Ok, putting on my IT hat

Look, my main job is being DBA for  a fortune 10 company.  Backup and recovery is an important part of that.  (We conduct 2 yearly practice runs with a rented spare mainframe computer site from IBM).  Not only are we striving for a complete restore, but time of restore is a goal because down machines cost money - every minute.

Backup should not be something you "remember" to do.  Get yourself a backup program that has a scheduler and let it do it's job.   Personally, I use Norton Ghost.  And as an added incentive, when I bought my wife her new machine to match mine, I "restored" my machine to hers, loading all the hours and hours of software all at once.  Then copy her data files over and whalla!  (Loading a new machine with all the software usually takes about a week.)

So, get yourself that backup software (Norton or whatever) and set it up and let it go.  Last time I had a system crash, I lost less then 1 hours work, but had to restore the entire machine (after the motherboard was replaced and I restored.)

SyncToy

SyncToy is my backup method of choice. Free and works great. After a few hard drive failures you learn the value of file redundancy. It is a weekly ritual now.

oh,and BTW

gigs is not a word.

Gigabyte is a measure of disk storage space.  gig is an abbreviation for 1 gigabyte.  GB is also standard use.  Gigabytes is more then 1 gigabyte.

You do not add an 's' to make an abbreviation plural.

Sorry, one of my pet peeves.

...

The abbreviation is a noun, though informal, and to make a noun plural, you add an S...many, many abbreviations are pluralized with an s...

I would not let your pet peeve distract you too much, at this point..."gigs" is already out of the gate, it's not going back...

I sadly have a hard drive I need to have serviced, but I have not yet got to the point of getting it done.  I'll probably not care in a couple more years, but it Does have about 3 months of unreplicated data on it...le sigh...

Ah the age old debate

Ah the age old debate ... is the language what is commonly spoken or is it what the scholarly halls say it is or isn't?

I hear "gigs" all the time in tech circles, and we all know what they mean when they're talking about storage space.

For the record, the online dictionary - Merriam-Webster (which MRH uses as our authoritative source for our editing) - calls gig a noun meaning gigabyte, not an abbreviation. And to form a plural of common nouns, you add an 's'. According to this dictionary, this word has passed into common practice now as a noun in its own right.

I backup with Carbonite(tm)

I use Carbonite(tm) "Cloud" automatic backup as my main backup method.  It's not very pricey, has unlimited amount that I can store, and is easy to use.  I also like that I can access my backed up files on any computer connected to the internet.  This recently came in handy when I was out of state and wanted to show some picture files that were on my home PC.  I just went to the Carbonite(tm) website, signed in, and downloaded the files.  The only small downside is that the first backup takes days, but you can use your computer during the backup.

I also have a few USB harddrives that I use to backup locally.

We are soooo lucky

Where else but on this site can we get the following

Hints and advice on all things Model Railways

Good advice on backing up your computer

And a English lesson

Well done guys lol

Thats Life

Thats Life Trevor,

I go to the train club on Thursday nights. We do run trains and talk about trains. It wont take long for someone to bring up another subject and then we are off on another tangent. LOL. The reason I posted about the future demise of my failing computer is because 90% of my videos and Photos are railroad related. I collect old negatives of trains and hope to preserve them for future generations. In that same vein, The photos I take today will be historically valuable in the future. I would hate to think that mine or others photos/vids would be lost due to a hard drive crash.

Rob Teed

Be aware of cloud storage...

I'm not saying BEWARE, but be aware. Closely examine who owns the data that you put on a cloud. It's one thing to put up stuff you don't mind going public, but the truly private stuff, keep that under your personal control. BTW, I use Dropbox. Easy, and don't have to think about it.

Back up your files

I have a friend who has been a programmer for Microsoft for ages now.  The "last time" that my hard drive went TU and I had to "redo" my precious railroad files and photo's, he told me that is why you never, never, never download or use as storage, anything!  Instead, use the flash cards that are so available these days.  And so, that is what I do now, either downloading or otherwise, everything goes on the flash card.  They have worked out great for me.  And honestly, it has saved me soooooo many headaches that I used to have!

Jeff Rader

I bought a one terabyte drive yesterday

As Alan said ... make the backup automated

As Alan said earlier, make sure the backup is automated - so that it just happens automatically whenever you add or update files. Dedicate an additional separate drive to backup - these days a USB drive is pretty inexpensive.

My favorite is the 2 TB Passport Drive - it's USB powered, and it's just a little larger than an Altoids mint tin. It's less than $150 on Amazon.

I use Genie9 Timeline Home to auto-backup my files. You can get it here for $40. Alan's got a free one in his post, but $40 is pretty cheap insurance and it has a lot of options for setting which folders to autobackup when.

Flashcards aka Back up your files

Backup GOOD devices NOT always SO GOOD. Keep in mind the rapid changes in computers. When I bought my new laptop I checked that it had a flashcard slot, and it did. Unfortunately NOT the flashcards I have been using. My video camera card worked with my now dead computer. My digital camera card had an adapter that made it the same as my video camera card. My external card adapter is so old it has an 3 something inch disk drive and the adapter is not recognized by my win 8 computer. Actually it is recognized by my old XP but doesn't read. Being too cheap to buy a compatible adapter, yet, I use my video camera via USB to connect to my new computer and run my digital camera card and adapter through the video camera. Does Rube Goldberg sound familiar.  John

2TB

I got a 2TB Seagate Go Flex drive for Christmas (gotta love in-laws who buy something they discover they don't need). 

