A few weeks ago I was at the Apple Store and witnessed this young woman in tears. She had all of her high school and college pictures on her aging Mac and the drive failed. She didn’t have a backup and while the Apple gang was doing their best to recover it, they weren’t getting very far. I felt terrible for her.
Then just a few days ago the external drive holding our 200 gigs of iTunes music and movies died. The drive (LaCie) was just 18 months old and gave me no warning. Fortunately, I had backed it up just a few weeks ago so we didn’t lose much but these events reminded me just how important it is to make copies of your data. I wrote about my backup plan a while back and the regimen hasn’t changed much. How are you doing on your back ups?
I am so glad you raise this issue from time to time, I have been on a personal crusade about the importance of good backups, telling anyone who will listen, ever since seeing a news report of the suicide of Stevenson Palfil, a New Orleans musical documentarian distraught over the loss of years of his files, photos and video, basically his life’s work, in Hurricane Katrina flooding. That sad report and a couple near misses with my own photo files and my wife’s music collection opened my eyes to immeasurable value of the personal assets on our computers (photos, journal entries, email correspondence, etc., not to mention work product) that needs to be safeguarded with a good backup plan. In addition to using the app superduper to make regular backups of my photo files on an external Lacie drive, I burn the new photo files each month to DVD and bring those discs to the office for offsite safekeeping. Not a bad routine but for all my preaching even I could stand improving my backup plan and execution.
I am so glad you raise this issue from time to time, I have been on a personal crusade about the importance of good backups, telling anyone who will listen, ever since seeing a news report of the suicide of Stevenson Palfil, a New Orleans musical documentarian distraught over the loss of years of his files, photos and video, basically his life’s work, in Hurricane Katrina flooding. That sad report and a couple near misses with my own photo files and my wife’s music collection opened my eyes to immeasurable value of the personal assets on our computers (photos, journal entries, email correspondence, etc., not to mention work product) that needs to be safeguarded with a good backup plan. In addition to using the app superduper to make regular backups of my photo files on an external Lacie drive, I burn the new photo files each month to DVD and bring those discs to the office for offsite safekeeping. Not a bad routine but for all my preaching even I could stand improving my backup plan and execution.
I am so glad you raise this issue from time to time, I have been on a personal crusade about the importance of good backups, telling anyone who will listen, ever since seeing a news report of the suicide of Stevenson Palfil, a New Orleans musical documentarian distraught over the loss of years of his files, photos and video, basically his life’s work, in Hurricane Katrina flooding. That sad report and a couple near misses with my own photo files and my wife’s music collection opened my eyes to immeasurable value of the personal assets on our computers (photos, journal entries, email correspondence, etc., not to mention work product) that needs to be safeguarded with a good backup plan. In addition to using the app superduper to make regular backups of my photo files on an external Lacie drive, I burn the new photo files each month to DVD and bring those discs to the office for offsite safekeeping. Not a bad routine but for all my preaching even I could stand improving my backup plan and execution.
I am so glad you raise this issue from time to time, I have been on a personal crusade about the importance of good backups, telling anyone who will listen, ever since seeing a news report of the suicide of Stevenson Palfil, a New Orleans musical documentarian distraught over the loss of years of his files, photos and video, basically his life’s work, in Hurricane Katrina flooding. That sad report and a couple near misses with my own photo files and my wife’s music collection opened my eyes to immeasurable value of the personal assets on our computers (photos, journal entries, email correspondence, etc., not to mention work product) that needs to be safeguarded with a good backup plan. In addition to using the app superduper to make regular backups of my photo files on an external Lacie drive, I burn the new photo files each month to DVD and bring those discs to the office for offsite safekeeping. Not a bad routine but for all my preaching even I could stand improving my backup plan and execution.
I am so glad you raise this issue from time to time, I have been on a personal crusade about the importance of good backups, telling anyone who will listen, ever since seeing a news report of the suicide of Stevenson Palfil, a New Orleans musical documentarian distraught over the loss of years of his files, photos and video, basically his life’s work, in Hurricane Katrina flooding. That sad report and a couple near misses with my own photo files and my wife’s music collection opened my eyes to immeasurable value of the personal assets on our computers (photos, journal entries, email correspondence, etc., not to mention work product) that needs to be safeguarded with a good backup plan. In addition to using the app superduper to make regular backups of my photo files on an external Lacie drive, I burn the new photo files each month to DVD and bring those discs to the office for offsite safekeeping. Not a bad routine but for all my preaching even I could stand improving my backup plan and execution.
Interesting thing about backups. I’ve seen many folks (myself included) think about the cost of backups and procrastinate or decide not to ‘buy that extra hard drive’.
When things go wrong – and they always will, someday – then money doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore. I’ve found myself willing to pay double or triple the cost of the preventative medicine.
