Just a reminder, hard drive crashed Friday.

[petesign]

If you haven't put a backup system in place do it now. You will regret it if you don't. If you havent gotten belarc advisor - do it now. It will give you a print out of all of your installed programs and serial numbers for each. Makes the re-installation process a LOT faster having everything in one place. For once I was prepared and other than losing time over the weekend, this was not a big ordeal.

Now, as far as windows updates taking two days to finish *grumble* I don't know of any way to speed that up.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

I had a customer last week who requested I send them all the vectors I did for them for the past few years. They did NOT have a proper backup and their hard drive crashed

 

[Techman]

I don't know of any way to speed that up.

Downlaod the service packs.. And store them.

 

[signswi]

Downlaod the service packs.. And store them.

Or go a step further and roll your own slipstreamed install using nLite. Or even further and set up SUS on your intranet.

 

[Gene@mpls]

Or make clones of your 'C' drives- I have clones of all 8 computers- data
is on a server that is backed up constantly and backed up on weekends to a mobile HD that goes home with me. ...Who's paranoid?

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Consider SSD (Solid State Drive). Prices are dropping, and they are a lot less likely to fail than an HDD. Of course you still back them up, because there are no moving parts in them, they are very stable. Always back up to at least 2 devices for maximum peace of mine. Ideally, back up to a second SSD

 

[neato]

http://www.carbonite.com

 

[Kevin-shopVOX]

at least all of your data you've had since signVOX is still there & you could still access all of that from another computer/device while you got back up. Sorry to hear about the time wasted on everything else. At least you were prepared.

 

[choucove]

I can tell you first hand that SSDs can fail just like any hard drive, I've had one just completely brick after three years of usage. While SSDs haven't been around near as long as hard drives to have a proven track record as such, reliability of the drives for the past several years has come down to more issues with controller firmware than actual hardware failure as is the common problem with hard drives. In the end, the percentage of SSDs that suffer some kind of failure is probably very similar to the percentage of hard drives that suffer some kind of failure. The problem with an SSD is, from what I know, there's NO way of recovering data from the drive like there can be professional options for a traditional magnetic storage hard drive.

Now that being said, I love SSDs and will continue to use them because their benefits greatly outweigh the disadvantages, and especially with hard drive prices still quite high, SSDs are a great option for anyone needing to upgrade systems or replace hard drives in workstations in the near future. As was mentioned above, it's best to store your data on a separate hard drive for backup, and perhaps another location as well just to be safe (hosted internet storage, another separate hard drive, etc.)

 

[TheSnowman]

I bought my setup from Advantage when I got my printer. Supposedly it's got a RAID setup that it's backing up everything I do just copying over to another set of HD's. Hope they didn't lie to me! I still back up my customer files every now and then on an external...but I'd lose everything else if that RAID ever went goofy and didn't tell me.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

Question... how do you know your backup is reliable? The customer I mentioned had a backup but something about the backup itself was corrupt too.

Are there telltale ways of determining the validity of the backup itself?

And then there are different types of backups. Ghosted, raid, data only

 

[choucove]

One of the biggest issues I've come across in my area talking with businesses about backup solutions is most believe they have something working. I hear, "Oh one of our employees set up a spare hard drive to do the backups." but when I check, there's just an external drive hooked up not doing anything - nothing has been backing up for months!

The best way of trying to tell if your backup system is valid or adequate is to simply test it. I ended up doing this with one of my customers to really drive home the point of backup systems. We unplugged his computer from the wall and told him to imagine he'd just lost his primary computer. Now, try to follow his backup routine to see what information he still had backed up or lost.

 

[David Wright]

I get it, false security.

 

[Gene@mpls]

I bought my setup from Advantage when I got my printer. Supposedly it's got a RAID setup that it's backing up everything I do just copying over to another set of HD's. Hope they didn't lie to me! I still back up my customer files every now and then on an external...but I'd lose everything else if that RAID ever went goofy and didn't tell me.

You Sir... are a very trusting man.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

One of the biggest issues I've come across in my area talking with businesses about backup solutions is most believe they have something working. I hear, "Oh one of our employees set up a spare hard drive to do the backups." but when I check, there's just an external drive hooked up not doing anything - nothing has been backing up for months!

The best way of trying to tell if your backup system is valid or adequate is to simply test it. I ended up doing this with one of my customers to really drive home the point of backup systems. We unplugged his computer from the wall and told him to imagine he'd just lost his primary computer. Now, try to follow his backup routine to see what information he still had backed up or lost.

But how do you test the actual backup? Assuming it was ghosted and an identical backup (not just a data backup), the first thought would be to erase your hard drive and restore from the backup. But if that fails then you are SOL. If the backup fails you have nothing.

So how do you test it? Temporarily swap out a blank hard drive?

 

[signswi]

I bought my setup from Advantage when I got my printer. Supposedly it's got a RAID setup that it's backing up everything I do just copying over to another set of HD's. Hope they didn't lie to me! I still back up my customer files every now and then on an external...but I'd lose everything else if that RAID ever went goofy and didn't tell me.

RAID is just one level of on-site redundancy and won't help you if your building burns down or floods. You need offsite backup as well.

crashplan.com backblaze.com amazon s3

 

[petesign]

RAID is just one level of on-site redundancy and won't help you if your building burns down or floods. You need offsite backup as well.

crashplan.com backblaze.com amazon s3

Guilty as charged. I haven't done anything offsite, just have a backup once a week or so on my print station and an external drive that constantly runs. Guess I should look into that.

 

[choucove]

But how do you test the actual backup? Assuming it was ghosted and an identical backup (not just a data backup), the first thought would be to erase your hard drive and restore from the backup. But if that fails then you are SOL. If the backup fails you have nothing.

So how do you test it? Temporarily swap out a blank hard drive?

On an imaged-based backup, testing can be done using any spare hard drive really. For instance, when we use the built in Windows Backup and Restore feature in Windows 7 to make full system image backups, we let it backup to a network file share on a scheduled basis and let it do a couple weeks to ensure the backup is running without errors and at the appropriate times. Once that is good, we will just take out the hard drive of the computer being backed up, install a spare hard drive (NOTE: For Windows Backup and Restore image files, the hard drive partition that you are restoring on to MUST be the same size or LARGER than the partition that you backed up!) and then do a restore of the image onto that spare hard drive. This way if something happens and the backup isn't good, you still have the original system still on the original hard drive that you can put back in and go about fixing the issue. Plus, you can use this same single spare hard drive to test the image backups on every computer.

Hard drive prices are high right now, yes, but I'd highly recommend keeping a spare hard drive around your business. You never know when you may need to copy a large amount of data, or replace a failed drive in a workstation or server/NAS, or backing up or testing backups at your office.

 

[WhiskeyDreamer]

We have an external drive that carries all our customer info and shop stuff (fonts, QB, software etc etc). Once a week, that drive gets copied over to one of our systems which is backed up every night via Carbonite. Haven't had any problems in years (and that was before we were doing offsite backups).