The backup program (Seagate Replica) that is on it does a full backup and then starts in on incrementals, so you can bak up to a certain point in time.... to an extent. Once the drive gets to about 90% it starts deleting the older backup points. I've been around 90% since a couple of weeks after I installed the thing. 

The interesting thing is that I've actually only got 1.5TB of "in the computer" hard drive space, and it's not nearly full. So my backups apparently contain a lot of duplication, which worries me not at all. 

Interesting note: when I hooked my 2TB Go Flex up to my system, the system refused to acknoledge that I'd installed another USB hard drive... the reason being that the USB ID of the drive conflicted with a 1TB Go Flex that I already had installed. So now I have to figure out where I want to stick that 1TB drive.... 

A copy of a copy of a copy

I am not a promoter of all things Microsoft but it is worth noting that SyncToy is a very flexible tool for free. You can create as many redundancy pairs as you wish, manage each as echo, add, or two-way sync, and fully control the frequency of operation including automatic by time and date. The ability to control the backup method keeps the backup files neat and tidy and they don't grow out of control over time.

You can buy a 2Tb USB external drive nowadays for $99 at places like Tiger Direct. Mass storage has become ridiculously cheap. Personally, I have 8Tb of internal that is backed up to externals which is then backed up to removables via a dock. The removables are stored at a friends house as I store his at mine. The removables are updated roughly once a month. Obviously I am in love with redundancy. The love affair has served me well over the years as I don't lose data... ever.

As Rick and others mentioned, I backup what I call mission critical data to cloud. DropBox is my choice at the moment however that is subject to change as cloud offers come and go.

The real test

of backup software on the PCs is the restore.  What is the restore process?  For Norton Ghost, I put a cd/DVD into the drive of the machine.  I boot off that cd/dvd.  (Assume machine itself is unbootable from the hard drive).  I then ask the software to show me the restore points - it finds them on the backup drive (a seperate USB drive) and lets me choose the one I want to restore to.  It then goes out and pulls in the last full restore and merges in the incrementals up to the point I chose.  I also have control to tell it how to manage the backup drive (how many to keep etc)

When the restore is done, I remove the CD/DVD and boot the machine.  And it is there.  Don't fall for the restore the OS, then load the backup software then restore story. Restore the entire machine.

As for cloud backups?  Oh really?  Besides the time delay, what about the websites that go belly up every day?  Do you have a bandwidth limit?  Will your backups use up that bandwidth?  Can you put up with the lousy response time while a backup is in progress?  And are you going to put your credit card online with an another unsecure website (there is no such thing as a secure website - ask me how I know sometime).

Why do I love ZOS backups?  Something called GDGs or generation data groups.  The OS manages the tape volumes for me. I tell it how many to keep when I set it up and each time I want to do a backup, I just tell it to use "the next one", never any exact name.  This is the type of thing I want in PC backups - total automation.

RAID Array and Carbonite

Blu-Ray

I'm going with Blu-Ray Disc. They have come down in price and I can store a lot of info on a disc. I'm not going to rely on a mechanical device for storage.

Rob, one caveat

Rob:

I'd recommend you actually give serious consideration to getting a second disk drive and setting up an auto backup using one of the autobackup tools.

The problem with any manual backup method is it depends on you remembering to take the time to backup.

If you're worried about mechanical devices letting you down, even worse is you letting yourself down by forgetting to do a backup and then losing many hours of work. If you have an autobackup in place that runs say every 15 minutes to backup just what's changed, then you'll never lose more than 15 minutes worth of work.

That's what we do here at MRH. Remembering to backup is a weak link in any backup scheme - but if you have the computer just do it for you automatically, then the likelihood that TWO drives will fail at the same time is very slim.

That said, we also backup our archives off site and in the cloud. Just relying on a single backup scheme sitll isn't good enough for really important files. Better safe than sorry, as they say.

I use raid 5 and raid 1 myself

For my C drive which contains the OS and other program files, and D Drive which contains all the critical documents (mostly "my documents" folder) I have it setup for raid 1, and for the E Drive which is the MASS Storage drive, I have it setup for raid 5.  I most likely should set up a backup for at least the E Drive (though the redundancy of RAID 5 has been sufficient so far) but it is several hundred dollars that I rather invest in other things than buying a 3 TB backup device.  Though it has been a year since I last checked prices adn perhaps they have gone down in price.by now.

Ken L.

Carbonite Fan

At Fast Tracks, everything is continually backed up via Carbonite, as well as onto two separate hard drives, all automatically and with versioning.

Needless to say, the core asset in our company is this data, and having an offsite backup is crucial, otherwise, someone could literally "steal" the entire company if they walked off with a computer.

The local hard drives I use for quick restores if needed, usually when I bork a file and need to get it back.

Carbonite

I prefer a digital copy stored in my house. Now I could make another copy and store it at my brothers house but I'm not real worried about losing it here at home. The DVDs and Blu-Rays will suffice for me. I keep them stacked on the spindle that they were sold with. I have seen fires totality destroy houses and yet the DVDs came out still readable. About the only thing that did survive.

Tried DVD backups and there are issues

Chisel it in stone!!!

Chisel it in stone!!! The cavemen might have been on to something. LOL