I was sitting here saving some completed jobs to an external hard drive and was wondering what ya'll do to archive your jobs. I have a legal pad that I write down the jobs that I have completed then every so often save to hd. Usually at the end of the year I save from hd to dvd's as a further backup. Always looking for a better method. I know there are several ways to skin a cat so what's yours.
You should always be prepared for any one electronic media failure to occur when you can least afford it, and maybe even two. What if the hard disk crashed and you hadn't tested the DVD you thought you were writing?
I am reminded of the corporate oops I saw once. They had a practice of writing backup tapes for the mainframe hard disks every so often. Big operation with multiple tape drives. They did an operating system upgrade over a holiday break so they made tape copies and reformatted the hard disks. When they started reading tapes back in, 1 in 10 didn't have data, apparently a bad write circuit on one of the tape drives. They fell back one backup period and got most of what was missing, some with prior versions of people's data. Fall back a cycle and repeat process until you've got all you can.
Your choice on what form of redundancy you use.
My system backs up to an external USB drive every night. I back up to another USB drive every Friday that I keep offsite. I back up the day's dwg's to a thumb drive every night and carry it with me. CD's and DVD's fail and get old. Redundancy is power!
Every time I do something important on my computer, I do an Acronis backup of the entire drive to an external drive. I also copy my important files to another external drive, in a subdirectory by date, usually once a month, so I can go back and load any file as of a given date. I also copy the files to a thumb drive and then onto the laptop. Between them I hope I have it all covered. The external drives are only turned on when actually copying.
ps Drives will fail, period. It is just a matter of the unknown when.
This office used to belong to a surveyor. This is why I say you should use a backup system that keeps your files off site.
There are several companies that provide this service.
Larry P
all jobs on a server with RAID drives
everything backs up to Carbonite every night
Where do you store the job that you just finalized, signed, sealed and delivered and are putting to bed that in 2 years or 5 years you call it up and know that is the finalized plat with all point nos., raw data etc. Thumb drives and externals fill up. The offsite storage - do you ever have to download because it fills up or just buy more storage room?
separate server for archive only, we use that for projects over 7 years old.
dual hard drives, second is backup only.
backup active and accumulative automatically every few hours, and manually when significant work is done.
3 external drives, all redundant, backed up every few days... one off site.
old drive from old dead computers are filed, after copying
I only use CDs for frisbees or coasters
lots of redundancy, just like surveying
quick and cheap...
i use SOS online backup and it is automatic, backs up daily and very reasonable, could not be happier, you can restore any version of a file, it saves any file that has changed. worth every penny. I had a hardrive failure in the spring that lost 2 weeks of data, SOS saved it all.
I use Carbonite. It's pretty cheap and very easy once it's set up. It works automatically so you don't have to think about it. I occasionally back up to dvd's, just to have a local backup. An external hard drive would work, too, but it's nice to know your work is being saved off site, in case of the worst.
> I use Carbonite. It's pretty cheap and very easy once it's set up.
There's a reason Carbonite is cheap: they don't back up your data. (Carbonite's response to this is that they *do* have a backup in the form of your hard drive.) If you happen to be unlucky enough to have your local storage fail at the same time Carbonite's fails, you can kiss your data goodbye.
My wife uses Carbonite. One time she wanted to restore a file that she somehow couldn't find, and learned that Carbonite had lost her account's data. All of it. They apologized and said they're restore their copies from her hard drive during the next scheduled backup.
Carbonite is the belt-and-suspenders approach, minus the belt. And sometimes minus the suspenders.
Rentavault is owned and operated by a PLS here in NC. They are really good guys.
Larry P
My City had a very comprehensive backup system involving RAID drives. It failed... They now pay someone for offsite backup.
I have a server with a RAID5 and 3 HD's that strip between the three. Then have automatic backups of the server to the internet via SOS online. We also keep paper copies in storage.
