Are your backups up to date?

[wilfred]

/.

[EEVblog]

I'm using BackBlaze now for HD backups

[BradC]

I bought a 2TB portable drive. It looks like it is 2 drives stacked in one package. Anyone confirm this? Are they in some RAID config?

I-Ching calculator says "A suffusion of yellow".
Maybe with a bit more detail we might have more of an idea.

Yes, my backups are up to date. 3am every day.

[andyturk]

Amazon Glacier says, "Yes."

[xrunner]

Amazon Glacier says, "Yes."

Yes, mine are. 

[rdl]

I have everything on a FreeNAS machine with mirrored drives. Those are synched weekly with a second machine, and periodically with a third.

As far as spinning drives go, I've had 4 times as many external fail vs. internal. I no longer trust them at all. I personally still have two in use but they will be phased out this year. I now use standard internal drives and put them in external enclosures myself.

[AG6QR]

I use Time Machine, which is a utility built into Mac OS to keep hourly backups.  My home computer is set to back up to three external drives.  I normally keep two of them connected to the computer at home, and a third is kept separately at my workplace.  Every couple of weeks, I rotate one of my home drives to my workplace, and bring the old workplace drive to home.

My primary work computer is a MacBook, which I also have set up with Time Machine.  I've got one external drive at home, and one at work.  I don't move those drives around, but I do move my laptop between my workplace and home daily, and keep an external drive connected in each place.

The net result is that if my workplace or home burns down, I'll lose no more than a week or so's data from my home computer, and no more than a day or so's data from my work computer.  If I have a single hard drive failure anywhere, I lose less than an hour's worth of data.

I've had a couple of hard drive failures since I started using this system, and restoration was quick and painless.  I've also had several incidents where I accidentally erased data.  Again, restoration was quick and easy.

Time Machine uses an intelligent system of unix filesystem links to do its backups.  That way, only changed files need to be backed up, but each time a backup is made, the entire full directory tree is replicated.  It keeps hourly backups for the previous 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for as long as it has space, which works out to about the previous year on my home computer, and the past six months for my work computer.

My backup drives are all encrypted, and they're all in my possession, not relying on Internet or cloud storage.

[Halcyon]

As far as spinning drives go, I've had 4 times as many external fail vs. internal. I no longer trust them at all. I personally still have two in use but they will be phased out this year. I now use standard internal drives and put them in external enclosures myself.

External drives rarely have "enterprise" grade drives in them. They are usually just the cheap entry-level drives, or even worse "AV/CCTV drives" which have little to no ECC capabilities on-board. Great for your young kid's iTunes backups but probably not much more.

My first line of backups synchronise with a secondary NAS box with an offline (less frequently updated) copy to LTO tape, which reminds me, I should get around to updating those tapes.

Absolutely critical information (such as my password database and very important documents) get a further 3 encrypted copies... one I keep on me at all times on a USB flash drive, another copy on CD/DVD that gets refreshed when there is a major change and a final "everything has gone to shit" copy in hard copy form through the use of Paperback (all I need is a scanner or camera and a copy of Paperback to recover the files).

[edavid]

I bought a 2TB portable drive. It looks like it is 2 drives stacked in one package. Anyone confirm this? Are they in some RAID config?

Large capacity portable external drives use single, 12.5mm or 15mm thick 2.5" drives.

An example drive is the WD20NPVZ, 2TB 15mm.

[kripton2035]

Quote from: wilfred on Today at 03:37:26

I just had an external drive die suddenly. I am now copying it back from a backup drive. 

I bought a 2TB portable drive. It looks like it is 2 drives stacked in one package. Anyone confirm this? Are they in some RAID config?

if it is effectively two drives in a raid config, then it's mostly two 1TB drives, in raid
it implies that if one drive fails, the whole raid fails, and most of the second drive datas are not recoverable ....
so it's twice more likely to fail than one single drive.
I would avoid such configuration for important datas ...raid 5 or no raid (eventually mirror raid but better 2 drives)

[ChrisLX200]

Can recommend Macrium Reflect https://www.macrium.com/  because it's reliable, quick and simple to operate.  Saved my bacon several times. For image restore it can either boot from a thumbdrive or from the boot partition on your system drive, the latter is useful if (for e.g.,) your Windows partition is corrupt and you just want to quickly restore it. I keep full backups on seperate systems: a NAS, a discrete RAID disk array box, and copies spread around the other 4 PCs on the network. Extra backup drives installed in every workstation for this purpose are cheap insurance against one or other machine vapourising, but it does load the network down when the data transfer happens (in the small hours when not being used mostly). For real time protection I use SuperFlexible File Synchroniser (new version re-named: https://www.syncovery.com/ ) which is set to protect specific directory/files daily or hourly - things like email folders and working directories for project programs.

