trying to determine best route to take on data storage. What systems are you using? 100%online? Auto back up? Multi storage locations?
redundant backup (TWO copies of everything) on site, and one copy off site
some I keep in the "cloud" just for convenience, but that is not something I would consider as a true Backup.
PS: autobackup (runs every two hours 24/7) on all data currently in use
$10 per month Dropbox, in the cloud and on an external hard drive Seagate sitting on my desk.
Peter Ehlert, post: 359315, member: 60 wrote: some I keep in the "cloud" just for convenience, but that is not something I would consider as a true Backup.
How come?
"some I keep in the "cloud" just for convenience, but that is not something I would consider as a true Backup."
Jim Frame, post: 359323, member: 10 wrote: How come?
1. it could be corrupted and not retrievable.
2. the account could be hacked and purged or infected
3. the cloud server could fail
I can control the health of my storage devices, I monitor them. Redundancy
Peter Ehlert, post: 359331, member: 60 wrote: 1. it could be corrupted and not retrievable.
2. the account could be hacked and purged or infected
3. the cloud server could fail
Not all cloud storage is created equal. The low-end offerings (e.g. Carbonite) offer little in the way of redundancy, so data loss is a troubling possibility. But the high-end products are arguably more reliable than onsite storage. Amazon's S3 service, which is what I use, stores multiple copies of customer data on multiple devices across multiple facilities. The kind of catastrophe that would overcome that sort of redundancy would also defeat any local storage scheme.
Similarly, I think that loss to hacking is much more likely at an individual's facility than at a reputable cloud storage provider. (There's little incentive to hack other than denial-of-service anyway, as all data is encrypted and Amazon doesn't have the keys.)
I keep onsite backups for convenience and the belt-and-suspenders philosophy, but I consider the cloud to be my primary backup. Corporations like Amazon, whose business is highly reliant on secure data availability, regard services like S3 as their authoritative data store.
I have a separate drive accessed by all computers thru wireless router and keep data from all computers backed up on two identical thumb drives.
Before retiring a computer or upgrading it, I copy all the available data on it and preserve it on a separate drive under a unique file name (ie: XP_MSI_serial number of motherboard) and burn to a CD or DVD and thumb drive.
Memory is cheap considering the alternative.
Server onsite with a backup made automatically to a second drive. Laptop of course has copies (500Gig SSD) and a couple of the 1Tb palm drives seems to be enough for me.
My hard drive crashed this past December. I was devastated. I had been keeping all of my current jobs on my computer. I had an external hard drive as well as my own personal cloud device (WD My Cloud 5Tb) that I transferred completed jobs to for archiving. Fortunately I was able to send the bad hard drive to an IT person and they recovered about 80% of the files. A few of them won't open and say they are corrupted, but it isn't the end of the world. I was able to replace a few of those files with files I had emailed out. Life goes on.
Now I have all current jobs that I am working on saved on Dropbox. That way I can get to them from anywhere and everything is always up to date. Almost daily I copy all my current files to my external hard drive and cloud device for backup. Everything seems to be going smoothly for now. I save absolutely nothing on my computer hard drive now. Lessons learned.
A few months ago I purchased a 6-bay QNAP NAS with 4 4-TB drives and maxed out the RAM. I set it up with RAID 10 - that would be AABB CCDD, in other words, it sends half the data to each pair of drives for speed and redundancy. I just added 2 5-TB drives as a full backup to this pair. Then I purchased a little 4-Bay QNAP home version with 2 more 5-TB drives. It is at home and logs in every night to match the backup in the office.
I now have an FTP and I am hosting the FTP for several projects with some larger firms. They were excited that we were able to provide this service. I have full remote access to my files which is convenient on snow days.
We have about 3 TB free and in the next year I will plan to buy another QNAP. I will probably go with another 6-bay unit with a similar configuration and add another 2 drives to my home unit for the nearby backup.
Self cloud or cloud free. If a catastrophe hits that KOs my office and my house, then odds are I will not be surveying anymore.
whitey1371, post: 359376, member: 10111 wrote: My hard drive crashed this past December.
Just because a drive has crashed and will not boot again does not actually mean the information is gone.
