Backup, Backup, Backup, and then, Backup....!

[OldIslander]

This morning, I’ll bet I’m the happiest old duffer in Victoria.

A week or so ago, I was “organizing” the split solid state drive of my laptop, and yesterday discovered that I had erased my entire database of photos. These include the original RAW files, out-of-the-camera jpegs, all android camera shots, all images that had been reworked in Photoshop and Lightroom, prepared slideshows, scans of hundreds of old family prints – the whole shootin’ match, going back between 20 and 25 years. All were gone from the drive and unrecoverable -- having done a recent multi-pass wipe with CCleaner. I was nearly ill... I’ve never had this happen before...

I’ve backed up regularly over the years. A couple of years ago, bought a 3 Tb external drive, and backup from time to time, using the Windows backup utility, and another app called NTI Backup, for redundancy. I just went into this program, and recovered everything. The format is a bit screwed up, and I lost any pics saved since my last backup about a month ago (not many, fortunately...). But they’re all there. Having gotten a bit complacent with my backups, I'm back on a tight schedule.

So take this as a gentle reminder – be sure to do your regular backups. I’d have been absolutely devastated, if I’d lost these.

[Catsumi]

Happy for you that you didn't lose it all. You are so right about backup.

Keep on clicking...

[Jlabute]

I've only seen this twice, but, I've had a few customers, one who lost their computer after a lightning storm, and, their server holding backups also got pooched. In this instance, we had to get a third party to restore the disk drive. So, backups to multiple devices if possible is also a good idea. Removable media may be a good idea.

[Urban Cowboy]

When it comes to things like ransomware removable media is actually the best way to protect your precious data.

The other thing I would add is that all too often I've seen people cheap out and buy inexpensive junk USB flash drives, and as far as I'm concerned if you value your data that's not really a wise decision.

Pay the extra and get a good quality name brand item such as Corsair for example, and you'll also experience added benefits such as quicker transfer speeds.

[rekabis]

With the shutdown of CrashPlan Home, there really isn’t a cost-effective, non-business backup system out there for multiple computers. An individual computer can run BackBlaze (and they are great for being unlimited, but suck donkey’s balls for being workstation-only; servers are a no-no), but when you have an entire family’s worth of computers to back up? Not cheap.

One solution I found was a combination of separate tools. On the one hand, I take the BackBlaze B2 cloud storage service (storage only, you supply the backup program) and the free/open-source program Duplicati for the backup software. At $0.005/Gb, B2 provides a backup solution that is typically (unless you are a real data hoarder) about half to a tenth as much as any “full stack” package. You should be able to back up an entire family’s worth of computers for less than $15/mo. Plus, Duplacti can also back up to a local, network drive as well, meaning you have a local source for fast restores, but the safety of data in the cloud if you loose everything including the local backups.

[OldIslander]

Interesting stuff...

I retired from a small high-tech IT company at which secure backup was considered the most critical aspect of day-to-day company operations. They spent a pile of money on a magnetic tape system, that backed up every PC on the LAN. And everyone was required to plug into the LAN at some point during the day -- even those of us who used laptops, because we were in the field much our time. So every PC was backed up, at least once per day. 'Box' PC's -- several times per day. As backups were made, the data were encrypted. It was compulsory that two copies of the backup go each night, to different locations (usually to the homes of engineering employees). Failure of this daily procedure to happen was a dismissable offence. It's been a few years since I was there, so this has all probably been modernized by now.

A significant loss of the company's working data would have been utterly devastating...