Backup! Backup! Backup!

Valentia

Oh woe is me! Nearly.

Went home last night and my computer wouldn't turn on. Corrupted HD. The one with all my pictures on. Hours and hours later "chechdsk" got it back. Anyway, I have all my stuff backed up. But here is the silly bit. I ran the backup programme, don't ask I don't know why, maybe there was a full moon last night.

I have the backup set up so that my external HD mirrors my main disk on the computer. What I didn't realise was that thousands of photos had not returned home after the fix so by backing up, as I thought, I actually deleted all the pics from the external disk that had not been restored on the main one.

Fortunately hours and hours later, because the external had not been written to since the mishap, I was able to get a recovery programme to find the deleted files. It is saving them, I hope, as I type.

The moral of the story is fairly obvious. Everything can disappear in the blink of an eye. Time to set up a third backup methinks where nothing is ever ever deleted. So as the thread title says.......... Jazuz the thoughts of it

A few pints tonight maybe. This is a strange kind of tiredness with no hangover

rymus

buffalo terastation Really have to get one.. Hope you get all of your photos back safe & sound.

CrowdedHouse

That was a close one.......:eek

I actually only recently made DVD's of my pics,I use an external HD for backup but got a bit wary when the HD in my work laptop died suddenly.The work machine was a fairly high spec jobbie and less than a year old.

delly

Funny what you say about overwriting one backup with another. I have an external HD with 7 folders Monday to Sunday. I have a batch program running to backup all my stuff on a daily basis, but if it backs up corrupt data, I still have the previous days to rely on.

311

Are there websites that allow a few TB's of storage.
Would zipping batches of photographs by date and then uploading single files to the web be a safe option??

Valentia

Sounds like a great idea Delly.

Brian: It would take so long to upload, that's what would put me off the idea. 92 Gig the last time I looked!

CraggyIslander

Been there done that, bought the T-shirt..... I do work in IT after all Although there are ways to revive crahed HD's (chkdsk is not really one of em) it still always is a hair raising (or is that hare racing?) experience.

My backup scenario is as follows:

1 external drive that holds a shadow copy of all my important files so they're kept in sync with the files on the internal HD's (no real need to duplicate the entire system)

2 additional external HD's for archiving all my RAW files, finished photoshop files, etc, these drives only get files added to them. Never anything deleted and files are never worked on directly on the drive. As my collection(s) grow I'll be adding more of these drives.

3 Just before files are moved to the archive HD's, I burn the files to DVD's (burned at low speed to maximize readability) and the DVD's get put in a very safe place (hope I never need to use these)

I'm actually considering building myself a raid-5 storage box with 5 large HD's to replace all the external HD's but need to save a few penny's for that first.

Raid 5 is where the data is stored evenly across all the disks, including parity information. If one drive were to fail, nothing would be lost... simply replace the drive and repopulate the data.

kjt

Glad to hear you didn't loose too much. I've currently 4Hd's in my pc and
3external, the annoying thing is I have to slap them into my external case
evertime I want to see exactly whats on them. I spent a bit of time clearing
them a month back and have 1-300gb just for movies, 1-250gb for Tv &
music, then the third is documents, photo's and randomness.

A while back I was having a look at the buffalo backups but the prices are crazy.
I'm half thinking of building a pc/server with raid support and 4drives, has to be cheaper.

Anybody heard of anything along the lines of buffalo but cheaper?

CraggyIslander

kjt, can build it yourself... just need one of these

Can also get them as internal cages but you'd need a massive PSU then.... not to mention cooling.

a couple large SATA drives, a decent controller and you're all set.

Dara Robinson

Valentia, very glad to hear that you did not loose that much.

Question 1: Anyone know of an extreeemly good and free recovery program? Also what would be one of the best recovery programs out there (inc ones you have to pay for)?
Question 2: If there a reliable and free backup program that people know about? And again what would be the best one out there (inc ones you have to pay for)?

Valentia

just home for lunch and all are back!! Phew.

I use Syncback for backup. It's free and very configurable, to me anyway.

