It's Important To Backup Your Personal Files

[The Penguin]

Living in a society dependent of digital files from taking pictures, recording videos, and/or creating other content, it is very important you have some type of plan to backup your files.

A few days ago, I had issues with a new 4 TB(4,000 GB) drive I only had for 6 months. 1.6 TB of data was photo and videos I taken over the years. I was worried at first. However, I do have remote backup so I can at any time recover all my files online. I'm glad I have a very faster internet connection. Still, it will take up to 5 days to get all my files back.

Some people might use an external hard drive to backup their content. This is a good starting point, but should you ever have a fire at your home, the external hard drive is useless. This is why having remote backup is important by having another way to get back your content should an event like this happen. With many remote backup providers, they have an extra feature that will make extra local copies of your files on another disk.

This one person I know takes lots of photos I warned them lots of time to get remote backup. I sure you got the idea they didn't listen to me and then one day bam it happen, their drive failed and they lost their photos.

Remote backup is not expensive. Many provides you can backup 100's GB for as low as $5/month. Most provides when you install their software, you select which folders you want to backup and the software will take care of the rest. The other nice part, should you delete an file on error for one of your backup folders, you can get your files back.

In summary, having another hard drive at your home to make backups copies of your files and choose a remote backup provider for extra precaution. One important note, never believe a provider that offers unlimited storage for backup. There no such things unlimited storage. Once you reach a certain point like many TBs of data, or maybe even 1 PB(1,000,000 GB), I sure before you get to those number the provider will give you an call telling you that you exceed your limit of the fake so call unlimited storage.

 

[Keigan]

Apple Time Capsule for me, it just works.

 

[The Penguin]

Apple Time Capsule for me, it just works.

Yes there many related devices like this from other vendors. Some of them also include remote backup. That good you use something.

 

[Mia]

I don't keep much on my system, photos I burn to cd's, same with music. Like to keep my system clean of most things that will slow it down.

Over many years of windows versions (some of which were really buggy), crashes, installs and uninstalls, blue screens, corrupt files, corrupted and or destroyed hard drives, viruses, worms, malware. I've kept important things off main drives and used external drives. I've learned never to keep anything really important to me on my system, as one way or another, even with back ups on the drives something will happen that can destroy the data.
Now with small flash drives/usb keys/ I keep photos and music, documents, information.

Funny, a while back I connected up an external floppy drive to erase old floppy's and found old stuff that I wrote or kept for reasons I have no idea about now. None of it except for nostalgia's sake was worth keeping. Erased most of them, and donated the floppy's to a buddy's old system, there were several early versions of doom and heretic each on five to eight floppy's. Interesting the things we think are important at the time.

 

[Jorg]

I'am also worried in some degree of all this digital infirmation I store. A couple of years ago I lost almost 1TB of info, most of it games,movies and non-sense but I also lost a lot of photos from my family and others, I remembered back then I copied some of that info into several dvd's so I could restore part of the lost archives, nevertheless several others were gone forever.

I bought a new external HDD, 4TB but I never felt 100% secure, it could be robbed, dammaged or something. I never used the cloud (altough I do use it for college data and works) because of my low internet speed, I used to have 3Mb but a couple of weeks ago I upgraded to 8Mb, it may not be fast like other places but I'm now considering it. There are several free services, many well known, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. I'm also thinking in Mega, it gives you 50GB for free but you have to be really careful with your info, specially, your password because if you loose it you WILL NEVER be able to got it back again. Since the Megaupload closure in 2012 the new service eliminated the "recover password" option and encription to secure themselves and the client.

 

[FreeDiver]

Here's a story you guys might find interesting. A few years ago, I got a job to try to recover some data from media that was stored in a safe. The safe was in a house fire and although the safe was fireproof, the contents were still subjected to high tempreture. They backed up their data to both CDs/DVDs as well as flash drives. The CDs/DVDs were totally unrecoverable because they melted and warped beyond repair. However, the flash drives were recoverable. All I had to do was scratch off the melted plastic and solder a usb plug to it and I was able to recover all the data off the drive.

Just thought I share this story with you guys.

 

[Tyrantus1212]

Dropbox? Dropbox (service) - Wikipedia

 

[WereBear]

Apple Time Capsule for me, it just works.

It is incredible! We have one which covers both of our computers. Now, heaven forbid, we have some kind of crisis, that would be the fifth thing to be gotten out; after the four cats

But backing up The Penguin (see what i did there ) it is important to have off site backups, too. I think of the Time Capsule as a convenience; when I accidentally delete or mess up a file, or when I get a new computer I can let the Time Capsule make my new Mac all set up like my old one.

But my Documents folder gets backed up into the Cloud with Dropbox.

Dropbox? Dropbox (service) - Wikipedia

There's a free service, and then a paid one, all of which are not that expensive when you consider no force on earth can get back a truly lost file.

For instance, I use the Apple Cloud for my iPad for 99 cents a month. Not only do I have backup protection, I also have the convenience of any new device getting configured for me when replacement time comes.

I also got cellular data on my iPad, so it's more like a big smart phone. When I travel for work, the maps, word processing, and email is incredibly useful, and I can use it as a phone, too!

I will have to come up with something else for pictures, which are so big these days, and I take so many, both for business and hobby. This isn't like my writing, which doesn't take up much room So I am getting new plans set up for those. In the meantime, Dropbox for business is working in the short term.

This is the wave of the future! Because hard drives are mechanical objects which do wear out.

 

[Butterfly88]

I just learned this the hard way. My old computer's hard drive crashed and I lost pretty much everything.

 

[WereBear]

I am so sorry! That's awful.

And a lot of people do learn the hard way.

 

[Bikutoso]

I'm currently lacking in security.
I have a spare hard drive that I can copy files to. I can't call it redundant, and I don't have offsite backup.
Equipment I want I costly, and lacking locations to store the hardware. And a tape drive would suffice for offsite, if I could find it for sale anywhere close by.

But I think backups and redundancy is pretty important to have. But you are not required to have a enterprise storage and backup system. A few external hard drives or a NAS would suffice for most people.

 

[The Penguin]

Some might find this funny. What I didn't admit to this post that my photos was setup as RAID1. A few of you know this for those read my post Thinking of RAID in Windows or Using FreeNAS? .

Last weekend, something went wrong with my RAID array. One of the disk was fine and the other disk Windows thought it was not OK. The disk that was OK, I didn't detach it correctly. Now I know there data recovery software could have fixed the issue for me. I was too lazy to do this so I did my remote backup instead.

When I finished recovering my remote backup, I pluged back in the other drive Windows thought that was not working. Well, it works perfectly fine. So in summary, I didn't need to do the remote recovery but it was nice this was an option. I'm glad I got the other drive back online because there was some video projects and music from a 3rd party I forgot to backup. These files are getting backup now.

Once the backup is finished, I decided instead of using a RAID1, I will have my backup software do a secondary backup to the other hard drive. So it still kinda like a RAID1 setup. Later, I will setup my internal drives back as a RAID1 and have an external RAID1. Some might find is over kill, but I love to have as much redundancy as possible.