Backup?

[Claw]

/offtopic
 
In terms of reliability, Samsung is far the best, we hardly see them, the worst is probably Seagate, once the most reliable is now the most unreliable, although the Maxtor brand is sort of still around, but still essentially a Seagate, Maxtor drives had both reliable and unreliable models, depends on the model numbers. Although barring in mind that there are more Seagate drives out in the market than any other manufacturer

i have some good experience with Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, (500GB) since they have a 16mb buffer and are single plated.

- claw

[Snokio]

I forgot my on topic bit :doh:
 
For home use, I have a raid 5 (3 HDD's) and also an external hdd. My previous system didn't have any back ups and was running on a IBM deskstar, aka deathstar :blink: I was running that for years and never failed!

[Jabbs]

By the way, if you don't have a backup plan, then you are potentially heading for disaster.

Hard drives do fail regardless of personal experiance.

In any case the last page or two of this thread has focussed on hard drive failures/non failures in relation to backups and the need for them.

There are however, other reasons you should have a backup strategy.  Hard drive failure is just one.  How about theft of equipment?  How about data corruption caused by viruses or bad shut down of PC?  How about fire or other disaster such as water damage? The list I'm sure goes on.  

Seriously, if you don't take backups simply because 'I've never had the problem before' then you are way off the track.  

I think the majority of us here know that you MUST have backups of data that you would be sorry to lose - simple, end of story.

On another point - on site backups are fine but to be really sure off-site backups are a must.  Which brings things back to Dropbox and other solutions already mentioned.

[Othbarty]

drives dont "just" fail.i kinda dont care if you have experienced something else with your drives, the reason of your drives die and mine dossent are propedly becuse my drives has an excilet enviroment and the drives are high quality drives.

Statements like that is the same as saying something like "People don't get hit by buses, just look at me, I'm still here!" and are plainly wrong (sorry to iterate this, but it's just wrong...).

After talking with oth the other night, i know its offsite backup he wants, no home storage
For long while i used idrives service, its not hte cheapest i know, but their service was awsome, best part was, that back then you could negotiate with em, example i didnt need their 500gb in the family package, but still wanted the service for multiple puters, so i sent em a mail with my wishes and they sent me instantly a price estimate back, fair price with a bit of discount but again they werent the cheapest afaik

Yep I want a off site backup solution in case of a hell-freezes-over situation (as bob most elegantly put it ).

The two solutions I have so far seen is carbonite and idrives. I will have a look at idrive, but by the looks of it, it looks like carbonite offers a cheaper solution (unlimited storage for $55 a year is great!).

Don misunderstand me, dropbox/ubuntu one is great for their uses, I just don't personally like it as a backup solution. File syncing between multiple computers is a whole different story all together

I feel a bit sorry for you TL, loosing all your pictures like that... This is one of the reasons I want a off site backup solution that I don't manage myself (if I do something stupid on one server, I'll probably do it on all the servers I set up...).

Thanks for all the constructive feedback keep it coming! :woot2:

[Claw]

Statements like that is the same as saying something like "People don't get hit by buses, just look at me, I'm still here!" and are plainly wrong (sorry to iterate this, but it's just wrong...).

im saying drives "just" dont die, there is a reason for its death, you dont "just" die, you might die in a bus accsident.

- claw

[TeaLeaf]

If that's the way you meant it Claw then there is probably a big problem with the translation to English of what you originally posted as I do not think that was what the majority here believed you meant.  Apologies if we misunderstood you, but the way it was written it meant something else.

[Lexander]

TeaLeaf you probably have the worst luck of all, sorry to hear that. I haven't had any problems with my HDD's ever, so I am quite waiting for it to happen anytime soon. But due to students budget I only use an external drive where I put only the most important stuff, like photos and documents. And this backing up one interesting thing as you basically can't do enough of it ever. So Oth you just need to find the suitable cost/space solution for you

I am a bit skeptic about the offsite backup as who can see the files and where are they located. Cheap can't buy you good in this case right ?
Using a NAS will be probably the best solution for me but it depends a lot from what are you to backup. And even if you have backups in 5 different locations there is still a change they will all crash at the same time. Probabilities...

[TeaLeaf]

I used a Raid5 NAS which backed up to a diff PC, copied to another non-raid NAS in a different geographic location and then had an additional copy on a portable drive (the WD Passport).  All the HDDs went within 48 hours.

I have since added Dropbox and Carbonite and will include these in my 'new' backup system.

[Othbarty]

I am a bit skeptic about the offsite backup as who can see the files and where are they located.

Thats is one of the great things with idisk and Carbonite, both encrypts your files with YOUR key prior to transferring them to the off site server, thus leaving all your files encrypted with only YOUR key. Your the only guys that can see the content of your backup.

TL, let me know how Carbonite works out for you, I will be adding the trial just to see at home, just annoying that I have to set up a windows virtual machine to handle the backup from my server

[Penfold]

/Flame retardant pants on.

I've gone through this thread and have removed the personal, the irrelevant and the Inane from this otherwise interesting thread.

