This is common sense, but sometimes we just don’t listen to common sense.
I know we have all heard the horror stories about how someone lost everything and how sad they are. That is why I backup all the time. I usually have two or three copies of everything. Then I can’t keep straight which copy is which and sometimes it takes me a while to sort it all out.
Storage being practically free, I almost never delete a single thing.
However, since I am leaving my company for a new job, I decided to go through my laptop and desktop computers and back everything up to a USB drive that I purchased at frys. This amounted to about 30 gigs of crap. Pictures, all of my source files for all of my Flash projects I work on, Music, Timesheets, etc.
So I back it all up to this USB HD, and then I delete it all off of my computer and laptop. Then I dropped the hard drive. Noooooooo!
See, Maxtor is retarded. They make a USB HD and then make every corner/angle on it rounded. Then they don’t put any little rubber feet on it. I sit it on top of my computer, on top of my desk, and it falls from about four feet up. First it fell a foot and a half and hit my desk at an angle. Since they so lovingly crafted it to be sleek and rounded, this caused it to go into a slide instead of just stopping. I watched in horror as it slid across my desk and over the edge (my desk is ALSO extremely rounded at the edge, or else it might not have fallen off the desk either). Then it somehow magically leveled out in the air and just =SMACKED= onto the floor. I don’t even think it bounced.
When I got home and plugged it in I was very relieved to see that it still worked ok. I started streaming my music from it and working on my game. Then it crashed. I unplugged it and plugged it back in, dragged my game off of it, and started working on my game. The HD started making weird clicking noises and then it froze my computer. I disconnected the USB cord and magically my computer was fine. Crap.
Now I can’t even get the computer to recognize the HD and even when not plugged into the computer it just sits there and clicks. It sounds like I’m running a defrag on it, but I’m not. It’s just sitting there plugged into the wall, churning away. Hardware failure.
So what did I lose? Excitingly enough, not much (I don’t think). I had recently backed up my computer at work and am now recovering some of the things I deleted from it. I lost some photos from my laptop that I’ll never get back (It’s been about 8 months since I’ve done a backup on my laptop, and that backup is now gone because we switched backup utilities and deleted all the old backups). Everything else, because of my “messyness” of keeping tons of copies here and there can be pieced back together. I have PDF copies of all of my timesheets. I e-mailed out all the church meeting minutes that I backed up from the laptop. I had just copied my original cmcculloh.com website up to a directory in chomperstomp. I had just backed up my entire MP3 library to that site Brian showed us a few weeks ago (Thanks bro, saved me hours of re-rip time). I think the only thing I really “lost” was some source code to some flash experiments and games that I haven’t touched for about two years now (which were housed on my laptop). I guess if I lost something else that I can’t remember, then since it wasn’t worth remembering, it probably wasn’t worth having, right? right?
I’ll just keep telling myself that, because I seriously don’t want to spend the $500 it would take to recover everything off of this drive.
Moral of the story (you’ve all heard this before) save early, save often, backup constantly. I think I may end up utilizing a service such as this in the future. It may also be time to set up that RAID in my home PC and backup my USB Drive to that computer every day. I don’t know why I never backed up the USB drive. I’ve had it since Friday. You’d think I’d have done it over the weekend at some point. Although I guess since i just yesterday got all the stuff off of my laptop on to it, that wouldn’t even have mattered. So, don’t ever ever ever delete your second copy of anything until it becomes your third copy. I should have left everything on my laptop undeleted until I backed up my USB drive. Live and learn…
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Glad that site worked for you. There’s nothing worse than having to re-rip all of your music. You get into a rhythm since you have to do it hundreds of times and before you know it you’re not being careful and you end up scratching a CD as you drop it into your CD tray.
How do you backup your hard drive(s)? Do you just drag and drop manually? Do you have a backup program that runs at a scheduled time every day/week/month? I don’t know the best way to do this. I’ve just done the old drag and drop onto my external hard drive. I’m afraid that since it’s not an automatic process I will forget to do it for months on end and lose a lot of data if my hard drive crashes.
Well, what we did at my old job was used Norton Ghost. Every first and fifteenth we would ghost the entire hard drive. Then every night it would do an incremental backup.
Now that I’m on my own though, i am going to need to find a system.
I plan on using something open source probably, but I don’t really know yet.
One thing that I find invaluable when working on projects is having a subversion repository set up for them.
When I settle on a system I will make a post about it.