HD sounds like a lawnmower mowing sticks.

tj86430 · **#21**

topazg wrote:

Ah, but do you also have a proper disaster recover plan that you test on a regular basis as well?

If this was directed to me: no. See my earlier post:

tj86430 wrote:

it's not even close to real "business best practices".

CarlJung · **#22**

kirkmc wrote:

Us Mac users have a feature called Time Machine, that saves files every hour, then stores the backups once a day (past the latest 24 hours), then once a week (past the last week). This means that whenever I have files that I find are corrupted, there's a fair chance that one of the backups will not be corrupted. I use this only for my home folder, but it has helped me get back files that I either accidentally deleted, or were corrupted.

Going beyond that, though, there are plenty of backup programs that let you keep every version of a file. I find that to be overkill.

From the little I have read about Time Machine it sounds like a fantastic peace of software. There are a ton of backup software for Windows and I bet some of them have something similar. It's on my todo list to research that.

topazg · **#23**

CarlJung wrote:

kirkmc wrote:

Us Mac users have a feature called Time Machine, that saves files every hour, then stores the backups once a day (past the latest 24 hours), then once a week (past the last week). This means that whenever I have files that I find are corrupted, there's a fair chance that one of the backups will not be corrupted. I use this only for my home folder, but it has helped me get back files that I either accidentally deleted, or were corrupted.

Going beyond that, though, there are plenty of backup programs that let you keep every version of a file. I find that to be overkill.

From the little I have read about Time Machine it sounds like a fantastic peace of software. There are a ton of backup software for Windows and I bet some of them have something similar. It's on my todo list to research that.

If you have a few machines at home that you'd want to backup, Veritas used do some good software, but Symantec now own it, so I don't know if it is the same, better, or worse: http://www.symantec.com/business/produc ... backupexec

There are definitely cheaper options for the single home user though.

daal · **#24**

CarlJung wrote:

My latest worry is that I corrupt an important file without noticing and then backup the corrupted file. That way the backup is unusable. Version control is the next step I need to take

Since my backup system could obviously use some tweaking, I googled version control, and found this nice explanation, for the less technically inclined among us:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-v ... n-control/

I'm also interested in learning how to automate backups. Can anyone point me in a good direction?

topazg · **#25**

tj86430 wrote:

topazg wrote:

Ah, but do you also have a proper disaster recover plan that you test on a regular basis as well?

If this was directed to me: no. See my earlier post:

tj86430 wrote:

it's not even close to real "business best practices".

Sorry, it was a slightly tongue in cheek comment

I'm impressed at the backup that a lot of people seem to do at home.

My procedure is basically a secure FTP upload (not publicly HTTP accessible) of my important documents (which are generally pretty small when compressed), and an external 750 GB HDD for everything else, which I update maybe once a month.

topazg · **#26**

daal wrote:

I'm also interested in learning how to automate backups. Can anyone point me in a good direction?

If you are a Windows user, you can get a licensed copy of Winrar or Winzip with command line utilities, and then write a batch file that automatically zips up and archives the zip files using Windows Scheduled Tasks.

It's about $40 or something I think for a lifetime licence, then the cost of external storage, then you should be set...

tj86430 · **#27**

I've used GFI Backup on Windows (http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm). It's not perfect, but it has a lot of good features. The Home Edition is free.

Time Machine is good, but the annoying thing is that it takes over the whole drive (IIRC).

kirkmc · **#28**

tj86430 wrote:

I've used GFI Backup on Windows (http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm). It's not perfect, but it has a lot of good features. The Home Edition is free.

Time Machine is good, but the annoying thing is that it takes over the whole drive (IIRC).

Time Machine requires a partition; I have it using a partition of a drive on which I store other backups.

tj86430 · **#29**

kirkmc wrote:

tj86430 wrote:

I've used GFI Backup on Windows (http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm). It's not perfect, but it has a lot of good features. The Home Edition is free.

Time Machine is good, but the annoying thing is that it takes over the whole drive (IIRC).

