Show Us Your Rig [4]

essenbe said:

Lady Fitzgerald, I'm surprised to find someone as fanatic as me. But, forget images. I have 2 drives and use Paragon Migrate. It is made especially for SSDs, but will work on spinners just as well. I clone my OS to another drive at least once a week, alternating weeks between drives. So, I always have 2 copies of my OS. If my drive died tonight, I wouldn't even lose an email, and would be back up and running in less than 5 minutes. To me, that is well worth the $19.95 it costs. Yes, I have a lot of hard drives. I think I should get some more. I'm sure I would find a use for them. Actually, I have been waiting for them to drop in price, back to where they were.

Mayhap we value our data more than most people. I'm trying to be as paperless as possible since it takes up less space, can be backed up easily, and is easier to organize. The only paper documents I keep as paper are the ones I'm legally required to keep, such as my birth certificate (it seems silly I have prove to someone I was born; like I was hatched?), titles, some receipts for warranties (for the anal companies that won't accept a copy of a receipt), etc. (and all of those are copied). I've ripped all my CDs to large bit rate mp3s and will be ripping all my DVDs and copying my VHS tapes (I'll keep the original disks for a while until I am sure the copies are good, then they will be destroyed since I don't have room for them). I've scanned a little over half of my huge book collection since I don't have room for them and I will NOT give them up. The scanning process involves cutting off the spines so they are automatically destroyed in the process. I can't afford to not be anal about backups!

In addition to multiple backups (all media can fail so redundancy is vital), having backups in multiple locations is vital. For example, if one has all of their backups in their home, a fire, flood, theft, etc. can cause total loss. Having at least one backup offsite will help to prevent total loss. The problem with most offsite backups (such as keeping HDDs in a bank vault) is the media still can fail and the backups are almost always out of data. Hence the need for the redundancy of both onsite and offsite backups.

Using the cloud for backups is usually the most up to date backup one can have since the backup usually takes place either immediately or soon after the data is created, especially if the software is set to do the backups automatically. The downside of cloud backups is a lack of security (unless the data is encrypted before uploading), the large use of bandwidth (which can knock some users out of the water due to usage caps), and instability. Free cloud storage sites are infamous for disappearing with little or no warning. Some sites are unrealiable (such as CrashPlan; their servers are notoriously slow although using the service to reciprocally store encrypted data on another person's computer seems to work well). Mozy was comparable to Carbonite until recently when Mozy dropped their unlimited data plan. I still use Carbonite to back up my desktop (I don't keep much data on my notebook and none of it is critical although I still back it up just to make restoration easier and faster). Still, even Carbonite has been known to lose data (rare but it does happen) and they could always go belly up. Also, recovering a few TB of data from them would take forever (and I'm pushing 64, I don't have much time left!) or expensive if I had them mail me HDDs with my data on them. Carbonite is still useful as an always up to date offsite back up to replace lost data an out of date HHD setting in a bank vault might be missing. Again, no matter the backup scheme, onsite and offsite redundancy is vital to avoid total data loss.

I experimented with clones initially—what could be faster than swapping out HDDs?—but backups always took too long since they always had to be full backups so I switched to images since I can use incremental or differential backups with them). I'm using the paid version of Macrium Reflect. I make a full backup roughly once a week (right now, I'm probably going to extend that interval because it takes too long to do a full backup) and, anytime I put vital data on a machine, I do a differential back up. The only thing a differential backup backs up is data that was added or changed since the last full backup (incrementals back up data added or changed since the last incremental backup). All the backup images have to be present for recovery but I keep each set of associated images in their own folder so that isn't an issue. I never modify original files, working from copies instead, so versioning isn't an issue (if I lose a file completely, it stays on Carbonite for at least a month anyway). Not having to frequently make full back ups save me a lot of time (yeah, I'm lazy) and my HDDS a lot of wear and tear.