[VK5RC]

NAS 2x2TB raid 0 configured, backed up weekly.

[brucehoult]

I haven't bothered with conventional whole-disk backups of my hard disk for a long time.

I work on multiple computers in different locations, synchronised by git, mostly peer-to-peer but in some cases via private or public git servers. I do non-work stuff on multiple portable devices as well as those multiple computers. Everything is either automatically replicated between them, or stored on someone's servers, or both. My library of media I didn't create is either itself a backup of CDs and DVDs or re-downloadable from the original source. Installed software either comes with the OS, or is easily re-downloadable form the original source (whether AppStore, apt-get, MacPorts or whatever)

The only thing I actually need to back up consciously is the media I did create -- photos and videos. I have a couple of external drives (including a 2nd gen Drobo I've been using since 2008), but most of the things I'd cry if I lost end up on twitter, facebook, youtube etc anyway. rsync does the job for them.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Can recommend Macrium Reflect https://www.macrium.com/  because it's reliable, quick and simple to operate.  Saved my bacon several times. For image restore it can either boot from a thumbdrive or from the boot partition on your system drive, the latter is useful if (for e.g.,) your Windows partition is corrupt and you just want to quickly restore it. I keep full backups on seperate systems: a NAS, a discrete RAID disk array box, and copies spread around the other 4 PCs on the network. Extra backup drives installed in every workstation for this purpose are cheap insurance against one or other machine vapourising, but it does load the network down when the data transfer happens (in the small hours when not being used mostly). For real time protection I use SuperFlexible File Synchroniser (new version re-named: https://www.syncovery.com/ ) which is set to protect specific directory/files daily or hourly - things like email folders and working directories for project programs.

I'd second that - I have it set to do an nightly image backup of the main drive to a second drive and to a NAS.Nice thing is you can mount an image file to pull individual files out.

I also have another utility, Versionbackup ( no longer sold), which keeps zips of changed files such that you can recover any version of a changed file from the last month ( or however you set it up)

[rdl]

There must be something I don't understand because two disks in Raid 0 on a NAS does not seem like an optimal choice to me.

[PlainName]

another utility, Versionbackup ( no longer sold), which keeps zips of changed files

Sounds a lot like AJC Active Backup:

http://www.ajcsoft.com/active-backup.htm

I've run it for a long time and can't recall ever having a problem with it. Just Works.

[vealmike]

That would depend on whether you wanted to optimise for speed and capacity, or for redundancy.

[Monkeh]

NAS 2x2TB raid 0 configured, backed up weekly.

Whhhhyyyyyy.

[suicidaleggroll]

All of my machines do nightly incremental (rsync --link-dest) backups to an external drive plugged into a central backup machine in my basement.  That machine syncs the external the other machines are backing up to to a second external that's a mirror copy of it daily.  It then syncs the latest backup from each machine to an off-site encrypted drive.  So any changes I make to any machine get duplicated that night, and quadruplicated, including one off-site copy, the following day at noon.

[CJay]

NAS 2x2TB raid 0 configured, backed up weekly.

You sure you meant 0?

That's not exactly 'secure'

[bd139]

Yes that’s less secure than one disk!

[ChrisLX200]

RAID 0=Pre-scrambled and doubles the chance of hardware failure losing your data (kind of... one disk fails you lose both). Zero advantage to RAID 0 in a NAS anyway as disk speed is not your bottleneck, more likely it's your LAN speed.

[Mr. Scram]

Yes, I seem to have worse luck with external drives. Don't know why though. I don't tend to move them or subject them to shock. I can only imaging it is hotter in those external enclosures.

I intend to refill the enclosure of the failed drive with a new drive.

Google does very extensive analysis of the regular hard drives they use in data centers and found temperature not to influence drive life, unless it's quite excessive.

I'm glad you started the thread, though. Most people only take heed when it's too late. Very few people can tell you what a proper backup is, even when they're familiar with computers.

[ChrisLX200]

Takes experience. You have to lose the contents of a hard disk to understand the importance of backups, you need to have a failed restore due to faulty backup to understand the importance of backing up properly! 

[Mr. Scram]

Takes experience. You have to lose the contents of a hard disk to understand the importance of backups, you have to have a failed restore due to faulty backup to understand the importance of backing up properly! 

Yes, testing your backups is as important as making them. That's not theoretical either, I've seen an example of a narrow escape just last month.

However, making proper backups in the first place seems to be rare as hen's teeth, and even if people say they make them, it's generally done is an ineffective manner.