The difficulty of making backups...nevermind

[deeaa]

Just clarifying to myself here---I'm just setting up my backup processes again for my PC.

So, what I do is this:

I back up C: in its entirety to USB drive as image.
I back up E: documents in entirety to USB drive by contributing, never deleting
- but within this, I also back up my music folder to another, networked drive so I can access that from the livingroom and that is synchronized, as I may add stuff from the living room there.

Then I back up the externel eSata video HD to same usb drive, again only contributing.
- But in addition to this I back up the video content FROM the usb drive just backed up to, forward onto the network drive for access to livingroom/viewing, but not back. I do not back up movies etc. temporary data, just the family videos etc.

Then I back up my laptop data to a different network drive for safekeeping, except the large audio/video data folders, which I back up to a third external drive.
And finally I back up my audio working files, projects etc. to USB drive.

If I did it all right, I should have everything except mundane TV shows and movies etc. in at least two locations, all spread out to 5 drives totaling the same amount of TB's and thus pretty secure. Phew.

 

[guitartango]

Just clarifying to myself here---I'm just setting up my backup processes again for my PC.

So, what I do is this:

I back up C: in its entirety to USB drive as image.
I back up E: documents in entirety to USB drive by contributing, never deleting
- but within this, I also back up my music folder to another, networked drive so I can access that from the livingroom and that is synchronized, as I may add stuff from the living room there.

Then I back up the externel eSata video HD to same usb drive, again only contributing.
- But in addition to this I back up the video content FROM the usb drive just backed up to, forward onto the network drive for access to livingroom/viewing, but not back. I do not back up movies etc. temporary data, just the family videos etc.

Then I back up my laptop data to a different network drive for safekeeping, except the large audio/video data folders, which I back up to a third external drive.
And finally I back up my audio working files, projects etc. to USB drive.

If I did it all right, I should have everything except mundane TV shows and movies etc. in at least two locations, all spread out to 5 drives totaling the same amount of TB's and thus pretty secure. Phew.

Wow Dee

I should know better but I never back things up (except for photographs), once lost three years of email..... us "IT" types never learn.

 

[Eric]

Yeah, you're better at backing up than I am. Other than some photos and possibly some music, I don't have that much worth saving. Lots of documents equivalent to a lot of time, sure, but really anything that would be missed? We've been cleaning out stuff at home and moving things into storage to make our house look better for buying, and it has brought home the point that we have considerably more stuff than we need, even if 'need' is defined as your life not being lived any differently than it normally is. I look at digital stuff the same way. Sure, if it's free I'll want to back up files and have them forever, but I doubt I'd even notice if almost all of them went away.

Still, it's good that you have a plan like this. Someday I'll hook up an external HD I have any join you in the backup festivities.

 

[deeaa]

Yeah, I have loads of stuff to back up, ranging from videos from dating back to 1967 to recordings from even further down, plus tens of thousands of photos and of course hundreds of my own songs, CD covers and other prsonal artworks or such.

Much of it does not even exist in other than digital format any more too.
Most of it is useless, but then again, most of it also doesn't take up so much room. Written documents only really make for much less than 100G of the stuff, so it's very easy to back up.

School stuff I have to save for 5 years minimum by law as well as shooting club documents anyway, and my tax documents etc. as well, so I have to plan to keep everything at least that time. Emails are no problem, google holds them, and I have a service that stores most of my bills and tax infos on the web too. I don't keep much stuff at all on paper....even in school, I have pretty much everything starting from books on my computers - I never carry any papers around, all I carry is my smartphone and my laptop, and I have _everything_ on the laptop from tests to student evaluations to emails to books to be shown off the video projector, to printable exercises and even all the listening exercises. All that makes for lots of material, I'd say around 250GB by now. I also have a couple of books I'm writing myself and such, but those I actually also store online for better protection and access to the same document from where ever I may be when the mood hits to write some more, so that I can basically edit them from my smartphone even.

So basically whereas all the other lecturers have bookcases full of dictionaries, books and manuscripts and copies and folders full of student info etc. forms...I have it all on my laptop only. Thus I really do need to make sure all of it is safe too. If I lost it, I would lose literally almost everything I use at work, could do nothing.

And, after all, it's very easy to do with something like SyncToy - it's kind of complicated to set up at first, having to think where is what and how to best organize the backing up, but once it's done, you just click on the icon now and then and it does it all automatically and doesn't even take up much time.

 

[Beerman]

I'm a big fan of imaging myself. I regularly image my C drive (which is basically just my OS) and keep all my documents and music and video on a separate drive which I image as well. Usually, I keep extra copies of my very important stuff so that if one external drive goes bad, I have another one ready.
Haven't backed up to the clouds yet but I guess it won't be long before that get's less expensive.

 

[marnold]

I bought an external hard drive and use a program called luckyBackup which is basically a front-end for rsync. I backup my MP3s, pictures, /home, and /etc directories. I basically do it when I think about it. Speaking of which, I should really backup my PS3 . . .

 

[Eric]

I bought an external hard drive and use a program called luckyBackup which is basically a front-end for rsync. I backup my MP3s, pictures, /home, and /etc directories. I basically do it when I think about it. Speaking of which, I should really backup my PS3 . . .

Can you remind me what rsync is? Isn't krontab also a built-in bash backup tool?

 

[marnold]

Can you remind me what rsync is? Isn't krontab also a built-in bash backup tool?

rsync basically keeps two directories synced with each other. You can do it all from the command line, but luckyBackup gives it a much more user-friendly interface. Cron simply allows you to run a program at a particular time. Eventually I'd like to get the rsync scripts from luckyBackup into a cron job so the backups are done regularly.

Anybody have any idea how the "external HD" and "PS3" in the posts above suddenly became links to eBay?

 

[Eric]

rsync basically keeps two directories synced with each other. You can do it all from the command line, but luckyBackup gives it a much more user-friendly interface. Cron simply allows you to run a program at a particular time. Eventually I'd like to get the rsync scripts from luckyBackup into a cron job so the backups are done regularly.

Anybody have any idea how the "external HD" and "PS3" in the posts above suddenly became links to eBay?

Ah. I took a community college Linux course a couple of years ago, and I remember cron (kron?) being mentioned with backups. I guess it was just being used to schedule periodic runs or rsync or something like that. Obviously, I was paying super-close attention.

 

[guitartango]

I have a penchant for installing different versions of Linux alongside Windows XP, only this time I misread the partition table and deleted my windows partition. Tried to recovery it but no go..... oh well