Timely reminder - Fan Heaters, check for hot running and clean.

[geoff]

Following on from thoughts in another thread

Who has been meaning to, but hasn't got round to ...

backing up the important data on their computer ?

[Cicero]

=================================================

And possibly also copying or verifying older data CDs / DVDs to prevent any chance of corruption. I believe that some CDs and DVDs can age badly.

Cic.

[Bob Eager]

Do it every day...

[S Viemeister]

Finally got around to that this weekend!

[Owain]

After a bit of a balls-up in April, I no longer have any important data on my computer :-(

Owain

[Jules]

And they can be damaged easily, and there seems no guarantee that a disc created in one drive will always work in the drive of a different manufacturer.

Fine for transient stuff, or as a secondary source, but I just don't trust them as primary for anything critical.

cheers

Jules

[Jules]

I've moved around a lot, so I've never had a very coherent backup plan. My problem is that I create too many darn backups, and I've ended up with about 20 different archives split across two countries, with various duplicates and/or previous revisions of files.

I'm currently picking things apart file-by-file to make sure I've got just one 'live' version and a couple of backups of the most recent copy of every single file, and it's taking forever...

cheers

Jules

[Cicero]

================================================

Before moving (almost completely) to Ubuntu I used XXcopy to sort out my files. If you don't know about it (XXcopy) it's an extended version of the Dos command, Xcopy. You can do all kinds of clever things with it to reduce vast numbers of files to proper order.

Cic.

[Tim W]

geoff wibbled on Friday 01 January 2010 13:09

My oldest computer (Debian Unstable) that I built over 7 years ago just started frying one disk (1 of 4 Seagates).

It was my backup server and exim email server. It's being re-burnt in, failing disk will be removed and the rest reinstalled with Ubuntu 8.04 (LTS) and used again as a backup box (Still got >0.5TB storage).

That and my old bent exim config was the last element of my systems that was pissing me off.

Finally, I almost understand my email config(!) having moved and redone it on another server. Managed to integrate DSPAM (antispam with learning) into the IMAP server (Dovecot) so whenever a user drags missed spam to the Junk folder, the IMAP server triggers a learning cycle on that mail. Ditto in reverse for mail being miss classed as SPAM. That's the way it should be.

DIY, but not as you know it Jim :)

[geoff]

In message , geoff writes

And WHAT a timely reminder

just got most of the way through a major back up and ...

computer died on me

Just finished reinstalling turnpike on my backup machine and back up and running again

Of course, since I never file data on the C drive a crash is normally recoverable anyway. This machine crashes and restarts just as the login screen appears

[Tim W]

Owain wibbled on Friday 01 January 2010 13:49

To anyone who is not backing up their data, the simplest way is go and buy a USB key. Don't be cheap - buy a solid one with good flash memory, eg Corsair.

I have the Corsair one that comes in an ali tube - waterproof, nearly indestructible and stays on my keyring at all times.

Normal mortals don't usually have that much data - the bulk is usually digital photos. If you can be organised in keeping all your real work in one place on the PC rather than splattered all over the desktop and in random directories under C: or whatever, backup regimes become much simpler.

Personally, I would keep my non media files on the USB stick along with small amounts of media files (photos) if that's all you have.

If you have a serious amount of media, the only sensible method is buy another hard disk and dupe everything over periodically - cheapest method per GB. Best to have an external drive you can jack into the PC then remove to another room or car in case of major disasters.

Even better is a small WIFI or wired NAS server (eg one of the little Buffalo ones or the many equivalents) and site it as far away from the PC as possible. Shed or garage is a good place.

Just for argument's sake, I've had a digicam since 2003 and my photo collection totals 31GB. That would still make a 64GB USB stick viable. a 0.5 to 1TB external hard disk would cope for a long time.

My home directory is 8GB, but a lot of that is expanded source code (other peoples') that could be recovered - if I had to I'd move that elsewhere.

My shared documents including house CAD stuff and letters, spreadsheets etc is 2.5G.

I consider myself quite a heavy user, so as you see, having a backup solution doesn't need to cost much.

73 quid for a *fast* 32GB rugged stick (many cheap ones are unbelievably slow, meaning filling them in one hit could take many hours to all day).

One or two of those is totally worth the money if you value anything you produce.

This external USB HD is all of 51 quid:

[Tim W]

Bob Eager wibbled on Friday 01 January 2010 13:36

Wouldn't expect any less from you Bob :)

[geoff]

In message , Tim W writes

From experience

buy two and make two backups, takes only a little more time and, having had one die on me ...

it's what I always do daily at work

before xmas, they had run out of internal TB HDDs (not worth buying smaller nowadays in £/Byte) and came away with two Hitachi external TB HDDs because they were less than £60 each (except that I can only see the 500G ones on their site for £48 incl VAT ATM)

[Tim W]

Cicero wibbled on Friday 01 January 2010 17:47

And rsync is available for windows too and is very clever for backing up changes efficiently. With a bit of messing about[1] one can get quite a nice set of full + incremental backups running automagically.

[1] I came across a new wrapper for rsync for managing this - once I've remembered what it is, I'll mention it here...

[Cicero]

================================================

I've not had any occasion to use 'rsync' (in Ubuntu) because I've actually done very little file handling since changing over. It's just been so pleasant to be able to switch on every day and know that there won't be any problems.

I spent several weeks using XXcopy on four computers with eleven DVD drives to get some kind of order from years of hasty backing up. I've now got all my data stored in triplicate on a mix of hard drives and DVDs on different computers. One computer is still dual boot to XP / Ubuntu because I need about six different Windows Word Processors to read all the files created over the years. One day I'll complete the process and convert all the different file types to one single type. Then I'll feel that the data is truly safe and fully accessible.

Cic.

[Jules]

Yes, I normally use rsync for backing up from 'live' to backup drives (slackware/linux) - but ISTR it couldn't handle the aspect of merging a whole bunch of files into one tree and discarding duplicates (if those files had the same path relative to the start of their archive it would be a different matter).

I'll have a look a xxcopy as maybe that has a go at this.

I did concoct a script to find duplicates using md5sum and ditch them, and every simulation I've run shows it to be doing exactly what I expect, but running it 'for real' on valid data makes me nervous (and running someone else's tool which I don't know the internals of perhaps makes me more nervous still :-)

cheers

Jules

[Owain]

it was all stored in home/owain and home was on a separate partition. But a OS reinstall rather overenthusiastically reformatted the disk instead of its own partition.

A file that big? It might be very useful. But now it is gone.

(attrib to Asai Tawara of Sony)

Owain

[Tim W]

Jules wibbled on Friday 01 January 2010 21:31

There's a lovely utility in linux called fslint that does this wonderfully.

Sadly for others, it doesn't obviously appear to be readily available for windows, prolly as it has a GUI which always makes cross compilation harder (but not alway impossible!).

[Tim W]

Owain wibbled on Friday 01 January 2010 22:12

I feel your pain...

One of the benefits of occasionally working somewhere with dosh - the important data would be on a SCSI array and it was a simple matter to yank the cable/fibre for the reinstall.

Not that we did that often - there was enough dosh to buy a whole new setup, get it working and tested then copy the data over.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

[Huge]

Microsoft "synctoy";

a treat.