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I have most of my files on an external HD.
If that one dies I'll be over in the corner crying my eyes out in fetal position 
In other words, completely unprepared 
All my code is in the cloud, so at least it'll be business as usual professionally.
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Sander Rossel wrote: If that one dies I'll be over in the corner crying my eyes out in fetal position
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Replace it with a three (or four) disk NAS box running RAID5 - that way a single HDD failure isn't fatal, the data can be fully recovered from the other two. (It works: I had one go down and the NAS worked flawlessly with just two while I waited for the replacement to be delivered)
If the electronics fail, you can generally read the disks in a new enclosure by the same manufacturer (but not a different one, they all use their own RAID controllers, even if the actual disks are all stored formatted as EX2).
And HDD failure is guaranteed; electronics tend to last considerably longer.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Replace it with a three (or four) disk NAS box running RAID5
That sounds difficult and expensive and I don't do hardware 
I'll probably buy a second external disk somewhere in the future and copy everything there.
Or put some stuff in the cloud.
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It's really simple: buy the box, plug it in. Connect it to your network (instructions will be with the unit) and via your browser tell it what RAID level you want. Then just set up shares as if it was a computer.
Easy-peasy, honest.
And not that expensive: a 12TB unit complete with 4 * 3tb Disks is cheaper than a new lappie: Seagate 12TB Cloud Business Network Storage 4 Bay DLNA RAID NAS Gigabit Ethernet 7636490032042 | eBay[^] (I have the 16TB previous version of this and it's given me no problems in the three or four years I've had it)
Yes, you could buy a second external disk for a quarter of that, but ...
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I'm thinking of moving my stuff to One Drive or some such.
Way cheaper and at least I'll still have my files when the house burns down 
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Quote: I have most of my files on an external HD
I have them on multiple external HDs with multiple backup copies on yet more external HDs. I have at least three copies of everything, four copies for the really essential files, plus additional (encrypted and zipped) copies on OneDrive and Dropbox.
I just had two external 5TB hard drives, 2yr old and 3yr old, turn into doorstops and have ordered two replacements (8TB) that should arrive tomorrow. Funnily enough, I have a bunch of 2TB HDs that are a lot older (6+ years) and still running strong. You can never tell.
I haven't lost a file this millenium.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Forogar wrote: I have at least three copies of everything, four copies for the really essential files, plus additional (encrypted and zipped) copies on OneDrive and Dropbox.
Five to six copies of everything? 
1000 years from now...
News anchor: "Researchers have found what appears to be yet another copy of a folder called 'Forogar vacation pictures' containing the same pictures as in previous excavations.
Having found these same images around the world researcher now wonder, who was Forogar?"
Researcher: "We have found no records of any Forogar anywhere, yet his vacation pictures keep turning up around the world, this is the 50th finding."
News anchor: "In other news, Leslie Nielson has died..."
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Quote: Five to six copies of everything?
Yeah, I know. Only five copies of some things - but I only have so much disk space and bandwidth available. Compromises have to be made sometimes. 
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Well, you can't be paranoid enough... Or can you!?
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I have:
- A NAS server, to which all PCs and portables in the house are backed up once a week.
- An image of the NAS server, taken monthly, stored at home. This is rotated with
- An image of the NAS server, taken monthly, stored off-site.
All my personal data are backed up to a level sufficient for my needs.
Our area is not susceptible to floods (~200 meters above sea level, ~20 kilometers inland). Should I need to replace the hardware (e.g. due to theft or a fire), I have no reason to assume that the shops will not be open. If a major earthquake or a nuclear war hits the area, I'll have bigger problems than my hardware...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I have a simple backup policy: I do not get attached to my data. Not one bit.
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/ravi
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Having been involved in recovery from ransomware, twice, pretty well prepared. Both cases had air-gapped backup. One server took a rebuild the other was VM that had recent backup. Both cases took scramble to get 2 days of document changes which is all that was missing and had paper backup. All that data has now been moved to cloud with backup nightly, wrote a program to download any changed Sharepoint dox as a chron job.
All stuff off the LAN at least nightly. NAS is intermediary, blocks connection via IP addresses.
Murphy is out there............ waiting.
Edit: An untested backup is similar to no backup. That is why we had to rebuild the server above, they had never tested it. That is what the VM world is all about.
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
modified 5-Jul-19 8:02am.
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theoldfool wrote: Having been involved in recovery from ransomware, twice, pretty well prepared
Got hit with wannacry?
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not me, clients did the crying. I did ka-ching!
