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I’ve lost my hard drive…wippeee!
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stasber wrote:
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Due to my very close call, my kit is locked in a secure cupboard these days, that includes my laptop. It’s a PITA to take it out and put it back in every time but I’m leaving less to chance that way; seems that in this society it’s necessary “just in case”. Several laptops go missing from hotel rooms for traveling employees every year in my company, just because they’ve not been secured/hidden – you’d expect a hotel room to be secure. Makes you think.A recent report (http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1014326.shtml) says about 4000 laptops go missing each week at European airports.
AK
Mr.H wrote:
One question that arises out of this, and I appreciate may be worth a thread on it’s own. What backup software do people use?
I found Syncback on Dpreview. There is a freebie version which is all most of us need. It can be set to copy files as a backup, or to synchronise them. Very easy to use – and the backups are replicas of the original files, not some obscure bak type files. It can be set to run automatically.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/welcome/aw1/synchronize.html?gclid=CLr7t_yI95QCFRVQtAodylC8Wg
Skittle wrote:
As an IT head, when I built my PC I installed a RAID 1 system. Two hard-drives, one mirrors the other. If I have a problem with one, the other automatically switches in. With harddrives being so cheap, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
I also have a RAID system; however, the two drives have to be similar/exactly the same. So if one fails, the other is likely to fail also.
An external drive is still essential.
irishwonkafan wrote:
ALWAYS back up your images. I have an external drive from LaCie that I bought from Barkers (Sponsor here) and this has saved my life. Today (Sunday) in Aldi there’s a 750Gb drive for sale for €119. Do yourself a favour and back up your images. You’ll smile with relief when it happens to you!!!
Alan
Glad to hear that you have recovered from a hard disk failure – ALL hard disks will fail sooner or later.
I have a rather overkill remedy: two computers in two different countries, each with an external hard drive.
And I have a USB drive which I use when ‘commuting’ – these are cheap nowadays to use as another off-site backup
Two separate external hard drives is probably the way to go. I’ve used a 1TB RAID1 external chassis from Lacie (BigDisk Triple). The power conenction on the PCB started to loosen a few months ago so I logged a call. They said I should send the entire thing back to Lacie and they’d wipe my drives as part of the inspection. Hmmm.
I’ve used combos of XCopy and Windows Backup for backup software. In our game, online backup isn’t much of an option because of the scale of data to retain (unless you only want to keep 30 days of data or somehting like that). However, if you’re in the USA then HP Upline might be worth looking at. The concern would be the time required for the 1st backup.
I now use Acronis TrueImage. It’ll do incremental backups (ie only back up stuff that’s changed). What was a bit worrying was that when I first got it, it had a bug which caused a backup to fail for some obscure reason after chugging through it for about half an hour.
RGH: TrueImage will also mirror a disk making swapping them a doddle, even bootable disks. This is how I first came across it when my wife’s laptop drive filled up and I needed to shift everything to a new (bigger) disk, on a whole, very painless. It’s also free for an evaluation period.
Otherwise, there’s Microsoft SyncToy. It’s a free download (go for the 2.0 beta, it’s much more capable that the 1.4 version), and will mirror a set of directories to another location. It has the disadvantage over proper backup software in that it’ll overwrite the destination file, so if you accidentally banjax your original and then do a backup, you’re hosed! Though for what it is, it does a good job
John
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