If you can't post something constructive without making it personal then don't. It's really not that hard :angry:.

[Jabbs]

Just had to use the Versioning feature in Dropbox.

Here's the situation and what happened.  Please note, there was no hard drive failure, no fire that destroyed the PC, no theft of equipment etc.

As some of you may no I do website design and such like.  One of my first customers likes to edit dates and times on his website himself rather than troubling me to do it.  

Whenever he makes a change he fires off an email to me so I know there is a change and of course so I can download that change just in case there is anything I need to work on (we are therefore working from the same files and it acts like a backup of course!

About a week ago he made such a change and let me know.

I downloaded the site and put it in my Dropbox>Current Work>sitename folder>htdocs

Dropbox did it's stuff

Checked my emails this morning and saw a panicked email from the guy.  He had made another 'small' change and uploaded it and when he viewed it the site was all over the place!  Code everywhere and no pretty front page that he is used to!

Ok here is where it gets complicated but please stick with me a moment. :blink:

I thought, no problem, I'll download the site again, check it over and if I can't fix it quickly, I will. If I can't, all I'll do is upload the file I had a week ago and make the small change for him that he was going to make!  Easy!

So I opened up my FTP program, navigated to folders etc and prior to downloading the htdocs folder I renamed my copy (within my FTP program) of htdocs to "htdocs 22112009" (fair enough I hear you say).

I then downloaded the folder.

Went into explorer and to my horror "htdocs 22112009" did not exist!  Only the new htdocs folder! Oh crap what's happened I said! (or something like that :norty:).

My FTP program had somehow messed things up and overwritten my local copy of htdocs which if you have been following this post was the latest copy take a week ago and which had the file I was going to restore the website to if I couldn't find a quick fix

I didn't have a recent enough copy of the file in question so I resigned myself trying to fix the file.  Dreamweaver reported about a 1000 errors

Then I thought! Dropbox Versions!  Yay!

And sure enough, popped on to Dropbox website, logged in, found the file and restored to the previous version of a week ago!

Hey presto I had a decent and recent file to work with, made the small change he had been planning and all was well.

All this since reading his email and writing this post has taken 40 minutes.

Big vote for Dropbox versioning. :thumbsup:

[b00n]

Big vote for Dropbox versioning. :thumbsup:

Well I installed dropbox to see what the fuss was about and tbh I haven't used it yet.:g:

I may have to give this a go since I tend to have random files kicking around which could easily get lost.  Not a huge problem since most of my projects are in Subversion, but Dropbox would be nice for keeping other stuff tidy.

As a side note, while it's not really a backup solution (although it would work as such), anything that can be defined as a 'project' gets stuck into Subversion for me.  I can't recommend it enough as it integrates with my development tools and means I have instant access to a current copy of my projects wherever I happen to be working. Strict version control keeps everything in order and it can automatically manage production/test/developemnt branches of any code.

[TeaLeaf]

I run Dropbox too and it is a great little app to backup and share across several computers.

I also installed Carbonite recently and at the end of the trial decided to subscribe.  Google for a Carbonite Offer Code and you'll find a 20% off one that works pretty easily.  $75 for 2 years of unlimited storage.  Worth the piece of mind in my book.

Carbonite works on one PC only, not like Dropbox which ripples across several.  However for your main PC or data box it is not a bad option.  Whereas Dropbox monitors only the things you put into the Dropbox folder, Carbonite adds an option to the context menu of a file or folder so you can right-click it and select to back up that particular file or folder.

Carbonite has worked real well for me so far, well enough to make me decide to subscribe and the cost is pretty low, working out at about Ã,£20 per year for 'unlimited' online backups.

I decided I liked the flexibility of Carbonite to choose what I backed up without having to put everything into a single Dropbox folder (like my COD4 profile for example) and the unlimited storage aspect.  So Carbonite gets my subscription.

Carbonite gets :thumbsup: from me.

I still use Dropbox, but I am using it only for the things I want access to from multiple machines and obviously I continue to use the free version so am limiting myself to 2GB storage in Dropbox.

However, I am still waiting for the Gdrive to appear, Google's version of the online backup system which is likely to start with synching online docs and other Gdata.  It's been rumoured for 3.5 years now and I'd love to see what it is capable of doing seeing how well the current Gpackage is integrated.

[Carr0t]

As a side note, while it's not really a backup solution (although it would work as such), anything that can be defined as a 'project' gets stuck into Subversion for me.  I can't recommend it enough as it integrates with my development tools and means I have instant access to a current copy of my projects wherever I happen to be working. Strict version control keeps everything in order and it can automatically manage production/test/developemnt branches of any code.

Use git. It's subversion but without the suck Also their system for creating branches and versioning and then merging those changes back into the trunk repo is *far* better than subversion's.

[b00n]

Use git. It's subversion but without the suck Also their system for creating branches and versioning and then merging those changes back into the trunk repo is *far* better than subversion's.

I don't really like its distributed nature.  It always struck me as an unnecessary over-complication and an easy way to introduce confusion.  I guess I never saw the problem in having a central repository.