Sytem Crash During Backup What sytem do you use?

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brucesly

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I do weekly incremental hard drive backup for the Vaio using Acrnis and try for daily backups of Blackberry on a flash drive.

I am pretty diligent about this and have two backup drives that I switch every month or so.

My computer had a out of memory error??? and totally crashed during the backup. I had to go back to the earlier backup and restore the whole drive and lost about 9 days of input. My outlook backup and blackberry sync did not like the retore process and could not just copy back. I probably could have played with it but I just took everything from my blackberry and manually got it back into outlook. I thought everything would just seamlessly restore HA.

Holy Crap what a scare? At least two weeks of getting caught up and things falling through the cracks. More stuff than ever. I totally have everything in the system. Mind maps spreadsheets gtd outlook plugin etc.

Anybody have any suggestions for a better backup system as I am kind of freaked out now but I can't backup every hour, it is a notebook. I own several companies so this is my accounting, sales, agants, inentory control, web actions etc.

My advice is if you are reading this and have not backed up your stuff very recently quit reading and go back up right now!

Let me know
 
I use:

Time Machine: Hourly backup to external hard drive.
Back Jack: Daily backup of critical files to offsite data center.
Super Duper: Weekly backup to external hard drive. I use a three-drive rotation in case one of these fails.

Plus my email and financial files reside on servers, not on my own desktop.

These are all Mac programs. When I used a PC, I used BackupMyPC for local backup, and Iron Mountain's Connected service for offsite. That was a few years ago, so I don't know what the current best options are.

Katherine
 
I use:

Mac - documents and small files
500 GB HD - photos, videos and large files
1TB HD - backup both the mac HD and the 500 GB HD using timemachine.

Love it.
 
brucesly;65123 said:
II thought everything would just seamlessly restore HA.
Click to expand...

First rule of backups - DO THEM!

Second rule of backups - TEST THEM!

I am on a mac, I use Time Machine to backup to our 1 TB 4 drive raid server in the garage. Periodic burn of critical files to CD into a media safe in another building. Monthly bootable backup of system using carbon copy cloner to a spare hard drive. Treo has existing LifeBalance file (all my NA lists) and my contacts.

Current hole is that I've moved to Open Office for my federal required sheep records and I no longer have them on my treo as well as on my machine so they are only backed up the way my mac is.
 
Oogiem: What do you think of OpenOffice?

I do hourly backups using Time Machine, and a weekly full-drive backup to an external hard drive, which I swap out at another physical location.

On the other hand, my GTD system is mostly paper now, which doesn't crash that often. :-)
 
brucesly;65123 said:
Anybody have any suggestions for a better backup system as I am kind of freaked out now but I can't backup every hour, it is a notebook.
Click to expand...

I used to be a backup slacker.

Now I have a Mac, and use time machine and time capsule. It automatically backs up hourly. It's backing up as I type this!

- Don
 
Give Mozy a try

I use and love Mozy for my online backup. You get 2GB space for free. The backup client is easy to use and automatically backs up your files at scheduled intervals or automatically when the system is not in use.

I also have a USB flash drive with a Windows Briefcase and a hard disk in an enclosure for backup of my music and other larger-scale media. I use a Robocopy job to keep these backups maintained.
 
Brent;65139 said:
Oogiem: What do you think of OpenOffice?
Click to expand...

Love it, As I edit old files they are being converted. I've been an MS Office user since rev 1, this is the first open office or star office clone that I can actually use.
 
You can use "Disk Utility" to do this. It exists in your applications utilities folder. Start the program, and then click "Partition" tab. Create two partitions of equal size. In my home backup drive. As long as your backup drive into your computer, Time Machine will back it every hour.
 
Dropbox and NAS

I use dropbox for working documents which syncs to the cloud and to any other device I've installed my dropbox account on. Works on Windows, Linux, Mac, Iphone, Android, etc. I have a Windows laptop, a pc with both a linux and windows installation and an Android phone. All these have dropbox installed and are in sync.

This is a constant syncing, so a hard drive crash of my pc means just install a new one, install operating system, then dropbox and login. A little time later all my documents are back.

For backup purposes I have a NAS with 2 discs in RAID mirror. If one drive fails, the other one still has the data. For security reasons I should have a seperate backup elsewhere, but have not (yet) implemented this.

When any operating crashes, it is always possible to retreive your data by using a live disc (f.e. a Linux distro). If your hard drive fails, then you have little chance you can recover anything.
Not sure how/if this works with encrypted drives.
 
I'm on a mac laptop which I take between work and home. I use DropBox for all documents that I can't replace. TimeMachine when I'm in the office. SuperDuper to clone probably every few days. One clone at work. One clone at home.

Michael
 
Mozy for key files

brucesly;65123 said:
My computer had a out of memory error??? and totally crashed during the backup. I had to go back to the earlier backup and restore the whole drive and lost about 9 days of input. My outlook backup and blackberry sync did not like the retore process and could not just copy back.
Click to expand...

Ouch!

I've spent the last two days backing up, doing a full restore of my computer (to initial factory state), and reinstalled software, etc. It's over two years ago that I bought the computer and there was an unbelievable amount Windows updates that I had to contend with during the process. My computer system had become so clogged up and unstable there was little choice. It would completely hang, requiring cold starts. Half the time it didn't boot properly, requiring another cold start. The hard drive would be rattling away constantly and I wondered what it was doing! What clinched was when my anti-virus program stopped working and I couldn't even reinstall or uninstall it. Now the computer is quiet and the responsiveness is amazing, so it's been worth the effort.

But back to the topic: I have a PC laptop and I don't use a high-end system, because I like to understand what's going on. For key files that get updated often, such as email and book keeping, I use Mozy. Because it's to the cloud it's rather slow, so I only use it for selected folders. I've set it to run twice a day. It's automatic and worry-free. With the small volume I get away with their free service of less than 2 GB. I'm very happy with this solution.

For the rest, I do (try to do) a weekly backup on to an external hard drive as well as to a large-ish USB memory stick (16 GB) using a cheap software tool called CopyCat by HahnTech.com. On the hard drive I backup all data; on the USB stick only documents (no music or films). What's a minus with CopyCat is that the incremental backups eventually fill up with files that I have deleted and no longer want to keep, so I run out of space and should I need to restore I would have a lot of junk to sort through. Every now and then, a complete backup needs to be done to create a new baseline.

As a part of my project to sort out a comfortable backup routine, I also went through all my files and purged! I did a folder every now and then and it took me months. I'm now much more discerning of what I decide to save! I went from 4.5 GB to 2 GB of documents (pictures, films, and music aside). (Who needs all those powerpoint slide shows of pretty pictures?)

Best wishes for your "sort out backup" project!
/Christina
 
Worth remembering to keep a backup in a separate place from your PC. Otherwise fire, flood etc or a burglar can make off with both copies of you files.

Michael
 
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