A note of encouragement to action...

[Limerick]

Hi friends,

Here we are at the beginning of a brand new year and I have a sobering question to toss in your direction. -- How serious would it be if your hard drive (which had previously displayed no apparent signs of problems) suddenly died and went to electronics heaven? Do you have all of those digital images of family and friends burned to a CD or DVD? What about all that music and all those letters and things that you have written in Word, the spreadsheets you've used in Excel, etc. for the past few years? If you suddenly lost all of that data, would it be only a temporary inconvenience, or would it be a gut-wrenching catastrophe?

For the past few years, I've been in the practice of backing up my systems from one hard drive to another. (FWIW, my choice of software for doing so is Norton Ghost 2003, though there are several good programs that will create such an image for you.) By choice, I create such images every Saturday. There haven't been many times when I've needed to restore an image (or a portion of one), but when those times have occurred, it has been a wonderful feeling to be able to solve the problem in only a matter of minutes. An additional procedure that is worth the trouble to me is to periodically burn important files to CD or DVD.

What brings all this to mind is the mysterious loss of sound on my secondary machine last night. For no rhyme nor reason, it went silent and stayed that way after a reboot. I spent some time "tinkering around" to see what might have happened, but to no avail. So I fired up Ghost, grabbed the C partition out of the full system image that I created last Saturday, and in about 10 or 12 minutes, I was back in business.

Obviously, there are different ways to protect your data. Some may be easier to carry out than others. The important thing is that you do something that will protect you from losing all of the "stuff" that all of us have, and treasure. I encourage you to give some serious thought to this concept, and to convert those thoughts into action immediately. When the chips are down and you need to rely on whatever backup process you have in place in order to regain access to files of importance, you'll be mighty glad that you did... Who will protect your data --if not you, who? If not now, when?

Happy Computing!

Limerick

[tpm]

Thanks for the post Limerick
I have been making "backups" using Windows backup utility and just now using Windows Live Care. I put my backups on an external drive. Question I have is how would I go about recovering from a disaster if one should arise. Do I reinstall Windows Xp and then go and recover my backup? Never had to do this and hopefully never will.
Thanks and Happy New Year

[Steve R Jones]

SyncBack is a flexible, and quite powerful backup and synchronization program that allows to to maintain backup copies of your files and folder, or to synchronize them, so that both locations always have a complete copy (e.g Laptop/PC). It offers different types of actions that let you choose how older and newer files are processed, which files should be excluded (by mask) and more. It offers standard file comparison based on the date and size, as well as optional MD5 checksum, which will detect even the slightest modifications to files. SyncBack also supports scheduled projects, FTP and zip compression of backups, as well as network login, simulation runs and more.

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/SyncBack/SyncBack.html

[Limerick]

Thanks for the post Limerick
Question I have is how would I go about recovering from a disaster if one should arise. Do I reinstall Windows Xp and then go and recover my backup? Never had to do this and hopefully never will.

Hats off to you for doing something about protecting your data, Tom. So many computing enthusiasts just hope that nothing bad will ever happen to them, never do backups of any kind, and then when the wheels do finally come off -- it's oh, mercy!

My concern with your approach is what you would do if Windows suffers a catastrophic breakdown and you are not able to get back into Windows. A good question to ask might be "What is my next step now?" Who wants to reinstall the OS and then hope for the best? Not me...

That's one of the appealing capabilities of Ghost that keeps me using it, year after year. If the above scenario happened here, I could boot to a floppy with Ghost on it, grab the most recent image from the other drive, restore the image, pull the floppy out, reboot, and I'm back in Windows XP just like I was before the crash. Another plus is that when installing a new hard drive, you don't even need to format (or partition) it, Ghost does it automatically when laying the image back down....

Limerick

[tpm]

A couple of years ago while trying to ghost with Nortons 2003 I somehow got caught between before and after. I went through the process of ghosting an image and then if I remember right when I went to reboot I couldn't get back to windows. During the reinstall process I did see the operating system was still there but unaccessible. When I get the courage up I will give it another go. Meanwhile if I did have to recover would it be as I said? reinstall windows and then recover one of my backups to put it back the way it was?
Thanks

[stevejr]

Excellent, limerick....this is much needed....especially by me.. I bought Acronis True Image 9.0 some time ago and have only burned a complete copy of my hdd once... I never was sure of what exactly that I needed to copy...the whole hdd...just certain parts...so I just copied the whole hdd.
Now that I have my first Granddaughter and already have lots of irreplaceable pictures, I know that it is even more important now to keep those pixes safely copied.

I also have Partition Magic 8 and made a couple of rescue floppies from that. I need to read thru the info about that and get familiar with what those rescue floppies do, exactly....as of this moment...I don't remember...

Any other suggestions and info about how to do proper back-ups will be welcome.

Thanks again, limerick...keep after us lazy folks!!!

[SuperSparks]

My strategy is to take a multi-pronged approach to backup. For the OS partition I make regular images using Acronis True Image. I keep all important data on a separate drive to that which the OSs are installed on, so whatever happens to Windows, I don't have to worry about my data. I will back up that data to an external HD, to DVDR, and to the other computer on the LAN. I do that on different days, so that I always have a recent backup, and even if a backup was corrupt I would never lose more than a couple of days worth of data. I also back up the Acronis image files to external hard drive or the other PC.

Like many experienced PC users, I discovered the need for backups the hard way Let's hope this thread will help others to learn from my mistakes and back up their data before disaster strikes.