Nowadays I’m pretty neurotic about backing up photos, financial information and such; but that comes from long tenure in the school of hard knocks. I agree with Anthony, good thing to remind us every once in a while.
Interesting thing about backups. I’ve seen many folks (myself included) think about the cost of backups and procrastinate or decide not to ‘buy that extra hard drive’.
When things go wrong – and they always will, someday – then money doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore. I’ve found myself willing to pay double or triple the cost of the preventative medicine.
Nowadays I’m pretty neurotic about backing up photos, financial information and such; but that comes from long tenure in the school of hard knocks. I agree with Anthony, good thing to remind us every once in a while.
Interesting thing about backups. I’ve seen many folks (myself included) think about the cost of backups and procrastinate or decide not to ‘buy that extra hard drive’.
When things go wrong – and they always will, someday – then money doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore. I’ve found myself willing to pay double or triple the cost of the preventative medicine.
Nowadays I’m pretty neurotic about backing up photos, financial information and such; but that comes from long tenure in the school of hard knocks. I agree with Anthony, good thing to remind us every once in a while.
Interesting thing about backups. I’ve seen many folks (myself included) think about the cost of backups and procrastinate or decide not to ‘buy that extra hard drive’.
When things go wrong – and they always will, someday – then money doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore. I’ve found myself willing to pay double or triple the cost of the preventative medicine.
Nowadays I’m pretty neurotic about backing up photos, financial information and such; but that comes from long tenure in the school of hard knocks. I agree with Anthony, good thing to remind us every once in a while.
Interesting thing about backups. I’ve seen many folks (myself included) think about the cost of backups and procrastinate or decide not to ‘buy that extra hard drive’.
When things go wrong – and they always will, someday – then money doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore. I’ve found myself willing to pay double or triple the cost of the preventative medicine.
Nowadays I’m pretty neurotic about backing up photos, financial information and such; but that comes from long tenure in the school of hard knocks. I agree with Anthony, good thing to remind us every once in a while.
I have several types of data all at different back up levels.
Anything not really important and recoverable through other methods lives solely on my fileserver.
Anything more difficult to recover (music mainly) but still not that important lives on the fileserver the gamebox the office box and the laptop at the same time (<3 Rsync)
Large but not replaceable\recoverable gets stored on every machine (again Rsync) Tarred and encrypted and stuck onto dvds and onto a backup drive
Small and Really important gets again stored on every machine this time encrypted and uploaded to a webserver (also don’t forget to have backups of your encryption keys)
Soon i should have a second fileserver to make a full backup of everything
I have several types of data all at different back up levels.
Anything not really important and recoverable through other methods lives solely on my fileserver.
Anything more difficult to recover (music mainly) but still not that important lives on the fileserver the gamebox the office box and the laptop at the same time (<3 Rsync)
Large but not replaceable\recoverable gets stored on every machine (again Rsync) Tarred and encrypted and stuck onto dvds and onto a backup drive
Small and Really important gets again stored on every machine this time encrypted and uploaded to a webserver (also don’t forget to have backups of your encryption keys)
Soon i should have a second fileserver to make a full backup of everything
I have several types of data all at different back up levels.
Anything not really important and recoverable through other methods lives solely on my fileserver.
Anything more difficult to recover (music mainly) but still not that important lives on the fileserver the gamebox the office box and the laptop at the same time (<3 Rsync)
Large but not replaceable\recoverable gets stored on every machine (again Rsync) Tarred and encrypted and stuck onto dvds and onto a backup drive
Small and Really important gets again stored on every machine this time encrypted and uploaded to a webserver (also don’t forget to have backups of your encryption keys)
Soon i should have a second fileserver to make a full backup of everything
I have several types of data all at different back up levels.
Anything not really important and recoverable through other methods lives solely on my fileserver.
Anything more difficult to recover (music mainly) but still not that important lives on the fileserver the gamebox the office box and the laptop at the same time (<3 Rsync)
Large but not replaceable\recoverable gets stored on every machine (again Rsync) Tarred and encrypted and stuck onto dvds and onto a backup drive
Small and Really important gets again stored on every machine this time encrypted and uploaded to a webserver (also don’t forget to have backups of your encryption keys)
Soon i should have a second fileserver to make a full backup of everything
I have several types of data all at different back up levels.
Anything not really important and recoverable through other methods lives solely on my fileserver.
Anything more difficult to recover (music mainly) but still not that important lives on the fileserver the gamebox the office box and the laptop at the same time (<3 Rsync)
Large but not replaceable\recoverable gets stored on every machine (again Rsync) Tarred and encrypted and stuck onto dvds and onto a backup drive
Small and Really important gets again stored on every machine this time encrypted and uploaded to a webserver (also don’t forget to have backups of your encryption keys)
Soon i should have a second fileserver to make a full backup of everything