Backups - a word to the wise

[Firestarter]

Nothing like a minor disaster to spur you into action...

The more we move into the "digital age", the more our lives revolve around computers and associated systems. What would you lose if your computer stopped working? A couple of spreadsheets and letters, or memories of that family holiday, or your baby's first words? Never mind anything "important" like bank stuff or work.

The short version (for those who don't want to read the rest below) - large quantity of data, not backed up, on a HDD that's overheating and stops working after 20 minutes unless cooled externally (and even then only works for 1-1.5 hours). My baby's life to date (15 months of pictures & video) plus other family photos going back 10 years, plus music files, totalling around 160Gb, which I've had a painstaking and very worrying weekend trying to recover before the drive burns itself out. The end of the short version - if I had a backup, I could have replaced the drive and copied the files back overnight - job done.

The long version:

For me, since the birth of my son just over a year ago, I've found myself with an ever-increasing large quantity of pictures and videos charting his life to date, not to mention music that I've pulled from CD for my ipod and the like. As the quantity of data grew, and was too much for my laptop, I decided to invest in a 750Gb Western Digital My Book World external hard drive that connected to my router - all the files were then accessible by both my desktop and laptop over the network. Great! So the only time the computers had information was "in transit" after download from the camera, and I didn't need a copy on each computer to allow me access to my music.

The problem is, the external drive started playing up a fortnight ago, kept dropping off the network. A restart usually fixed it, but it got more and more pronounced - suddenly it would drop off after about 20 minutes. Tried copying the files off over the network, but got nowhere before the drive would stop responding. Noticed a lovely yellowing of the network drive's housing, where something was evidently overheating. Pulled the drive, and found it wouldn't even detect when plugged straight onto the motherboard!

An overnight cool-off did the trick, but I then discovered that the drive, although visible, was in a non-Windows file format. The MBWE uses a Linux file format, so I can't reover the files using Windows. So, I found a CD-bootable Linux program and a SATA-USB converter (plus desk fan), and I've spent the weekend copying data over for as long as I could, before turning the drive off to cool when the file transfer rate dropped off, basically papping myself that the drive was going to completely overheat and lose the data. I could have gone to an external data-recovery place, which I would have done if this hadn't worked - at a starting cost of about £100, and potentially a lot more.

I've been very lucky - I've managed to recover everything onto a different drive, which will be getting backed up onto a new 1Tb drive in addition to my USB external drive until I get the network drive replaced. Then it will be network drive plus a backup HDD kept in a very safe place.

Basically guys, let this be a warning - back your important stuff up - regularly. Don't wait (as I have) until something fails and you're into panicking recovery mode - it does happen, I've put off getting a backup system despite knowing better until I've got time to set it up. Remember, backup doesn't mean having the files somewhere other than your computer, it means having a copy somewhere safe.

I've now got a SATA-USB converter (£20) which will take any SATA hard drive and connect it via USB, plus an extra (large) hard drive to take backups of everything on - total price less than £100 (the minimum cost of un-guarenteed data recovery). The network drive will (hopefully) be replaced under warranty so I'll have a working system again. £100 for instant recovery? Dead cheap I'd say, when the data on the drive is irreplaceable.

[joecrx]

i burn most of my stuff onto dvd every so often ,i had a external crash once and lost the lot ,

[Samray]

Hardly failsafe. A lightening strike, robbery or housefire for instance would still see everything lost. All your begs are still in one askit.

Essentials I backup online occasionally, but there again there is a lot to be said for a fresh start with most of the clutter on my pooters.

[Aladinsaneuk]

and for important stuff - use gmail

I reguarly email important documents and images to my gmail account - currently i can store just under 8gb of stuff there for free....