Today was International Backup Awareness Day

[pokerfan]

December 14, 2009
International Backup Awareness Day

You may notice that commenting is currently disabled, and many old Coding Horror posts are missing images. That's because, sometime early on Friday, the server this blog is hosted on suffered catastrophic data loss.

Here's what happened:

1. The server experienced routine hard drive failure.
2. Because of the hard drive failure, the virtual machine image hosting this blog was corrupted.
3. Because the blog was hosted in a virtual machine, the standard daily backup procedures at the host were unable to ever back it up.
4. Because I am an idiot, I didn't have my own (recent) backups of Coding Horror. Man, I wish I had read some good blog entries on backup strategies!
5. Because there were no good backups, there was catastrophic data loss. Fin, draw curtain, exeunt stage left.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001315.html

My system has removable drive bays. I use two drives for backup so that I can rotate them through my safe deposit box at the bank. Granted, this rotation may only happen once every couple of weeks, but it's better than no backup at all.

I use rsynch to mirror the contents of my /home directory to a removable drive. I prefer creating a mirror to some arcane compression system because I like to see that my data is actually there. Besides, most of my data (in terms of total bytes anyway) is already compressed in some fashion (video files, jpgs, mp3s, etc. so further compression is pretty much an exercise in futility. If my primary drive fails, then I can revert to the local backup. I the house goes up in flames or I'm burgled, then it's a trip to the bank.

Don't think this can't happen to you. Last month, I had a drive just die. No warning whatsoever. I booted the system and the BIOS said that it couldn't see any drives! A bit of diagnostics traced it down to one drive (out of three) in my system. Whenever this particular drive is attached to my system, it now prevents recognition of any drive. Go figure. That drive is now sitting on my shelf. I hope to revive it someday when I have time to look at it but frankly, I'm not hopeful. Fortunately, I had a backup.

[Old and In the Way]

1. When you have a failure that wipes out your business data, you

get the religion on back-up pretty quick.I lost a little over 2 years worth of business data when my hard drive jammed in a complete failure. Now I have 2 external HDs continuously backing up, daily. I have another solid state drive I leave in my car's glove compartment (locked and encrypted) that's my fail-safe back-up.

[hermetic]

2. Yesterday I got myself

a flash drive, something I just learned about on this board a short while ago. It's just a little, bitty thing. I sure hope it does what I think it will. I don't have much but I would be heartbroken if I lost all my photos and a few very important documents.

:hi:

[Old and In the Way]

3. It's all about the bytes

If you have, say,a 128 Meg flash, it'll store roughly 100 HD pics or 30 MP3 songs. If you have, say a 16 Gigabytes device, thanks 16,000 Megs of storage - a lot more pics, vids, and music!

[struggle4progress]

4. Backup is good. Multiple backups is good. I use internal and external drives, as

well as a combination of different backup programs