When's the last time you backed up?

I got a rude reminder last week when my computer crashed. Rebooting got a "can't find c:/windows, no such directory" error. Luckily most of my data and documents were unharmed, but it was just that: luck. It turns out the hard drive is dying, and a replacement is on its way to me right now.

I bought a backup drive some time back, but got lazy in using it. So now I found a backup program that knows to close Outlook before backing up, and can backup open documents, and have it on a nightly schedule.

I do backup in spurts, mainly when someone reminds me of the horrors of not doing so. A few months ago, I began getting notices that my hard drive was dying. Thank goodness, it gave me enough notice to get everything backed up, though the hassle of starting over is not something I want to do again soon. :eek: I'm not one of the tech guys (like my son) who looks forward to such challenges. I luv when all is well and running smoothly.

I like the sound of the RAID setups. I have not used it yet but I plan to... I was more interested in setting up dual to double my hard drive retrival but they say good things about setting RAID up for continous backup on a separate hard drive. It's not supposed to slow the computer just mirror everything on the extra...
assuming the HDDs are identical I suppose the backup drive would be on it's last leg at that point too... so time for a new pair.

I suppose I'm telling you nothing new but justin case here's a link to some info.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

Glad you didn't lose everything
RonDon

Oh Doug I'll need these reminders often lol.

I have had those catestrophes and I still tend to forget. Just had one about a month ago and it was during a super huge rush order which even though I had the originals backed up and safe and some of the proofs I forgotten to save any finals. I freaked out. My husband had some guy that works on computers for a living look at it around 2AM and he said my stuff couldn't be saved because my folder was encrypted and that it was my mother board. Normally a good friend of mine looks at my computer but I couldn't get a hold of him. Well, I'm glad I decided to wait to find him because turns out it was only my power supply. All my stuff was still there, exactly the same. Could you image if I had gotten another motherboard, etc. and just thrown all my files away for nothing? And to think, that guy actually charges people to fix their systems. My friend does it just to do it. I told my friend, if I ever move, I'm kidnapping him and bringing him along. LOL. He needs to start his own business with that. He says he doesn't know where to begin but he would make a killing at it.

Anyways, thanks for the reminder.

I am of the opinion that whilst raid is invaluable, it is not the be all and end all given that in some cases problems with the primary hard drive will also be duplicated on the mirror.

With the relative cheapness of usb external drives, I think this is the most readily viable and removeable solution.

As hard drives have now grown to massive proportions, now outstripping the capacity of many of the mediums used for backup, it seems that a scheduled batch file that ran each night to a removeable backup drive would be the ideal.

In addition, the device being removeable would allow you to continue working on another machine if a major hardware disaster were to occur as in motherboard etc.