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How Do You Backup Your Data?


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We all seem to use a fair bit of technology these days in the pursuit of gold and pleasure.  We have detectors, maps, gps's, phones, books, scans, photos, videos, cameras, stories, etc. etc. not to mention our computers and drives we use to record and back these things up.  Some are mobile and some stay at our homes and some are in the cloud.

A few months ago one of my devices stopped working and I know I lost some data.  It is data I may not 'need' but without it I don't have it as a record.  I may have lost some find points for the Minelab 3030 on XChange2 because I didn't have a backup of the backup so to say.  Steve sent me some private messages about it but I think it would be a good topic to help us review, store and share our data with someone or not lose it easily.

What do you do with your computer backups?  Do you just backup online?  When you travel, how do you sync your data so that all files and pictures are current on your devices?  How do you purge your duplicates so you don't run out of storage space on your external and internal memory?  How do you prepare for a trip and what do you do when you come back from a trip?

I hope to copy someone's procedure or modify mine to a more simple system.

Mitchel

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 You can have external back up, dual computers and all kinds of fancy stuff but anything stored electronically is subject to loss (among other things) 

I drive my book keeper crazy but I still keep enough records on paper so it wouldn't be a disaster if I lost electricity and all phone service for 40 days and 40 nights. Doing so has been well worth it a couple of times.

 I am envious of those of you that had the sense to jump on board with technology instead of fight it every step of the way like I do.Sorry I couldn't be of much help MN but you know I just love poking sticks at at computer stuff every chance I get.

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1 hour ago, LipCa said:

external hard drive

Years ago I had an external hard drive backup that I bought just as a backup solution.  It crashed.  I still have the data on the platters and no one has been able to recover the data (mostly pictures).  What I should have had was a dual hard drive backup or a server backup which includes many drives in an array that is supposed to prevent data loss on any single account.

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I have four external hard drives and use them to store different data and some duplicate data. I take enormous amounts of photos and that takes up a lot of hard drive space. Plus I get delete happy once in awhile and accidently erase of file I shouldn't have. Plus a hard drive can go at any time, thus the reason for more than one hard drive. Today's prices on external hard is very low cost, especially around the Christmas holidays. There is some free software available to monitor the health of your hard drives if one is concern about the status on them. I also use a free software called Cobian Backup 11 Gravity for a backup software and it gives a person several different ways of backing up data either manually or automatically.

 Cobian Backup supports 4 types of tasks:

Full backups: Every single file in the source will be copied or compressed. If you are overwriting, every file will be replaced. If Overwrite is unchecked, you will have several copies of the same source.

Incremental -  The program will check if the source has been changed from the last backup. If there is no need to copy the file, it will be skipped, saving backup time. The incremental procedure checks the Archive bit attribute of the file. You may want to manually reset the attribute to force a full backup: use the "Set the archive attributes" on the Task menu.

Differential: The program will check if the source has been changed from the last FULL backup. If there is no need to copy the file, it will be skipped, saving backup time. The differential procedure checks the Archive bit attribute of the file. You may want to manually reset the attribute to force a full backup: use the "Set the archive attributes" on the Task menu.

Dummy task: This backup doesn't need a source or a destination. It is useful to use the task just as an scheduler to execute applications, close services, reboot the computer, etc.

When we take a trip we leave all photos on the storage cards and backup that data on a laptop when needed, then when we get home transfer that data to the desktop and external hard drives.

I'm not comfortable yet backing up anything I believe is important to me on the cloud.

 

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Hey Mitchel
For stuff I really don`t want to lose, I convert it to a zip file and upload it to either Google Drive or Microsft One Drive.  You get 15 gig at Google Drive and 5 gig at One Drive.  You can store a hell of a lot of stuff with 20 gig but if that`s not enough you can pay for bigger storage or open multiple accounts.   I also back up stuff on external hard drives, but the free cloud storage is my last line of defense.   cheers  Dave
https://www.google.com.au/drive/
https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-au/

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+1 for Google drive backups. Install the windows app on your pc and you get a google drive folder. Move your important data files to the google drive folder and edit them from there. Any changes you make are automatically saved/backed up to the cloud. Google drive also has the ability to restore previous versions so if you get a nasty crypto virus on your pc that locks all your files, you can restore from a previous "clean" version easily.

