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What do you do for backups?

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What do you do for backups?

AgnessGP

AgnessGP

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What does everyone do for backups? Everyday I think I have thousands of emails on Yahoo! Mail but they are purely online, and some of which are extremely important. Do you backup your emails?

What do you do with documents?

I have an external hardrive but even then, what happens in 30 years time when devices and inputs are much different?

It just scares me that I have years and years of memories etc, all saved digitally. Whether on drop box, external hardrive, memory sticks, it is all digital.

What do you use?
 
Having worked in the IT industry for nearly thirty years, I totally understand your concerns. My first 10Mb SCSI hard drive cost around £1,000, new (showing my age); and some of the removable stuff we used for backup (tapes, Zip drives, 3.5" and 5.25" floppies) are now just about obsolete.... :(

Currently, I probably rely on the cloud just a little too much -- as I mostly use my iPad and iPhone; but when I used a Mac, for work, as well, I backed up everything (emails -- which were downloaded; not left in the cloud... -- documents, photos, etc.), every day, to two external hard drives, and a RAID set-up. Having seen too many hardware failures in my life, I just like the idea of as much redundancy, as possible.... :rolleyes:

To be honest, I don't think there's a perfect system -- i.e. one where you'll ever be 100% convinced that your data is safe. All you can do is build a system (preferably with a duplicate, offsite...) that gives you a fighting chance of recovery.... :eek:
 
We've got a huge NAS drive (which mimics apple time machine) so macs and PCs are set to backup when left idle

Phones and iPads back up via wifi when available, but also sync with iCloud

I think the NAS box cost £45 and the hard drive that's in it was another £60 or so, it still has an empty slot for a second drive which can either be for further storage or copy the first drive.
 
Don't worry about it, worry about something important, I've lost so much stuff over the last 20+ years and can't see how any of it will enrich my life later if I still had it. About the only thing I can think of that you might want to keep for later posterity/nostalgia is photographs which you can always just get developed, you know, like people used to? ;)
 
Nice replies thanks for that! Didn't realise how much was out there.

I use dropbox which is also a type of cloud system, but that's my problem, dropbox isn't 100% reliable, and what if they have a problem? Bankruptcy?

You're right in what you say that no system is perfect, I just want the best possible chance, probably RAID array and syncing the whole PC.

I suppose with photos i could print them off (hard copy then), but even then, hasn't new ink been proven to only last around ten years?

Also, I guess there's the option of burning to DVD, but again, DVDs don't last forever.

Difficult isn't it :( I only really thought because I really do rely on my computer working everytime, and when it doesn't, I'd be screwed. I think i'd rather lose my car and my wallet than my computer.
 
Eklipze3k said:
Don't worry about it, worry about something important, I've lost so much stuff over the last 20+ years and can't see how any of it will enrich my life later if I still had it. About the only thing I can think of that you might want to keep for later posterity/nostalgia is photographs which you can always just get developed, you know, like people used to? ;)
Click to expand...

Our family are extremely nostalgic lol. My dad has spreadsheets and reciepts of nearly everything he has ever bought. The other day he told me what he bought me for my 6th birthday or something. I'm not a hoarder, but I just want to make sure I don't lose anything.

I know what you mean though, you always think you'll miss something but when it's gone you don't really feel much different!
 
AndyRKett said:
We've got a huge NAS drive (which mimics apple time machine) so macs and PCs are set to backup when left idle

Phones and iPads back up via wifi when available, but also sync with iCloud

I think the NAS box cost £45 and the hard drive that's in it was another £60 or so, it still has an empty slot for a second drive which can either be for further storage or copy the first drive.
Click to expand...

I hope your NAS has RAID or sync's it's data somewhere else or it's just an additional link of failure. From my experience NAS boxes have a nasty habit of failing quietly without warning.
 
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ChrisUK said:
I hope your NAS has RAID or sync's it's data somewhere else or it's just an additional link of failure. From my experience NAS boxes have a nasty habit of failing quietly without warning.
Click to expand...

It does indeed have RAID.

Basically it syncs between the computers and the drive when the network is idle so if the NAS fails the data is still on the computers if the drive fails or disappears from the network the Mac is pretty quick to tell you.

the problem with doing a lot of photography and filming is the huge amount of storage needed i think its currently 500GB of just photos and videos this makes cloud storing stuff very expensive and time intensive. although now flickr gives everyone a free TB that makes for a good place to store pretty much all my photos

Am currently working on a film project where we are turning a 2006 VW T5 ex plasterers van into a camper van, where one day of filming easily nets 30GB of files of which only about 4% will be used in the final cut, all these files need to be local because as above you can't process 30GB from cloud storage it would take hours in uploading and downloading
 
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AgnessGP said:
I suppose the best backup is to stick everything on a hard drive, print out possibly, burn to a dvd, and hide away for access in years to come.
Click to expand...

Not really, DVDs scratch very easily, and hard drives will break at some point.

With Livedrive everything that's on your computers hard drive (that you select) is stored in the cloud on RAID servers so is perfectly safe.

Dom
 
AgnessGP said:
Are online storage mediums reliable then? sounds like a silly question, but just curious to what you think
Click to expand...

They're more reliable than anything you can reproduce yourself without a billion pound budget. Only draw back is like Andy mentioned is your link "to the cloud" is too crap to do multimedia. Unless you live in Sweden or Finland with Gigabit Internet lol.
 
I never bother to backup anything outside of my PC although I keep windows on a separate hard drive to all my such as movies/music/games etc, especially all my photos and anything else I would rather not lose.

This way if windows buggers up or I get a virus or something of that nature (I know it is still possible for it to affect my other hdd if its a really bad one), I can just format the drive and reinstall windows without having to worry about my important files.
 
I'd love to do online backups, but my internet connection just isn't fast enough. Documents are OK, but photos and videos no chance.

For that reason, I never delete photos from my camera / video camera even once they've been copied to the PC.

Then, every so often, I'll just run a full backup of my laptop to an external drive (which is kept in a fireproof safe :))

I was also thinking to get a RAID NAS box, but, they don't support EFS, so all my data would be on there unencrypted, which is no good.
 
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