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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There's ultimately 2 machines I need to backup:
a) A machine that ultimately just acts as a NAS. It primarily contains personal files and archived installers, from OS ISOs to full app setups (none of those crappy web installers that spend hours downloading). That gets backed up to two drives: One sitting next to the computer (physically disconnected unless currently synchronizing), the other is sitting at the office and replaced with the one from home once a month.
b) A VM host. The host OS basically contains nothing but the motherboard drivers and Hyper-V, so I don't bother backing that up. The VMs are backed up on another pair of drives, in the same way as described above. The hardware can die - in fact the motherboard was replaced a few years ago - and all I had to do was create new VMs and point them to the existing VHD files on disk. That also takes care of duplicating a working environment elsewhere if I needed to.
My backups are done with robocopy.exe and a batch file (ok, a PowerShell script). I have little trust in third-party software that create files that can't be read without the software that originally wrote them; additionally, the way I see it, incremental backups are at risk if one file in the set gets corrupt. With robocopy, I can browse the file system without relying on any particular software and grab a single file, a folder, or an entire disk. The whole lot gets encrypted with TrueCrypt using whole-disk encryption.
The one thing I don't get is a file change history, but in the unlikely event I ever need to go back to an old version of a file, I have yet another old system that only gets powered on and resynchronized maybe once a year.
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Perfect!
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After 3+ decades using computers, that's my preferred approach. Ultimately it's not cheap, but then, you pay what you're willing to in order to be able to recover your data.
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For personal stuff, I have no backup/recovery plan. When I get a new system every 5-6 years, the personal stuff gets copied to an external drive for transfer so a worst case scenario of an unrecoverable drive failure after the first year would be irritating but not devastating.
Perhaps this is being naïve, but I have a lot more faith in the hardware these days, specifically SSDs. The only spinners still in use here are external USB drives. I just recently replaced the first 64GB SSD I bought for a server back in 2011...not because it failed.
Professionally, I have a pretty simple backup system using a server and a laptop. All important work related files are kept in shared folders on the server. These shares are mapped on the laptop with the 'available offline' option. At least once a week, the laptop synchs up any changes. If I need to use the laptop away from the office, all my files/projects are there and will update the server on the next synch.
This method absolutely saved my bacon about 3 years ago when the server's data drive failed. Even though I was able to recover all my development files, docs, etc. I soon realized that most of the sql databases being hosted on that server were lost...the log files and backups were on the failed data drive. In all, I lost a few months of customer support tickets which had to be re-entered. 
That experience led me to create a nice little sql backup utility that runs a nightly or weekly backup storing/rotating copies on two different local drives as well as sending a copy to a remote ftp location. I won't be fooled again! It also has the benefit that if I'm working remotely, I or my colleague can get last night's backup from anywhere. Disasters should always be a learning experience...best when learned from others!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Here's my simple DR/BC plan:
- All email stored on my personal mail server.
- Important data backed up weekly to an external drive (single folder copy).
- All personal source code hosted at Microsoft, so at worst I'll lose my pending changes (which are usually zero).
- All app installers and license keys live on an external drive, so I can relatively easily reinstall the OS and all apps.
Apart from my source code @ MS, I don't store data on a 3rd party cloud. I also don't have a secondary machine. So if I have a hardware problem, I'll need to fix it or get a replacement box.
/ravi
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Yes, I have backups, then the backup NAS is backed up (to a device on a timer, so it is only ON during the backups, and cannot be accessed/activated outside of that time).
I have a pretty exact spare (Cold Spare) computer system. Swap SSDs, and I can reboot to that machine.
I have a second timer device, but have not configured it, for holding the SSDs to backup to. That is a project for the next 2-3 weeks for me. The goal is to have my C: and D: SSDs backed up to Fresh SSDs once a week, and that device turned off.
FINALLY, I test this from time to time. (once a year). And the PAIN Point is that it takes so dang long to restore the images to the new SSDs, that if the failure is the destruction of the SSD, I lose basically an entire day. [I lose about 1hr to swap the HDs].
Is this overkill? NO!
Last Summer my motherboard gave up the ghost. I swapped the drives and was up and running in a couple of hours (initial debug time, and then software license issues, ughh). And then I ordered a new spare from a refurbisher. Tested with cloned hard drives.
So, I am running on a 7yr old Dell, with a cold spare.
The problem is that the new computers barely support Double SSDs.
And Frankly, they are NOT that much faster! Although the USB and I/O Improvements are almost there.
Upon Switching, I will NOT have a cold spare (too expensive), I will have 24hr service for 2-3yrs, and then I will buy the spare vs. extending the warranty.
FWIW I use an external CD/DVD because the internals died, and I use them so infrequently.
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At home, I back up all the non-redownloadable stuff on my NAS. I have two PCs, the stationary main one and an auxiliary laptop. The laptop doesn't have the environment set up but thankfully, Visual Studio takes care of pretty much everything by itself.
On office, all my stuff is on OneDrive for business. The environment is easy to recover as well.
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