knew what they were doing. Walked right past $5k in inks. A complete stereo system. Mac Mini. Drills, etc. Tweakers....

Well the silver lining is it could be worse... Did they damage anything getting in? It might be a nibble to test response. Had a buddy who's shop got robbed 3 times over the course of a month and each time it got progressively worse as they knew they had more time and the layout memorized.

 

[Desert_Signs]

Well the silver lining is it could be worse... Did they damage anything getting in? It might be a nibble to test response. Had a buddy who's shop got robbed 3 times over the course of a month and each time it got progressively worse as they knew they had more time and the layout memorized.

They pried the back door open. I put heavy duty barrel latches on both back doors before I went home Monday. With the cameras, alarm, and hardening the doors, I know all I can do is slow them down. That's why insurance is the last line of defense!

 

[Ditchmiester]

We have mirrored drives in our Dell Server that is backed up to a NAS device onsite and then then NAS device is backed up to Microsoft Azure Cloud as an ISO file each week. So at most we lose a weeks worth of information. Considering we have about 15 years worth of customer data on the Server I would take a week. Also have paper copies of all invoices so it could be duplicated back into the system if needed.

 

[reQ]

NAS at work + NAS at home. All work files from work also copied to home based NAS. Works for me.

 

[Pat Whatley]

I'm just getting over the numbness of last summer.

Had 15 years worth of Flexisign and Illustrator files saved to the main hard drive on my computer, backed up to the hard drive on a second computer, and backed up again to an external hard drive.

The main computer stopped booting one day. Windows attempts to start then just shuts down. Tried repairing, tried running it as a second drive, nothing lets me in. Went to swap the hard drive from the back up computer into the main computer....dropped it. Hard impact of the corner of the drive onto the concrete floor. Never worked again.

No problem....my trusty Seagate is there. No problem except that something, somewhere in that drive failed and it won't read any longer either.

Going back to cd storage I managed to get a lot of files from 2000-2007. Everything from 2007-2014 is gone. Thank God for emailed pdf proofs, at least some of the stuff I've been able to retrieve. The rest....floating through the cosmos.