I bought Recover My Files last night after testing the free version. If you do decide to buy be careful that you stick with US currency though. It tried to sell it to me as Euros which was turning out way dearer.

kjt

Thanks for the Fred, that's the sort of thing I've been looking for

magicbastarder

i just copy my stuff manually. that way i can eyeball what i'm doing.
however, most of my photos are scans - losing the file doesn't mean i've lost the image. plus, i've got my photos on my machine, my external HD, and my dad's computer, to cover fire and theft as well as HD failure.

however, if i did end up having to re-scan 6000 images...

Shiny

A also copy over my stuff manually.

I originally used the microsoft "synctoy" tool until I
actually checked the backup and found that it often
didn't bother backing up 3-4 gigs of data every time.
Dirty b*stard.

Valencia I will give your "syncback" suggestion a try
tonight.

I'm starting to use the Lightroom backup feature so
that my photos are backed up as I import them.

I did lose over 300 gigs of MP3's last month so
I know how it feels big time. Although I got most
of them back from friends, DVDs and hardrives.

magicbastarder

Shiny wrote:

300 gigs of MP3's

there isn't that much good music in the world. probably.

Valentia

Fred C. Dobbs wrote:

kjt, can build it yourself... just need one of these

Can also get them as internal cages but you'd need a massive PSU then.... not to mention cooling.

a couple large SATA drives, a decent controller and you're all set.

Interesting indeed. When you say decent controller, what does that mean? Excuese my newbie questions.

311

magicbastarder wrote:

there isn't that much good music in the world. probably.

I've a tiny collection and it's about 40-50 gigs:o

magicbastarder

it's a strange world where listening to CDs is regarded as old school.

CraggyIslander

Not at all Valentia, controller is the part that actually connects the box with 4 physical HD's to the actual PC so you can access the drives.

There are controllers already built into the motherboard of your PC to connect the internal HD's, but these usually don't support the raid 5 level.

To get good performance from the raid drive (dont want it to be as slow as an external USB drive) a good controller is probably more important than the size or speed of the hard disks used.

PS If there are more people interested in a similar setup, I may be able to source all the various parts 'bulk' through my own company's suppliers (let them handle the VAT hassle) and then assist anyone with installing and configuring.

GristlyEnd

Good to hear you recovered them Danny. I don't have any backups but I will sort it out immediately. Are Maxtor external drives any good? I see PC World have a 320GB external for €120.

Valentia

I would be up for that Fred. It sounds like a good long term investment. Thanks for the info.

Ruu_Old

DarrenG wrote:

Good to hear you recovered them Danny. I don't have any backups but I will sort it out immediately. Are Maxtor external drives any good? I see PC World have a 320GB external for €120.

I have a Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive and it works well. I have 2 other Western Digital MyBook (2x250GB) that I got from Komplett.ie, cheap and work great.

gandalf

External My Book which backs up all important files (will be buying one soon just for photos) and then a 2nd layer of backup onto DVD-RW disk for all the photos. All done manually, no need for fancy back up proggies (yet!!).

Found out about backup the hard way when a disk crash lost all the piccies I took of the sisters wedding back in Rome in 2003 (she has the photos on a disk I gave but can't find it since they moved house DOH!!).

CraggyIslander

gandalf wrote:

External My Book which backs up all important files (will be buying one soon just for photos) and then a 2nd layer of backup onto DVD-RW disk for all the photos.

That's the best way As handy external HD's are, they are exactly the same drives as the ones inside your PC... so yes they can and will fail eventually... archiving to good quality DVD-R's is vital.

In the pre DVD day's I used to archive to CD-R's and made the mistake to buy a pack of cheap white label CD-R's. 18 moinths later when I needed to restore my MP3 collection after a HD crash ... about 1 in 10 of the CD's turned out to be unreadable, although they were fine immediately after burning Lost a lot of rare bootlegs that day.

Valentia

Fred, I meant to ask. When you said chkdsk wasn't the way to revive a HD, is there anything you would recommend? I have an Ultimate Boot CD which has got me out of a few scrapes and chkdsk is the one on that.

Shiny

I'm still restoring my Music from the 50+ DVDs and on nearly
every DVD about 10 albums just wont transfer.
Bloody "Failed Cycle Redundency Check" crap.

I think in the future I wont even bother backing up
to DVD at all. A cheap external drive is faster, easier
and probably more reliable in the long term.

Needless to say I burnt most of those DVD's @ 8x.

