Rant Need for back ups

[paddy2]

02:00hrs working on my mesh and the £$%"& machine froze.
O.K. I had a few windows open but I have 3Gb of RAM.

Had to reboot.

Just will not boot. Tried to reinstall windows, will not have it. Will boot and run from CDROM but not the disk. Used BART to run tests, so very very slow

End result move a different disk into machine and start again. So I could boot to one dick and pull files off the old one

I had been backing up my project, well saving another copy as file 1, file2, file3
(Wings3d does a great job of that.) but not to another disk

Had I a real backup I could have been up and running within the hour, not best part of a day later. Still got a mass of re-installs to do....

HOW UP TO DATE ARE YOUR BACK UPS??????

 

[Astronut25]

IT Advice

I've found it to be significantly better to separate the OS and Virtual memory, and the other files onto separate disks.

it significantly improves performance, and would make this sort of problem easier to work with. Also, the drive that has the Virtual Memory will be used a lot more and won't last as long, and reinstalling just your OS is a lot easier than installing all your programs (contrary to popular belief, you can just copy/paste most programs from one computer to another, programs will automatically correct the lack of registry entries in most cases)

 

[Keatah]

When it comes to backing up my system (which I do on an irregular basis 2x or 3x every year) I image the entire C:\ disk. This means OS/VM/APPS/BOOT/SETTINGS/REGISTRY/WINDOWS. All of it. And I use something like Macrium or Acronis to do it. Anything goes wrong, hardware fail, virus, theft ---[[ BAM!! ]]--- I'm back in business within the hour. This image will restore the entire system the way it was before. Including installed programs and all their customized settings & registry keys. My configuration is relatively stable, I don't make a lot of changes too frequently. And thus I have settled on running main system backups about every 6 months more or less.

I also keep my user generated data separate - projects, photoshop material, music, saved games, personal correspondence & records, personal journal, photos, MyDocuments, things like that.. I keep that in either "special" directories on the main disk or on a second disk entirely. This is very dynamic, stuff changes daily. So I back this up with something like a filesync program, DirSync or FreeFileSync. Sometimes I just use multiple saves. I run it daily or weekly and it takes about 3 or 4 minutes, tops. It may scan through thousands upon thousands of files, but only copy or update 25 or so. Because those 25 are either new or changed by me during the course of the week.

Everything is nicely set up and my weekly backups are truly one-click operations. That is my way of doing things, and everybody is going to be a little different.

The whole point of backing up is to have two copies of everything you want to keep. The few crunch times I needed my backups they surely saved the day! Saved me weeks of work from not having to re-build and reconfigure the system. Also saved a lot of irreplaceable personal data. In fact, it took me longer to get to the computer store for a replacement disk one time than it did to get everything back to normal.

 

[garyw]

I rarely back up my PC. I back up the data once a week to a NAS storage device then once a month that backup gets sent offsite to Amazon S3. To date I've not yet lost any data.

I need to take an image of the PC simply because restoring it will be much quicker, if I lost the PC today I'd just drop an image from a Windows Deployment server, reinstall the apps over the network and restore the data. Probably 3 hours work.

As someone once told me 'any data you don't backup is data you never really wanted'

 

[Keatah]

I've since further simplified my "backup operations". Spending something like 1/2 hour every month or two. Fantastic "low cost insurance" that has pulled me out of a jam a couple of times.

There have been times when folks have sent me a small payment when they used their backed-up files to effect a restore of some sort. After I pounded a lecture into them. How cool is that?

 

[Ripley]

I also take a full system image every now and then, and a daily/weekly backup of my personal files on an external USB HD.

One click on the desktop to run the backup (robocopy).
Few minutes to restore the system image, plus 1~2 hours to restore files from USB disk.

 

[paddy2]

At least I am able to get the files back. Will take time but sleep is for babies!!!