Just remember hard drives are mechanical devices, and WILL fail sooner or later.

[Train]

How many of us have had a BSOD or power failure and upon booting up have gotten a UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error?

Then we find out that we can not fix it with recovery console.

How many thousands of Dollar$ are you willing to spend for forensic/ recovery work?


20 minutes now can keep your wallet from getting one serious beating!

Backup anything you do not want to lose.

[Limerick]

Just remember hard drives are mechanical devices, and WILL fail sooner or later.

Ain't that the truth! After years and years of having hard drives that ran non-stop for long periods of time (and none ever failing), I encountered a bad year in 2006. Within the space of only a few months, I had an 80 GB and a 60 GB to just "up and die" on me. I would have been in a world of hurt had I not had current backups stored on other drives.

Limerick

[Limerick]

Meanwhile if I did have to recover would it be as I said? reinstall windows and then recover one of my backups to put it back the way it was?
Thanks

From what you've said about the means that you are using, that sounds like the only thing that you could do at that point.

Limerick

[Limerick]

SyncBack is a flexible, and quite powerful backup and synchronization program that allows to to maintain backup copies of your files and folder, or to synchronize them, so that both locations always have a complete copy (e.g Laptop/PC).

Thanks for posting that link, Steve. I visited there and read some of the reviews, which were mixed. A product like that may work well for some, but being an old "DOS-head" myself, I prefer a solution that does not depend on having Windows up and running.

Limerick

[Limerick]

Train stopped by and left a reply of considerable importance --

Backup anything you do not want to lose.

I may have mentioned it on here before, but this reminds me of a time when I worked for a software company in Baton Rouge. I did phone support in those days for a backup product called "Fastback Plus." It was a wonderful program, in that it had lots of power and capabilities for a product of its day...

A desperate lady called one day. Her computer had suffered a severe crash and I walked her through the process of restoring her most recent backup. (Which had been done about 19 months prior to that day.) When the restore was complete, she was thrilled to see that the files had been successfully restored. But then as she began to look at payroll files etc., that she was most concerned about, she said that she didn't see any files that were recent. When I explained to her that she now had her system back to the state that it was in when that backup set had been made 19 months ago, she really lost it. The poor thing thought that by doing a restore, her system would somehow magically become just like it was the day before it crashed. Moral of the story -- while old backups may not be entirely useless, their value is definitely limited.

FWIW, I had another rather unpleasant experience while doing that job, that I don't think I'll ever forget. Another lady had me to walk her through a restore of a backup set that was on about two dozen 5 1/4" floppies. We got to the point where I asked her (just as I had previously done with many other clients) whether she wanted to overwrite her existing files. She said "yes" and I told her how to set an additional switch in Fastback to allow that to happen. The restore went without a hitch and she began to look at the files. She began to get really alarmed and said that she didn't see any of her current files, just the older ones. I explained to her that when I asked her, she said that she wanted to overwrite them, and that in that process, they had been replaced with the contents of that backup set. She began screaming at me, saying some very unkind things. I learned from that call never to use the word "overwrite" again. From that day on, I always asked "Do you want to destroy the existing files and replace them with the files in the backup..." Indeed, we live and learn.

Well, enough of my musing... yes, I hope that this thread creates an awareness of how important it is to have a backup plan that is worth the effort put into maintaining it.

Limerick

[Train]

To give you an idea, this is a very short list of possible things that can happen:
· HDD failure
· Data-destroying virus
· Accidental format of wrong drive or other user error
· Corruption caused by a disk operation such as partition resizing
· Other random corruption
· Static electricity
· Flood
· Fire
· Any other weather related storm
· Deleted on purpose by someone malicious (through internet, or physical access)
· Confiscated by the Police/FBI/etc

There are many more ways it can happen. Most of these have a low enough odd, but do you really want to take that chance?

[stevejr]

Well, now that I have had the proverbial cup of cold water tossed in my face, I need to take the next step which is to decide which kind of extra, simple to use..relatively inexpensive ( maybe around $100.00 )..storage device to get....another internal hdd ( wouldn't 250Gb be sufficient...or even less?)...or an external hdd ( don't know much about those).

I think that I would probably keep my pixes burned to cd's or dvd's...which would result in not needing such a huge hdd capacity...unless I wanted to have multiple redundancy and also keep the pixes on the back up hdd??

I have other questions but I'll just stop here and take this in several steps.

[Nix]

Hmm ironically with my old Gateway system I used to use Ghost 2002 to back up about every 3 days.

Towards the end of it's life that was coming in very useful.

My new Dell system came with Raid 1 Mirror on dual 250Gb HD and Ghost 10 creating backups on a second partition on the drive.

Needless to say in my first days of tinkering, I turned of raid and also stopped the Ghost 10 schedule in preparation for doing it myself manually.

About 3 weeks in and I hadn't got round to setting it up and was tinkering around with raid in the bios and wiped my hard drives.

Had to resinstall from scratch and then restore files and emails from my old PC.

So lost 3 weeks worth of email plus any docs etc my wife had updated and all the stuff she'd set up in the Outlook 2003 calendar. She was not impressed.

Lucklily was able to retrieve some additional pictures that were still on the Digital Camera.

Had I gotten round to wiping the old HD and data from my old PC, we would have lost that too as I hadn't backed it up recently either.

You can guess what I immeditelty started doing once I was back up to running again. Almost daily backups now and lots of DVDs full of photos, MP3, My Documents etc etc from old PC and new.