Hard Drives and Paperweights, are they interchangeable?

[Craig B]

Last night, about 5 minutes before getting ready to leave work, my hard drive crashed. Hard. As in deader than Michael Jackson's career.

I tried several things. Nothing worked. It wasn't recognizing CDs, it wasn't botting up. Nada. So, I said, screw it, and went over to my fianceés, convinced I had lost the last 3 months worth of work I had on my hard drive.

But this morning, after some struggles and after a last ditch effort of using Mac OS X's target fire wire mode … success!! I wa able to copy all of my work, personal files, archived email and bookmarks off onto another Mac at work.

I can't even tell you how happy I am.

Now, a quick lunch and then it's time for me to heul the carcass down to the Mac store in the mall and get them to fix her up. then i get to spend the early part of next week reloading software and copying all the data back. Which won't be fun, but it's a lot more fun than having to redo 3 months worth of work.

Moral of the story: BACK UP DATA OFTEN!! Do not get lazy about it like me.

[ecsyle]

I keep telling myself that I will get a good backup system in place. I even started getting equipment for it. A dedicated fileserver in a cloest in my house. Maybe the kitchen. I just need to get a few more drives in place.

I really need to do it. Losing 100+gigs of working files would be crushing.

It's great that your system was recoverable.

What are you going to use to backup gigs and gigs of data?

[EC]

I have a brand new computer that's nothing but a paperweight, don't get me started.

I had a hardrive crash last year, man that sucked.

[Craig B]

What are you going to use to backup gigs and gigs of data?

I've had luck at home with having two large internal drives (at least 200 Gb each) and 1 large extrenal drive. I only work on one of the internal drives, the second one is solely for backup.

Then I use retrospect to backup all files to both the second internal and the external as well as occasionally burning old jobs to 2 DVDs (one to keep at my house and the other at my parents' house (about an hour from me)). That way even if my house goes up in flames I still have the backup DVDs.

It's a little bit of cost to set up initially, but it's worth the peace of mind.

At work we have an offsite server, but it has been getting rather full lately, so I got out of the habit of copying to it, but I think I'll start to once I get my machine fixed.

[Craig B]

I have a brand new computer that's nothing but a paperweight, don't get me started.

I had a hardrive crash last year, man that sucked.

Ugh. I feel your pain. trust me. It ain't fun.

[ecsyle]

I've had luck at home with having two large internal drives (at least 200 Gb each) and 1 large extrenal drive. I only work on one of the internal drives, the second one is solely for backup.

Then I use retrospect to backup all files to both the second internal and the external as well as occasionally burning old jobs to 2 DVDs (one to keep at my house and the other at my parents' house (about an hour from me)). That way even if my house goes up in flames I still have the backup DVDs.

It's a little bit of cost to set up initially, but it's worth the peace of mind.

At work we have an offsite server, but it has been getting rather full lately, so I got out of the habit of copying to it, but I think I'll start to once I get my machine fixed.
I was burning DVDs for a while, but my super drive is starting to act really flaky. I don't trust it anymore.

Is retrospect something I should look into? I don't know of any good software to help manage backups :/

[EC]

I was burning DVDs for a while, but my super drive is starting to act really flaky. I don't trust it anymore.

Is retrospect something I should look into? I don't know of any good software to help manage backups :/

I know we used it at my last "conventional job" and I think it's a very common software for backups.

On XP Pro, I can create backup files right through the system and plop them on DVDs. Which reminds me, I need to do that and create a schedule myself. I keep everything on externals, which does make it really really handy when you have to swap computers due to hardrive issues or whatever. But I have no backup other than that.

[Silence04]

Craig B, that's not a Hard drive crash, that's data corruption.

a vital catalog file must have become corrupt, preventing it to be recognized.

there is a mac App called Disk Warrior that was made just for this, i suggest you buy it.
it takes all readable data off of any hard drive and rebuilds it into a new Catalog tree.

[orkaknos12]

I just bought a USB 2.0 bus powered mini hard drive and backed up all my projects to it then used it for scratch disk on my laptop. they've got em up to 160GB - (you can get bigger drives and swap them out in the enclosures, too) for peanuts on ebay. I can share my backups at my two work sites and home in a matter or seconds. It's a godsend. I have a ghost image of the production machines on it - all I have to do is type in the licenses.

-Jon

[Rocketpig]

There are three things any designer should have:

1. An external hard drive
2. A DVD burner with DVD-Rs
3. A fireproof safe

Once a week I back up my data to an external HD. On old jobs, I burn them to DVD and delete them from my drives (though I should probably store one DVD off-site). I then put them all in the safe when I'm not using them.

The fireproof safe isn't automatic (a thief can still steal it), but if I lose my computers and safe, I probably also lost my TV, DVDs, stereo, CDs, etc. and I'm so pissed off that losing my work data won't really matter.