Time Machine requires a partition; I have it using a partition of a drive on which I store other backups.

If I want to have an USB disk partitioned into two, and use one partition for Time Machine and another partition for Windows on VirtualBox, should I use OS/X or Windows to do the partitioning?

Will Time Machine also be able back up the stuff on my network drive (or rather parts of it), i.e. I want to back up up stuff from my OS/X formatted internal drive as well as network drive (SMB)?

kirkmc · **#30**

tj86430 wrote:

kirkmc wrote:

tj86430 wrote:

I've used GFI Backup on Windows (http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm). It's not perfect, but it has a lot of good features. The Home Edition is free.

Time Machine is good, but the annoying thing is that it takes over the whole drive (IIRC).

Time Machine requires a partition; I have it using a partition of a drive on which I store other backups.

If I want to have an USB disk partitioned into two, and use one partition for Time Machine and another partition for Windows on VirtualBox, should I use OS/X or Windows to do the partitioning?

Will Time Machine also be able back up the stuff on my network drive (or rather parts of it), i.e. I want to back up up stuff from my OS/X formatted internal drive as well as network drive (SMB)?

I'm pretty sure that Time Machine requires HFS+. It works using hard links so the disk doesn't fill up quickly, and my guess is that Windows formatting doesn't allow for hard links (or if it does, they probably aren't the right kind). This said, you can choose FAT formatting for partitions from Disk Utility, so for this to work, you'd have to do it on the Mac side.

Time Machine can work on a local or a network drive.

fwiffo · **#31**

Actually, NTFS supports hard links, symbolic links and something called "NTFS junction points" which is like a special weird hard link for directories. But it doesn't seem like anybody uses them.

Most backup setups for linux have a time-machine like functionality using rsync and hard links, but kudos for Apple for making rsync-style versioned backups usable for the masses. Backups are so important, and it's not like versioned backups are some kind of sci-fi alien technology; I don't know why it's taken this long for them to be made user-friendly.

My basic strategy is that any time I get a new hard drive, I just get two plus an external enclosure. After I get everything installed on the new drive, I image it to the external twin then keep it up to date with rsync. Then when the drive in my box fails, I can just throw in the other drive and keep going. When I move on to the next computer, I can stick the external on a shelf somewhere. I have a stack of old drives that have all sorts of nostalgia fodder on them.

There are also those toaster-style docks. I haven't used them, but they're probably more cost effective if you're using a lot of external drives.

freegame · **#32**

I wonder how much date people backup.

I make a backup (manually copy) of a tiny part of my data files and digital photo's on an external disk I keep next to my PC.
A couple of times a year I put a backup on an old PC I keep at my parents home. (in case of robbery, fire ect.)
This is maybe 100GB of data.

On my main desktop PC I have 4TB of storage most of which is used (75-80%). Creating regular backups of all this just takes too long, and buying the extra storage isn't cheap either.

ethanb · **#33**

fwiffo wrote:

Actually, NTFS supports hard links, symbolic links and something called "NTFS junction points" which is like a special weird hard link for directories. But it doesn't seem like anybody uses them.

Most backup setups for linux have a time-machine like functionality using rsync and hard links, but kudos for Apple for making rsync-style versioned backups usable for the masses. Backups are so important, and it's not like versioned backups are some kind of sci-fi alien technology; I don't know why it's taken this long for them to be made user-friendly.

My basic strategy is that any time I get a new hard drive, I just get two plus an external enclosure. After I get everything installed on the new drive, I image it to the external twin then keep it up to date with rsync. Then when the drive in my box fails, I can just throw in the other drive and keep going. When I move on to the next computer, I can stick the external on a shelf somewhere. I have a stack of old drives that have all sorts of nostalgia fodder on them.

There are also those toaster-style docks. I haven't used them, but they're probably more cost effective if you're using a lot of external drives.

