Thread: Had Any Bad Experiences Losing Data From Hard Drive Failure?

Lol. I coded IBM cards in SASS in one college course. Took a stack of cards to do a small equation. Then again I had a slide rule class in junior high, since calculators came out when i was in high school. Pretty much sure that classifies those of us in that timeframe as dinosaurs.

Anybody remember the Commodore VIC-20? Commodore VIC-20 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

About the loss of the manuscript, I think it's best to print out a hard-copy on good paper stock. Who knows whether computers 30 years in the future will be able to read Word files. CDs can go bad after 8 years and DVDs 2-4 years. I'm not sure of the life span of a hard-drive. But after 5 years you are taking your life into your own hands.

I remember it, that was a good machine in it's day. I went from Sinclair ZX81 -> Sinclair Spectrum -> Atari 520ST At the time I had dreams of becoming a game programmer, but it was too hard using assembler LOL. After 6 months work, my aircraft could finally fly and do rolls over a pixelated line of ground terrain. Maybe I would have finished the game around now if I had stuck with it?

One of my senior work colleagues once told me about programming with punched cards, that must have been a real pain if you needed to debug your code LOL.

btw.

I almost finished coding a simple file backup utility. It should be easy to use, and effective in backing up important files, and folders.

The idea is that you right-click on any file(s) or folder(s) that you want to backup in Windows Explorer and get a "Backup" option in the context menu, and this utility runs in the task bar to back up the files to an external hard drive on a regular basis such as per 24 hours. Then, if your C drive melts, you can re-install the app., retrieve the settings, and restore your important files easily.

The "backup" is a mirror of files of your selections from your C drive, and the "archive" is to temporarily hold onto files that you deleted from the C drive backed-up files. Or files that you decided not to backup anymore. You can choose to wipe the archive files later, or keep them, just in case you made a blunder.

Here is what it looks like so far:

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This could be improved to have cool graphics, and all kinds of bells and whistles, but I want to get it done quickly, and maybe give it away in exchange for an e-mail. Let me know what you think about this?

Originally Posted by bogart

About the loss of the manuscript, I think it's best to print out a hard-copy on good paper stock. Who knows whether computers 30 years in the future will be able to read Word files. CDs can go bad after 8 years and DVDs 2-4 years. I'm not sure of the life span of a hard-drive. But after 5 years you are taking your life into your own hands.

Good point about keeping a hard copy. As for hard drive backups, we always keep three generations (called grandfather, father, son) of backups on three different portable hard drives. The idea is to use a different drive each time you do a backup. We do monthly backups of everything, so we three months worth of backups. One backup is never sufficient.

Back in the 1980s when I was doing IT tech support we did a full backup on tape every night. The newest copy was always stored off-site, just in case the building got nuked.

Originally Posted by Andy101

One of my senior work colleagues once told me about programming with punched cards, that must have been a real pain if you needed to debug your code LOL.

I had one class in high school in the 1960s where we did an exercise with IBM punch cards. I didn't quite grasp that one at the time, but I understood that it could take a couple of hundred individually punched cards and a computer the size of a locomotive to balance your check book. That was state-of-the-art in the 1960s.

I had one class in high school in the 1960s

I was about born then, but I remember collecting some punched paper tape from the London science museum as a child that intrigued me. I want to visit there again, I love the old mainframes, and steam-powered machines.

I'm a bit crazy about data security, so I automatically backup all my pc's on a daily basis to an external HD. I use Cobian Backup 10, a free solution, but by far the best piece of free software I've ever seen for this purpose.
In my Web Server I use a 4 Disks RAID 10 solution and backup daily to an external drive... On a weekly basis I download all the backups to my home PC and include those backups in my daily PC backup... did I mention I'm a bit security crazy???

Did you practice restoring data to make sure that it can be done?

Yes, in both cases I've tested the backups, in fact I believe I can restore my PC from scratch in less than 4 hours (with all the installs needed, data reinstatement, etc.) and the webserver in less than 8 hours (worst case scenario in which the datacenter would burn down and I'd have to re-upload all the Gigabytes and restore the sites fully at another place.) In this last case I'd have to re-upload about 25 Gb's of data from Portugal to the US (as I'd probably choose another provider there). Currently I work with Wiredtree.

I just have the backup discs for my computer.
Then everything else is on usb drives.
I am ready for any problem (having all my data on usb drives mean at the worse case of computer blows up, I get another computer).

My blogs are backed up both on my computer and on another server (wherever that may be, as it is my son's company servers).

I did some further work on my "Simple Backup" solution, now as well as right-clicking on file selections in Windows Explorer, you can drag and drop files onto the form to add them to the backups (when the form is not minimized in the task bar). The aim is to make it as easy as possible to use, and have no excuses not to back up important files. This is a screenshot showing random files/folders that are being backed up:

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