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Posted By: Keith from Oz A Valuble Lesson - 02/25/18 01:21 AM
I know a lot has been said about backing up your files, but I want to reiterate how important it is.

A few years ago I had a computer crash, and lost a lot of valuable files, so from then I've made a point of backing EVERYTHING up regularly.

With BIAB, I back up my songs on my laptop, an external hard drive, and also on a UBS thumb drive for convenience.

Today I went to back up my BIAB files on the thumb drive, and it had corrupted, and I lost everything that was on it.

Fortunately due to my obsession with backing up, I had multiple back ups on other devices.

You work too hard to lose it .... back up one, two, three times , just to be sure.

Remember, Braces and a belt smile
Posted By: jford Re: A Valuble Lesson - 02/26/18 12:36 PM
I also synchronize my files between my three computers, in addition to backing up to external USB hard drives. Disk space is cheap, and where licensing allows it, I also have almost all of my apps installed on all three computers as well. That way, if one of them dies, I can be up and running on one of the other computers in a matter of seconds.

Also, about once a year, I'll archive my data files to DVD's as well. I guess you could say, I back up to DVD anally (pun intended). smile

The few times I've had a crash, I've never lost more than a few days (yes, I could be more diligent, but I prefer to spend my time creating music, rather than backing up music, so I'll live with that slight risk).

It's not to everyone's taste (especially those who "need" a nice GUI), but I generally use batch files along with the robocopy command (which has lots of options; much more than copy or xcopy) to back everything up, as well as to synchronize files between computers.
Posted By: w Re: A Valuble Lesson - 02/27/18 05:23 PM
^

what about backups to clouds ?

yes, no, perhaps ?
Posted By: jford Re: A Valuble Lesson - 02/27/18 08:54 PM
You certainly could backup to the cloud, but that's a lot of bandwidth. For my wife's computer, she uses Carbonite to back up her data, but I go in on a regular basis and back it up to a USB hard drive. It's always best to have more than one backup.

I remember once, we had what was supposed to be a top notch tape backup solution in our server computer room. What we found out was that it backed everything up every night like it was supposed to; however, when we went to restore data, we found that although the software claimed to support backing up "open" files, it actually didn't, and you got corrupted files. The joke became that the software worked great at backing up your data, just as long as you never had to restore it. smile

We switched to a different backup software, used the same tape drives and tapes, and it backed up and restored with no problems.

Moral of the story, is to make sure whatever backup strategy you use, that you test both the backup process and the restore process. No need for a false sense of security.
Posted By: rharv Re: A Valuble Lesson - 02/27/18 11:39 PM
What John says is interesting because I have seen it both ways.
Sometimes a backup reports it fails, because a single file is corrupt. However this same 'failed' backup works to restore everything BUT the corrupted file. So 99.99+% recovery.

Other times (using different BU method/software) a restore failed if even a just single file had an issue.

Like he said; make sure not only that the backup reported successful, but that restore process (using said backups) actually works.

False security is pretty much the worst security.
I know I'm repeating his point, but it's pretty important.
A backup that doesn't restore is not a backup. It's a waste of time.

As far as cloud backups, I think the time/bandwidth is worth it. It is off site and should be redundant (and backed up yet again) in the cloud.

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