Install the google drive app on your smartphone and you can access or change the same files on any device and you always have the latest version.

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We maintain current redundant incremental backups of dozens of terabytes of data. This is a daily thing for us. Those backups are on quality hard drives in quality self powered firewire cases and the drives are only powered up to accomplish a backup.

All quality hard drives today have SMART technology. The drive monitors it's own health and reports use hours, on off cycles, size of disk, size of data on disk, remaining empty space format type and other goodies. If there is a potential failure point for the drive it will report that as a problem, usually before any data is lost. The software to get these SMART readings is free for every operating system.

Hard drives and their enclosures are not created equal. If you see a bargain in a plastic case at Wally World you are probably best off to move on over to the cheap metal detector section. There is a large amount of future grief built into those "bargain" drives. If the drive case comes with a bunch of free software or automatic features try the stationary section for some disappearing ink and composting paper, your "data" will last longer.

Avoid "green" technology in hard drives. The "green" is just an excuse for building a slow cheap hard drive to 1980's construction standards. Hard drives use very little electricity so consider the promise of a few cents less electricity use as a come on to help the bottom line of a drive manufacturer in Thailand.

There are other options besides hard drives. Unfortunately virtually all those options are incredibly slow and unreliable. USB storage sticks work until they don't. If you haven't had a USB stick fail you probably haven't used many. They are great for sharing a little bit of data between devices or people but they really aren't a long term storage option.

The "cloud" is a joke when it comes to security or reliability. Amazon cloud (the biggest) was recently hacked as many other cloud providers have been. All of the "cloud" providers copy portions of your data to whichever server is the cheapest this week. Essentially your data is being constantly fragmented and copied to the lowest bidder in a game of data arbitrage. That's the "cloud". If there is some data loss just reread your contract before you complain to your cloud reseller. Some data loss is to be expected and they suggest you keep a secure local backup to ensure your data integrity. Of course the minute you have a weak or non existent internet connection your data just becomes an abstract concept somewhere "out there". Much like gold if your data isn't in your possession you don't really "own" it.

We maintain our own internet server that serves up several gigabytes of data every day. Besides the copies of that data we keep in our office we also have a second backup server located on a different network in a different city. If the main server loses data (which has never happened yet) the backup server has an exact copy of the original and has permission to install that backup copy and reboot our main server. The backup server is never accessed by the public.

It is possible to backup your data in such a way that short of a global nuclear war your data is secure and available when you need it. It's just a matter of deciding just how secure and available you need your data to be. The basic rule is that if you don't actually back up your data to an independent storage system no backup scheme can work. The most common failure in backup systems is the users failure to actually backup the data they want saved. No body can fix that type of data loss.

 

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15 hours ago, mn90403 said:

Years ago I had an external hard drive backup that I bought just as a backup solution.  It crashed.  I still have the data on the platters and no one has been able to recover the data (mostly pictures).  What I should have had was a dual hard drive backup or a server backup which includes many drives in an array that is supposed to prevent data loss on any single account.

The problem with array backups Mitchell is that when one drive fails you lose all the data. Arrays are built for higher access speed not for data security.

Running a second hard drive in the same enclosure works but isn't the best solution either. Although you can arrange for one hard drive to "mirror" the other hard drive they both rack up the same number of run hours and approach their lifetime expectancy at the same rate. Although it's rare for two hard drives to fail at exactly the same time it's not rare for two older hard drives to have the same failure mode when there is a power supply glitch from their common power supply bus.

A separate high quality hard drive in it's own enclosure with it own power supply is your best bet. Remember if you delete the original file when you backup you haven't accomplished a backup at all. Without two identical files on two different devices you don't have a back up.

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Hey Mitchel

another thing I didn`t mention, but it`s something I use ALL the time, sometimes 2 or 3 times a week.  If you are talking about you only want to save 25 meg of data that you have altered, email it to yourself from one account to another. I send from a hotmail account to a yahoo account. That way you always have a copy in your sent folder of one account and your in box at another account. And doing this you always have for ever a copy of every back up you have ever sent.  cheers Dave

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