Yeah, I've always been puzzled by that - NTFS supports several modern filesystem features (well, modern in the sense of "any filesystem written since the 80s should do this,") but the only people who are allowed to actually use them are virus writers. :lol:

I think "junction points" are what we call bind mounts. So the people who wrote NTFS maybe were pushing to get away from the crazy, inconsistent "drive letter" scheme (and got beat down by Gates/Ballmer?)

Ah! I might have just figured it out. I bet NTFS was actually written for Xenix (which was supposed to replace DOS and Windows as the "operating system of the future" - before "Cairo" came out managers in Microsoft didn't want to be assigned to the Windows project because they thought it meant they were getting sacked soon.) When they decided they were going to continue using the win32 kernel they probably just grafted the POSIX (well, Weirdnix at least) filesystem onto the OS and called it an "enterprise feature."

kirkmc · **#34**

fwiffo wrote:

There are also those toaster-style docks. I haven't used them, but they're probably more cost effective if you're using a lot of external drives.

I've moved to disk docks in the past couple of years. Fewer cables, fewer power bricks, and, with the exception of drives that I use all the time (I have two externals connected to my Mac), it makes life oh-so-much-easier. Saves a lot of space too.

CarlJung · **#35**

fwiffo wrote:

There are also those toaster-style docks. I haven't used them, but they're probably more cost effective if you're using a lot of external drives.

What are these docks and how do they look? Picture?

fwiffo · **#36**

They look like... a toaster... and hook up via eSATA, USB or firewire. You can just plug a bare hard drive into it. I don't have a specific one that I've used or recommend, but here's an example: example toaster-style dock

Kirby · **#37**

I lost data due to a hard drive crash last year - mostly go stuff, but also some photos. I tried recovering the drive with some softare (on the mac) called DiskWarrior. I let it run for over a week, and it still didn't repair the drive. I finally gave up, and bought a new internal hard drive, and then an external hard drive to use for backups. Now, I use Time Machine with an external hard drive, and it seems to work fine.

I still have my old hard drive from last year in a closet somewhere. My hope is that there will be good enough software available sometime in the future for me to someday recover my data... Someday...

CarlJung · **#38**

fwiffo wrote:

They look like... a toaster... and hook up via eSATA, USB or firewire. You can just plug a bare hard drive into it. I don't have a specific one that I've used or recommend, but here's an example: example toaster-style dock

Ah, thanks.

ethanb · **#39**

Kirby wrote:

I lost data due to a hard drive crash last year - mostly go stuff, but also some photos. I tried recovering the drive with some softare (on the mac) called DiskWarrior. I let it run for over a week, and it still didn't repair the drive. I finally gave up, and bought a new internal hard drive, and then an external hard drive to use for backups. Now, I use Time Machine with an external hard drive, and it seems to work fine.

I still have my old hard drive from last year in a closet somewhere. My hope is that there will be good enough software available sometime in the future for me to someday recover my data... Someday...

Put it in the freezer for over 24 hours (in a ziplock bag or something so water doesn't condense around it) and throw it in the computer fast when you take it out.

ddrescue if=/dev/sdc of=bad_disk.img

GNU ddrescue (careful, there's a non-GNU program as well, dd_rescue - not as good) is awesome because you can tell it to go back over bad sections reading fewer bytes at a time. I rescued a disk that way and in the end (after 4 or 5 retries) I was able to recover everything but 27 bytes, IIRC. I'll live with a skip in one MP3 file.

LocoRon · **#40**

ethanb wrote:

Put it in the freezer for over 24 hours (in a ziplock bag or something so water doesn't condense around it) and throw it in the computer fast when you take it out.

Just a note: This method will destroy the platters, thus making any future attempts impossible (or nearly so), therefor it should be saved as an absolute last resort. There is also no guarantee it will work. If you have anything very important on your drives, do not attempt this. Send the drive to a pro to take care of (it will be expensive, anywhere from $1000-$5000).

That said, if you don't care about the data on your drive all that much, but would still like to try and get it back, this is a good trick to try.

HD sounds like a lawnmower mowing sticks.

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