Kara Edwards’ recent blog post prompts me to ask this question because sooner or later something is going to happen that means, if we don’t, we’ll wish we did have a back-up of something. (How’s that for a vague and unfocused sentence?)
For example, my son Eric’s laptop crashed a few weeks ago. Thankfully, nothing of consequence was on the hard drive that died. And replacing the drive, re-installing the operating system, the applications and so forth hasn’t been too hard; but it serves as a reminder that backing-up isn’t just a good idea … it’s a requirement.
Kara mentions that she’s using external hard drives for back-up. That’s a good idea. I go a couple of steps farther. I have an external drive for the initial round of back-ups. I then back-up to optical media (data DVDs) and I have another RAID drive attached to my network at home that holds back-ups of all critical files as well.
Amateurs… 😉
Fiber optic drives for the SAN running RAID config. O+1 config for the DAWs, and a lovely Scalar 1000 running tape backup (watching the robot run never gets old for me).
Overkill? Absolutely… but VO isn’t the only thing I do, and frankly the computers in the home lab can’t be offline for long.
For most folks, an external HDD is fine, though a nice network storage device is preferred (Linksys makes some half-decent ones that aren’t too bad on cost). If you’ve got the time and cash, Veritas NetBackup is a great solution, but most folks will do fine with Symantec Ghost, or if you like open source, Clonezilla. I’ve used all three and while NetBackup is the easiest solution for my needs, Ghost or Clonezilla will more than cover the job.
Here’s another gift from the grabbag. Since most disaster recovery scenarios involve the mechanical or logical failure of a critical storage device, there’s a freebie application out there which can potentially save you from disaster. It’s called HDtune and it’s a nice little application which tests and monitors your HDD for issues. They give the older version for free (which right now is 2.5.5, and runs fine), and 3.50, which has more security features and only runs $35. Either will do for the type of disk checking required to see whether the drive is failing.
Thus concludes your Continuity of Operations (COOP) briefing of the week. Enjoy!
-Greg
http://www.gregoryhouser.com
Greg,
Excellent stuff. Thank you for adding to much to the discussion. The NAS I’m using is a D-Link. I’m very happy with it.
Be well,
Bob
I’m constantly amazed how many individuals and businesses don’t do regular backups. Of course truth be told I learned the hard way myself years ago! I now back up the important stuff across multiple hard drives and also to DVDs. There’s a way to utilize google mail to store files that I need to figure out sometime as that would be free off-site storage.
Mark,
I too learned the hard way several years ago. Like you, my back-up system involves now multiple hard drives (including external local drives and a Network Attached Storage RAID) and optical media. DVDs for now and eventually I’m going to move to BluRay just because of the ever growing size of files.
Be well,
Bob
Thanks for sharing this experience. Every pc and laptops we own should be backup daily. NAS rocks.