Blessed are the geeks...

[Big Dave]

...for they make the backups.

7 year old firewire drive just started making a noise like a pushbike with broken spokes.
No data lost, need a new backup, backup though.

Timely reminder. When they let go it's usually terminal.

[Ronin]

...for they make the backups.

7 year old firewire drive just started making a noise like a pushbike with broken spokes.
No data lost, need a new backup, backup though.

Timely reminder. When they let go it's usually terminal.

Well done that man. Just delt with a client who has had her 2nd hard drive faliure in a year. Unfortunately she didn't head my warnings after the first time and has lost 9 months of business data, unable to pay GST or clients. I had even sold her an external and shown her how to back it all up.

Sigh

[geoffm]

And to state the obvious - do check your backups have actually backed up and are retrievable, unlike mine over the NAS drive server which for some reason mangled everything.

[Oakie]

Well done that man. Just delt with a client who has had her 2nd hard drive faliure in a year. Unfortunately she didn't head my warnings after the first time and has lost 9 months of business data, unable to pay GST or clients. I had even sold her an external and shown her how to back it all up. Sigh

Thats the sort of thing that can cripple a business. As part of my job I do the payroll. It is backed up on the server, on my PC, on an external drive that is stored in another building on site and on a USB Flash Drive at home. I think I'm paranoid enough.

[jonbuoy]

Thats the sort of thing that can cripple a business. As part of my job I do the payroll. It is backed up on the server, on my PC, on an external drive that is stored in another building on site and on a USB Flash Drive at home. I think I'm paranoid enough.

Headache is keeping them all synched.

[Big Dave]

And there are online services that can deal with data like payrolls and spreadsheets.
My issue with online backup is that the complex photoshop layouts or movies are occasionally 500+mb files - has to be local.
Stuff that is top priority goes on a DVD as well.

[jonbuoy]

And there are online services that can deal with data like payrolls and spreadsheets.
My issue with online backup is that the complex photoshop layouts or movies are occasionally 500+mb files - has to be local.
Stuff that is top priority goes on a DVD as well.

Yup, internet cloud computing & storage is a great idea - we just need decent upload bandwidth.

[Ronin]

And to state the obvious - do check your backups have actually backed up and are retrievable, unlike mine over the NAS drive server which for some reason mangled everything.

Storagecraft FTW

[Slyer]

I've gone the RAID1 or mirrored drives route that prevents me from losing anything in the event of a hard drive failure. Need to sort an external solution to prevent aginst corruption, deletion etc.

[avgas]

Don't even get me started.
Right now I have 5 bloody SCADA systems which are on shitty old PC's due to customer not wanted to fork out for servers.
I hope the SQL one goes first. More fireworks then.

[sinfull]

Some of the on line pron's that good now, i don't bother backing the movies up, seen one seen em all !

[riffer]

grrr. Don't remind me. I'm still rebuilding my movie collection after one of the 500GB drives on the Home Theatre went belly-up. Only movies backed up were the kids' ones (because they do their own backups - not bad for 12, 10, 9 and 5 year olds). Most of them are on DVDs but man, there's a lot of work rebuilding the set. And I have so much drive storage that there's no way to back it all up unless I install an LTO jukebox and that's getting a bit ridiculous for a home network. Anyone else here dealing with terabytes of home network storage? Or are we the only family full of geeks?

[Big Dave]

Nah. Never watch movies more than once unless there is absolutely nothing else on TV.
My own movies I save so I don't have to do the work again or might be able to re-use.
I usually hate the stuff I did a year ago because I've learned how to do it better in the interim.

Jnr knows how to check his email otherwise has no interest in computering.

[Slyer]

grrr. Don't remind me. I'm still rebuilding my movie collection after one of the 500GB drives on the Home Theatre went belly-up. Only movies backed up were the kids' ones (because they do their own backups - not bad for 12, 10, 9 and 5 year olds). Most of them are on DVDs but man, there's a lot of work rebuilding the set. And I have so much drive storage that there's no way to back it all up unless I install an LTO jukebox and that's getting a bit ridiculous for a home network. Anyone else here dealing with terabytes of home network storage? Or are we the only family full of geeks?

I used to have a RAID5 array of 320gb drives.

You need a minimum of 3 drives first of all. If you make 3 into a RAID5 you get the storage capacity of 2 of the drives but you are protected against any of the drives failing, you just replace the drive and the array rebuilds happily. It becomes more of an advantage if you have more and bigger drives.
5x 1TB drives in RAID5 = 4TB of storage, all in the one partition which means you won't have to copy from drive to drive ever again. And if you lose any of the 5 drives you are safe, just replace it ASAP and it will rebuild the array and you'll be protected again.

Disadvantages are that if you lose 2 drives at once you lose EVERYTHING. And yeah it's not for everyone.

RAID1 is easier. 2 drives that mirror each other, everything that happens is written and read from both drives so if you lose one you've still go the other. Nice and easy.

[avgas]

Or are we the only family full of geeks?

We used to be. But I found this to be ridiculous - so now I have all my stuff limited to 500gb. After 500gb you have no idea what is on there I have found.
Wife had 400gb of movies she was never going to watch again. In fact all our movies we pretty much concluded we would never watch again - no point in keeping it.
Cut the music down from 300gb to 220gb - hoping to get down to 150gb by end of year.
Documents are sitting quite happily at just under 110gb - hopefully I can start cutting into them soon too.
Good thing is now I can walk around with the whole thing on my little 2.5" drive. With a the big backups at home.
So yeah - when I get to 1TB again I know I am doing it wrong........
In the words of Nike - just stream it.