Today Is World Backup Day!

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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Though not widely publicized at this point, World Backup Day is catching on by word of mouth. For the second year in a row, computer users worldwide are being reminded about the importance of regular scheduled backups. The chances of a drive failure rises as the HDD ages, so do the smart thing and back up your drives today before you become an April Fool. :D
 
If only I could impress upon my family and friends how important this is. Eventually I had to set an automated backup of my parents' files to my server as a last ditch. If you want something done right...
 
what does this mean if I was doing a overdue backup anyway and did not even know it was world backup day?
 
When I worked at Staples I was once tasked with sitting at the front of the store and asking customers if they backed up their files regularly or even at all and I shit you not that not one customer backed up their files.
 
That reminds me, I have not ran an offsite backup rotation in over a month, I should get on that. I do have weekly offsites that upload to my server in the south but it only includes the very important data, I can't possibly backup everything this way given my connection upload speed. Wish I had FIOS. 100 up/down or more would be awesome.
 
When I worked at Staples I was once tasked with sitting at the front of the store and asking customers if they backed up their files regularly or even at all and I shit you not that not one customer backed up their files.

lol I believe it. It's very scary. Even small home run businesses don't backup their data. When I used to run my computer repair business it used to shock me the stuff they depended on their PC for and they did not have backups. They'd bring me this computer filled with spyware and viruses, and did not have any backups. I'd always warn them that there's a good chance the data may be corrupt because they waited so long, and that they should really have backups.

I've thought of starting a backup company just for local businesses. Basically I could sell mini backup appliances, manage their backups etc. Though the responsibility is quite high if something goes wrong. Lot of people it just never crosses their mind that they could instantly loose everything if something happens to the hard drive.
 
Woah weird, I just backed up today for the first time since november 7th.
 
Funny.

Have a raid mirror in my SBS 2008 server for the small business I work for. One of the drives fails last night.

No big deal. Took bad one out, ordered a new one today. Well, this evening, the other drive fails. What luck. Ran out to the store and paid a lot of money for a couple of mediocre drives (which is all they had), since this is a great time to be buying those.

Now I'm doing a barebones restore from one of the backup drives. Killing time while it restores, so I hit up the [H]. What do I see, but this article.

Yep, even if you have "redundancy", you can have crappy luck like me. Well, could be worse. Happened on a weekend, which disrupts things a little less at least. And I have it set to backup daily to external hard drives that I swap out each day.

Not done yet, so I shouldn't count my chickens before they're hatched or however that saying goes, but hey, doing daily backups is saving my butt right now.

Make every day your backup day.
 
lol I believe it. It's very scary. Even small home run businesses don't backup their data. When I used to run my computer repair business it used to shock me the stuff they depended on their PC for and they did not have backups. They'd bring me this computer filled with spyware and viruses, and did not have any backups. I'd always warn them that there's a good chance the data may be corrupt because they waited so long, and that they should really have backups.

I've thought of starting a backup company just for local businesses. Basically I could sell mini backup appliances, manage their backups etc. Though the responsibility is quite high if something goes wrong. Lot of people it just never crosses their mind that they could instantly loose everything if something happens to the hard drive.

The people that bother me are the ones who it crosses their mind but they believe that no matter what techs like us can always get their files off of their hard drive regardless of the state it is in.
 
The people that bother me are the ones who it crosses their mind but they believe that no matter what techs like us can always get their files off of their hard drive regardless of the state it is in.

And then they get mad when either we:
Cannot
Quote them several hundred dollars to do it.

I've stopped being nice to rude customers, I tell it like it is. "Well, at least you've learned to keep backups!"

Part of the perks of managing your own store.
 
One of the secretaries essentially does the opposite of backup. She keeps all her work files inside the temp folder (c:\windows\temp). You now, the one IT regularly clears whenever they're doing maintenance. Doesn't want me to move them to the documents folder for whatever reason:rolleyes:

About the only worst thing you can do is put your files in the recycle folder. :mad:





Wow. I still found this. I read about it before but didn't actually write it down.

http://www.edepot.com/taohumor.html

The novice asked the backup master: "Master, now that my backups have good coverage, are taken frequently, are archived, and are distributed to the four corners of the earth, I have supreme confidence in them. Have I achieved enlightenment? Surely now I comprehend the Tao Of Backup?"

The master paused for one minute, then suddenly produced an axe and smashed the novice's disk drive to pieces.

Calmly he said: "To believe in one's backups is one thing. To have to use them is another."

The novice looked very worried.
 
Haha yeah it's one thing to have backups, but good idea to go over them once in a while and make sure that using them is actually possible.

last summer I was going on vacation for a few days and since I did not have an alarm system then I took enough drives out of my raid arrays to make it irrecoverable and brought those drives offsite. Also took out my PC's drive as it also had data on it. That way if someone broke into my house they would not get my data.

Well the night before leaving I was bored out of my skull considering my servers and workstation was all down. I decided to boot off a Live CD and figured I'd at least hop on MSN to talk to friends or something. Since my hard drives were offsite and I was not booted into my regular installation I did not have my msn password handy. So I decided to just go to my offsite backup server to get it. Then it ocured to me the password to get into that server is in the pins file that is on that server. Oops. I fixed that by changing the root password to something I can remember.

On top of that I also have a physical offsite backup job. The backups are to hard drives and the hard drives are physically brought to a lock box. No passwords to remember. Though in the event of a house fire while I'm at home, trying to find the key to the lockbox in the wreckage would be a whole other story. But pretty sure if I was to provide proper ID (which would also be burned, damn) would work. I need to slightly revisit this now that I think about it. :D
 
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