Bugger!

[seawasp]

Kathy's computer decided to stop booting this weekend. So I took it in this morning.

Hard drive is borked. They're not sure if they can recover anything from it or not.

So I'm out something like $300 and Kathy's out whatever wasn't backed up on the drive, which could be quite a bit.

On the positive side (trying to stay positive here), I don't need to buy her a brand new computer -- which I couldn't, at this point -- and she'll have a VASTLY larger hard drive this time (I think something like five times her prior drive's size).

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Data that isn't backed up doesn't exist. Data that isn't backed up twice in different locations is one small step away from being not backed up i.e. not existing. Computers are cheap. Hard drives are cheaper.

What I take from your last sentence is that next time a drive fails Kathy could lose five times as much data as she did this time.

BTW RAID is not a backup methodology, it's just a way to lose more data faster.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Last year I had a RAID controller go stupid on a 8TB RAID 6 set. The disks were fine but the data was hopelessly corrupted. 8TB of research data that would have been gone forever had it not been backed up. But the RAID set itself was fine.

Sync (Dropbox) is not a backup methodology, either. It's just a method for losing many copies of data faster. :)

My recommendation for personal computers is to get a couple of inexpensive USB drives. Determine how much time you can afford to spend reconstructing lost data from scratch. Run backups to one of these drives at least that often. Most backup tools can be configured to run at specified intervals. Rotate drives on a weekly basis.

[seawasp]

USB drives? You must mean large separate drives, not the usual thumbdrives, because those can't hold a tenth of the data on the main drives.

Ahh, it all comes down to money. I can barely afford to replace this drive. Buy two or three more drives just for backup? Not without a lot of new, free money coming in, alas.

My writing I back up to a thumb drive regularly, but that's really a tiny thing to do; even with all associated images, etc., it's not going over a gig.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Where "large" depends on how much data you're backing up, how many incremental/differential backups your backup tool makes, and how often you rotate backup drives.

[seawasp]

Well, for ME I can actually back up most of what I give a darn about *on* a USB stick. A fairly small one.

Kathleen, however, is an artist and is into remembering things via photos, etc., so the stuff she cares about runs into vastly more space than even the pretty large (32GB) thumb drives will manage.

[kjn]

And keep one copy under another roof than the rest of them every night. Otherwise its just a method of losing several hard drives at the same time.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Simplest in-house backup is to get a cheap NAS box and fill it with large hard drives, not configured in any kind of RAID of course. Put that on the local network and use it as a backup device, nightly or hourly or whatever your schedule demands. Gig Ethernet is faster than USB 2.0 external drives, USB 3.0 isn't common enough quite yet and having the NAS box plumbed into the LAN means backing up is only a few keystrokes away so it tends to actually get done. Leave it switched off otherwise to save on drive spindle time, use Wake on LAN to power it up when necessary. Two NAS boxes (or two separate drives in one box) is a better idea.

External drives are best used for backing up truly critical data that you want to store offsite but it's more effort logistically speaking getting grandfather drives back to refresh them and keeping track of where you are in the cycle. Security is also a problem if you have sensitive data to back up in which case encryption is needed and that's another whole can of worms.

As for RAID its only raison d'etre is high uptime availability based on hot-swapping defective drives. Anything else, and especially trusting it to replace backups is a recipe for data loss.

[seawasp]

Well, this is stuff for people or companies well out of my range. I have a few computers which are connected to RoadRunner with a wireless router, not a LAN with backup software or whatever. Let alone the ability to purchase separate groups of drives for use offsite.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Amazon lists the 2TB My Book Live at $150. You dropped twice that on a single service call. I'd say that a pair of these -- one live, one swapped -- is within your range.

[seawasp]

I dropped twice that to get the machine fixed and usable again. Because the alternatives were (A) no machine for Kathy, which really isn't an option, or (B) buy a new machine, which REALLY isn't an option.

I did not HAVE that money to "drop", so to speak, and it's coming out of other things now.

[seawasp]

To clarify: I have NO discretionary funds currently. Any payments that I don't expect either have to come out of credit somewhere, or out of non-discretionary payments that I can defer for a while. In the last year and a half I've paid for a roof and three major appliance failures.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

I have a HP N40L doing both backup server and media sever. Four by 2TB disks with btrfs for integrity checksums and stripe+mirror for media redundancy and repair of corrupted data. It handles Time Machine backups for my Mac, Unison replicas and weekly Clonezilla snapshots for my Windows computers, and rsnapshot for its own OS disk. The backup subvolumes are snapshotted and cloned to single disks in a USB 3.0 dock every day or two, media every week or so. The media subvolumes don't change much relative to their sizes. These disks are rotated through my fireproof box. Encryption of sensitive data is managed on the hosts using EncFS. This data is never decrypted during the sync and backup processes.

If you're not into this level of tech-geek then a couple of WD My Book Live units can be sufficient for home and small office backups. I know of a number of Unix admins who've been using them in the small office space. They swear by them.

[seawasp]

I'm not even at the level that I understand what you just said, let alone at the level to use it.

I'm at the level that we have a backup drive under the bed (bought like four, five years ago) that we can copy stuff to. She just isn't very diligent about copying it on her own, and this time she had no warning.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Translation: I'm applying enterprise-grade methodology, on a smaller scale, to my backups. A typical home user doesn't need this level of effort, but I'm not a typical home user. You and your wife are. A couple of swappable drives of some sort, could be USB, could be networked, is sufficient. The important thing, which your wife should have realized after this, is to use it. A backup system is no good at all if it isn't used.