Usually something has corrupted the boot sequence or files were lost from the windows operation system that will not allow the computer to gain access to that drive again.
That drive has to be removed and the files opened by another computer.
An external adapter is available for less than $10 on Ebay that will allow you to connect an internal hard drive to another computer and open to view and copy the information from the damaged drive.
I've had hard drives go bad and have always been able to recover the information with this method.
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A Harris, post: 359434, member: 81 wrote: Just because a drive has crashed and will not boot again does not actually mean the information is gone.
Usually something has corrupted the boot sequence or files were lost from the windows operation system that will not allow the computer to gain access to that drive again.
That drive has to be removed and the files opened by another computer.
An external adapter is available for less than $10 on Ebay that will allow you to connect an internal hard drive to another computer and open to view and copy the information from the damaged drive.
I've had hard drives go bad and have always been able to recover the information with this method.
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That has always been my understanding as well. Maybe it wasn't a crash per se, but rather a major corruption. Not sure what to call it, but for whatever reason the data could not be recovered by that method by two different IT companies. It had to be sent to a data recovery specialist and even they could not recover all of the files in perfect shape. It is a moot point at this time because I no longer need the files. If for some reason I do need them in the future or at least proof of their demise I have the corrupted hard drive in safe storage for those files that were not recovered in perfect condition. Like I said before, you live and you learn. I am now more consistent with doing backups of my working projects.
Oh, and the corruption/crash happened while trying to update to Windows 10.
I learned years ago to always keep the OS and my data on separate hard-drives. That plus regular backups have prevented any lost data for many years. Hard lessons are the ones we remember the longest.
whitey1371, post: 359444, member: 10111 wrote:
Oh, and the corruption/crash happened while trying to update to Windows 10.
When it happens that way, the data is rarely able to be recovered.
The process reads and stores data temporarily, erases data, rewrites data and checks data.
When something breaks down while that is happening, the information basically has gone who knows where.
Finding it again is like searching for a grain of sand in a dessert of sand.
Before any changes are made to your operating hard drive, you must backup any data files first, then update drive.
I do not have any unnecessary data files stored on my C: operating system drive.
The C: drive only has the operating system and software programs.
The bulk of my data files are stored on a separate external drive that is accessed by all my other computers and phone thru wifi.
The daily working files on each computer are stored on a D: second internal hard drive thruout the day and at end of day or end of project the file is stored to the external archive drive.
The D: drive is for storage only and contains data files of all types.
Every time I have moved to a new operating system, I purchased a new hard drive and made a new installation.
Stephen Ward, post: 359452, member: 1206 wrote: I learned years ago to always keep the OS and my data on separate hard-drives. That plus regular backups have prevented any lost data for many years. Hard lessons are the ones we remember the longest.
agreed.
on MOST desktop computers you are able to install a Second hard drive. Hard drives are cheap.
many laptops can also accept secondary hard drives also, if not many are capable of using a CD Tray drive adapter like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/221855634115?_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
whatever you do, Nothing Beats having an additional current Backup (copy) Off Site!
The blue screen of death. Happened just last night. Glad my data is separated from my OS and on the external HD on my desk as well as out there on dropbox which has been very handy in many other ways including accessing files with my iPhone.
Thanks everyone. A lot of good ideas. I'm going to research everyone's suggestions.
All I use is an external hard drive, a 64gb jump drive and synctoy. Tried Dropbox once it was too slow, don't have that kind of patience.
Brad Ott, post: 359557, member: 197 wrote: The blue screen of death. Happened just last night. Glad my data is separated from my OS and on the external HD on my desk as well as out there on dropbox which has been very handy in many other ways including accessing files with my iPhone.
Try and remember back in the near past when it was smooth sailing and use that as a restore point.
If this is a new install, it probably needs to be opened in safe mode for some proper tweak to get the conflicts taken care of.
good luck
MyCloud EX2 - I have it setup like a server with multiple partitions. It also has several RAID settings, so it backs itself up to itself. I am going to get another one to keep off-site which will serve as another backup.
I like having the physical drive at my office and the remote access is pretty cool.