Takeshi_Kovacs

Exactly what way would be the best for long term storage?
I thought using dvd to backup, and storing them in a dark, dry and temp controlled place would be a safe bet. Although i have heard stories of cd and dvd 'rot', where optical media degrades over time (as per Fred's case possibly).

I myself had at least 40 gigs of stuff stored on dvds about a year ago, and left them in a cupboard for a few months. When i went to use them, the computer could not read them, and upon inspecting them closely, i could see that the data layer was all discoloured. Maybe they were just a dud batch i dunno.

sineadw

I'm glad you got it all back Danny! I lost 140 gigs of stuff in the great crash of 04, including all my PSD work files, and infinitely worse, every baby picture of my youngest that I had. Thank god for my friends and family - they put an album together for me. Needless to say I learned my lesson. I have 4 HDs on the desktop where I can ghost, copy everything important to my non-networked laptop, back everything up onto offsite discs and also online. I have the bases covered I think. I've said that out loud now haven't I? :rolleyes:

Fajitas!

I´ve gone through 2 laptops since Dec to know all about this.

Back bloody up.

CraggyIslander

Valentia wrote:

Fred, I meant to ask. When you said chkdsk wasn't the way to revive a HD, is there anything you would recommend? I have an Ultimate Boot CD which has got me out of a few scrapes and chkdsk is the one on that.

Ahh, didnt realise it was the ultimate boot CD version, that one's fairly reliable. The ms-sjite winblows one is the one I was thinking of and it's dangerous, simply because it starts making changes to the physical layers of the HD immediately and you regularly end up with the less than useless .chk files.

Unfortunately there isn't one single tool that does it all (well I havent found it yet) I mostly end up mounting the drive as a slave in a second system and running an assortment of tools (mostly linux ones) and regularly manufacturer specific ones.

Shiny wrote:

I'm still restoring my Music from the 50+ DVDs and on nearly
every DVD about 10 albums just wont transfer.
Bloody "Failed Cycle Redundency Check" crap.

Takeshi_Kovacs wrote:

Exactly what way would be the best for long term storage?
I thought using dvd to backup, and storing them in a dark, dry and temp controlled place would be a safe bet. Although i have heard stories of cd and dvd 'rot', where optical media degrades over time (as per Fred's case possibly).

I myself had at least 40 gigs of stuff stored on dvds about a year ago, and left them in a cupboard for a few months. When i went to use them, the computer could not read them, and upon inspecting them closely, i could see that the data layer was all discoloured. Maybe they were just a dud batch i dunno.

That's what happened with my batch of white label CD-R's. I've since found out that all recordable media (regardless of brand) is produced in only a couple of huge factories in Asia. Dependant on which factory and which fininshing layer was used, any of them can be a dud batch :eek:

All discs have an electronic code on them which identifies the finishing layer used. Did find a list of all these various 'codes' and their rating (as far as reliability goes) and how to retrieve the code from a disc. think it was on cdfreaks.com, but not certain. Have a print out I can refer to, but it's been a while as the 300 disc batch of DVD-R's I got last time are on their recommended list I'll see if I can dig up a link

Morlar

Ruu wrote:

I have a Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive and it works well.

I have one of those as well - cept mine is sitting on top of a wardrobe dead as a doornail - still holding a few gig of raw files (that I dont have copies of). After that I bought a poweredge server running linux on 6 scsi 10k 73gb hdd's which I dont backup to often enough.

CraggyIslander

Morlar wrote:

After that I bought a poweredge server running linux on 6 scsi 10k 73gb hdd's which I dont backup to often enough.

Money to burn?

Anyway here's a link to a list of media and info on how to get the media id of the disc

Morlar

Fred C. Dobbs wrote:

Money to burn?

Nope it was 2nd hand. It cost less than 2 x 300gb external hdd's (which I dont trust anymore: )

magicbastarder

we've got an 8TB test SAN in work i fully intend to make use of once it's up and running.

Shiny

Just wondering and cant find much about it on the web,

Would a raid array ( specifically raid 0 ) offer much of a
performance increase in Lightroom or Photoshop ?

magicbastarder

yes.
but raid 0 is not a good idea because if you lose 1 disk, you've essentially lost them all.

CraggyIslander

magicbastarder wrote:

we've got an 8TB test SAN in work i fully intend to make use of once it's up and running.

Lucky bastarder!