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Server dead, I'm so happy!

anotherdog

anotherdog

New Member
My main file server died on Friday. The drive, 500 gig with all my business for the last three years failed, dead as a doornail.

I'm so pleased that my backups finally paid off. Went to Tiger Direct, bought a new 1tb drive and dropped the latest (12 hours old) backup back on it.

You have to back it up, it will die one day.

The only downside is how smug I am.
 
royster13

royster13

New Member
Backups are a life saver......My main laptop just died, however, my backups (external hard drive & Carbonite) are fine.....I like the Carbonite backup because I can get to my files even if I am not with my computer.....

I also have a 2nd laptop with a full installation of Adobe Creative Suite CS3 so I am pretty much back in business.....The biggest pain will be figuring out how to deactivate the installation on the dead laptop so I can install it on the new desktop that is on the way....
 
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Tovis

Tovis

New Member
If you need the files recovered it is usually possible, insurance actually covered it for my photography business when I needed it.
 
anotherdog

anotherdog

New Member
I'm kind of interested in what people do to back up.
My own past experience (paranoia) makes me back up the server to Norton Ghost every night, and Carbonite during the day. I also throw two monthly live copies onto yet another pair of USB drives.

My only downside with Carbonite is the time it takes to backup my server. it took three months to do the first backup. Now I have changed the drive on the server its treating that drive as a completely new backup so I have twice the data up there.

Memory is cheap, regret is expensive.
 
S

SqueeGee

New Member
We have two internal hard drives in our file server (1TB each) that are mirrors in case one dies. Then we have a removable tray that contains another 1TB hard drive that we back up to and take offsite (in case of a fire, flood, etc.) Although I should do it more often, my offsite copy only gets updated about once a month.
 
Dice

Dice

New Member
Highly Recommend running a Raid 5. We have 1 Tera Byte backup on a 4 drive Raid 5. Put it together for less that $800.

Raid 5 Means you'll have to loose 2 drives to really loose anything. If one drive fails you pop another in and restore the raid from the other drives.
 
C

ChiknNutz

New Member
I have a Windows Home Server, automatically backs up all connected PCs every night (works kinda like Norton Ghost in that respect) and also distributes all files across multiple hard drives (I currently have 3 500GB HDs) for redundancy.
 
M

mac_man_luke

New Member
Dice said:
Highly Recommend running a Raid 5. We have 1 Tera Byte backup on a 4 drive Raid 5. Put it together for less that $800.

Raid 5 Means you'll have to loose 2 drives to really loose anything. If one drive fails you pop another in and restore the raid from the other drives.
Click to expand...

Problem with 1TB drives and Raid 5 is that because of the size the number of errors are higher than the raid can handle so there is something like a 33% chance of loosing the whole raid when you loose 1 drive

Raid 6 is a better option these days
 
anotherdog

anotherdog

New Member
Another problem with Raid 5 is all the drives are in the same box. What do you do in the case of fire flood theft or (shudder) Bank repo?

You need to think Biblical disaster. People living in the ruins are going to need signs and banners.
 
I

imagep

New Member
I used to use an external usb drive, but it was a hassle backing up and taking the drive home, rarely did it.

Now we use Carbonite. It is super easy to use, very cheap. I just hope that it is actually working as I have never actually tried to restore files.
 
trakers

trakers

New Member
Good for you. I get so tired of preaching about backups to family and friends, who never backup, then want me to rescue them from the jaws of hell when something goes wrong.

Interestingly enough when I got home last night my wife informed me her computer was hosed. It is a brand new machine, built last week, running XP fully patched and NIS2009 updated. She still managed to get the XP Antivirus crap, the one that actually looks legit.

I (smugly) pulled out one of my 1TB Seagate externals and hooked it up, popped in a Ghost disk, and 7:34 later she was back to where she was 2 days ago.

So 7 minutes as apposed to hours and hours of reinstalls, updated and reboots.
 
Replicator

Replicator

New Member
I do manual backups of all new files daily on [2] redundant external 1.5TB drives.

and if the main system crashes I have docking stations to mount the [2] internal hard-drives into to recover everything else back to a clean OS install if necessary.
 
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