Seriously people

[SkinBasket]

Back your shit up on physical media. I was a week from doing it. Then the heads on our hard drive failed so hard they destroyed the platters. We were willing to pay $1200 to recover the data - just to make sure we weren't missing anything, but they can't. I also have 95% of the same data on the drive I had transferred it from a few months ago. In that time, that drive also failed - on a less physical level, so there is still high hopes for an almost complete recovery. But we're still one failed recovery effort away from losing 10 years of digital photos, illegal music downloads, and hundreds of hours of creative and professional work.

[Zool]

Hard drives are so ridiculously cheap now that there's no reason to not at least have a RAID 0 setup(where 2 drives are mirrored to contain the same data). Most motherboards in the last 3 years support it. In ADDITION to a raid you should also have an external USB drive running backups weekly.

DVD backups of specific things you want to make sure and save(i.e. digital photos) are always a really good idea and cheap to do.

Leaving your computer on and not having the drives spin down for power save actually extends the life of your drive.

[Freak Out]

After losing a fuck load of digital photos a couple of years ago (my wife will never let me forget it) I do what Zardoz is suggesting. I have two external hardrives I back all the digital media up on once a week and I keep electronic financial and personal files backed up to smaller drives. I do have a raid setup on a gaming rig but don't keep any other files stored on it...I just wanted better performance. That is coming to and end though and I'm going to start using SSDs on my game box.

[Scott Campbell]

Raid? No thanks.

http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mediasmart-server/#/Why/

If you don't want to build a Windows Home Server yourself, just buy one like the one in the link above. I've seen them as low as $250. Backups are automatic and nightly. But it does far more than just backups, and it is easily the best Microsoft product that I've ever owned.

[SkinBasket]

Yeah, I've always left our computer running to reduce the stress on moving parts and the expansion/contraction of the boards.

Apparently the heads broke and skidded against the platter for half a day before I noticed the system was down.

Backing the shit up got delayed and I was lazy because I knew I had the old HDD. What a shitstorm.

Something tells me I'm going to be storing DVDs in a fireproof safe from now on.

[SkinBasket]

Raid? No thanks.

http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mediasmart-server/#/Why/

If you don't want to build a Windows Home Server yourself, just buy one like the one in the link above. I've seen them as low as $250. Backups are automatic and nightly. But it does far more than just backups, and it is easily the best Microsoft product that I've ever owned.

Essentially this machine was our media server. Without the back-up. Which in hindsight was kind of an important omission.

[Scott Campbell]

Raid? No thanks.

http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mediasmart-server/#/Why/

If you don't want to build a Windows Home Server yourself, just buy one like the one in the link above. I've seen them as low as $250. Backups are automatic and nightly. But it does far more than just backups, and it is easily the best Microsoft product that I've ever owned.

Essentially this machine was our media server. Without the back-up. Which in hindsight was kind of an important omission.

This thing is strictly a server - no keyboard or monitor. If you run multiple PC's, it'll handle the backups on all of them. The other thing you could do is run "Folder Synch". It's free ware that will synch the contents of designated folders across your network. But it's a little more manual.

Is your porn collection intact?

[Kiwon]

You guys are scaring me.

The fail rate for mobile HDD are high?

What's the best solution for a family scattered around the world? On-line backups?

The media server solution looks good but what can go wrong with them? Won't they eventually fail at some point themselves? You know, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Murphy's Law, etc.

[Scott Campbell]

You guys are scaring me.

The fail rate for mobile HDD are high?

What's the best solution for a family scattered around the world? On-line backups?

The media server solution looks good but what can go wrong with them? Won't they eventually fail at some point themselves? You know, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Murphy's Law, etc.

Yeah, any hard drive will fail sooner or later. But the point is that your chances of the server failing at the same time that a main rig fails is pretty much non existent - unless you have a fire or something.

In a perfect world we'd all keep daily backups off-site. The media server isn't perfect, but it beats the crap out of what most people are doing. And it's ridiculously easy and cheap to set up and automate for nightly backups. I don't have to "do" anything. I have a little green button in my system tray that lets me know that both machines are backed up daily. If it turns yellow, something went wrong. Easy, cheap and more robust are the reasons I'd recommend it.

But admittedly, I'm not an IT guy.

[mraynrand]

You guys are scaring me.

The fail rate for mobile HDD are high?

What's the best solution for a family scattered around the world? On-line backups?

The media server solution looks good but what can go wrong with them? Won't they eventually fail at some point themselves? You know, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Murphy's Law, etc.

Yeah, any hard drive will fail sooner or later. But the point is that your chances of the server failing at the same time that a main rig fails is pretty much non existent - unless you have a fire or something.

In a perfect world we'd all keep daily backups off-site. The media server isn't perfect, but it beats the crap out of what most people are doing. And it's ridiculously easy and cheap to set up and automate for nightly backups. I don't have to "do" anything. I have a little green button in my system tray that lets me know that both machines are backed up daily. If it turns yellow, something went wrong. Easy, cheap and more robust are the reasons I'd recommend it.

But admittedly, I'm not an IT guy.

I don't know what to do - I'm up over 2 terabytes with digitizing Packer games. And now the f'ing HD games take up 30gb each. I can't back that up, and I have to jump through hoops to make the backup ignore the places where those are stored. Annoying. I wish the NF fucking L would sell games on blu ray.

[Scott Campbell]

You guys are scaring me.

The fail rate for mobile HDD are high?

What's the best solution for a family scattered around the world? On-line backups?

The media server solution looks good but what can go wrong with them? Won't they eventually fail at some point themselves? You know, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Murphy's Law, etc.

Yeah, any hard drive will fail sooner or later. But the point is that your chances of the server failing at the same time that a main rig fails is pretty much non existent - unless you have a fire or something.

In a perfect world we'd all keep daily backups off-site. The media server isn't perfect, but it beats the crap out of what most people are doing. And it's ridiculously easy and cheap to set up and automate for nightly backups. I don't have to "do" anything. I have a little green button in my system tray that lets me know that both machines are backed up daily. If it turns yellow, something went wrong. Easy, cheap and more robust are the reasons I'd recommend it.

But admittedly, I'm not an IT guy.

I don't know what to do - I'm up over 2 terabytes with digitizing Packer games. And now the f'ing HD games take up 30gb each. I can't back that up, and I have to jump through hoops to make the backup ignore the places where those are stored. Annoying. I wish the NF fucking L would sell games on blu ray.

My server is at 6TB now, and it could easily be at 9TB with the new cheap 1.5's available. Windows Home Server allows you to specify which folders to backup.

[Zool]

You guys are scaring me.

The fail rate for mobile HDD are high?

What's the best solution for a family scattered around the world? On-line backups?

The media server solution looks good but what can go wrong with them? Won't they eventually fail at some point themselves? You know, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Murphy's Law, etc.

Yeah, any hard drive will fail sooner or later. But the point is that your chances of the server failing at the same time that a main rig fails is pretty much non existent - unless you have a fire or something.

In a perfect world we'd all keep daily backups off-site. The media server isn't perfect, but it beats the crap out of what most people are doing. And it's ridiculously easy and cheap to set up and automate for nightly backups. I don't have to "do" anything. I have a little green button in my system tray that lets me know that both machines are backed up daily. If it turns yellow, something went wrong. Easy, cheap and more robust are the reasons I'd recommend it.

But admittedly, I'm not an IT guy.

I don't know what to do - I'm up over 2 terabytes with digitizing Packer games. And now the f'ing HD games take up 30gb each. I can't back that up, and I have to jump through hoops to make the backup ignore the places where those are stored. Annoying. I wish the NF fucking L would sell games on blu ray.

My server is at 6TB now, and it could easily be at 9TB with the new cheap 1.5's available. Windows Home Server allows you to specify which folders to backup.

The built in backup software allows you to do incremental backups too. Theres really no need to backup your OS and this is where the local RAID comes in. If one drive on your workstation fails, the other picks up and goes. When you replace the bad drive in the mirror, it rebuilds the mirror.

[Scott Campbell]

The built in backup software allows you to do incremental backups too. Theres really no need to backup your OS and this is where the local RAID comes in. If one drive on your workstation fails, the other picks up and goes. When you replace the bad drive in the mirror, it rebuilds the mirror.

WHS will back up all PC's (and Mac's too I believe) on your network - including laptops. Can RAID do that?

[Tyrone Bigguns]

Macs don't have hard drive failures or require backup.

Life without boundaries you pc tools.

[Partial]

Re: Seriously people

Back your shit up on physical media. I was a week from doing it. Then the heads on our hard drive failed so hard they destroyed the platters. We were willing to pay $1200 to recover the data - just to make sure we weren't missing anything, but they can't. I also have 95% of the same data on the drive I had transferred it from a few months ago. In that time, that drive also failed - on a less physical level, so there is still high hopes for an almost complete recovery. But we're still one failed recovery effort away from losing 10 years of digital photos, illegal music downloads, and hundreds of hours of creative and professional work.

Cloud storage is the answer. S3 is cheap, and I'm sure there is even cheaper stuff out there.

Too bad xdrive wasn't still around. That was an awesome application.