Thursday, September 09, 2004

Backups... who needs 'em?



It never rains when you take an umbrella. While it might feel like it is true we all know that is a crock. So we all back up the important documents & Pictures don't we? Hard Disks don't fail do they?

Well, I have spent the last 5 days recovering a 160GB disk. I hadn't changed anything, no new components or software. just stopped turning round quietly.

On it, were all my photos (from the wedding you can see I just got back from) most of which was unbacked up. In fact my last backup was July AND it worked! JULY! Wow thats ages ago. Well at least I have a backup!
It is normally something I do quarterly. And right about now I am considering that is wrong.

So I have got most of it back, enough that I could bored O&M with photos of their wedding if I tried. But it doesn't answer the question of HOW DO YOU BACK UP LARGE AMOUNTS of data.
What is more annoying is just after the wedding O and I came up with a plan for backing up data across our machines, taking advantage of the unlimited data of the internet connections we have and just doing disk to disk back ups where the disks were separated by a very large distance. Boy I wish their honeymoon was shorter.

So please do tell me. Please email me any suggestions you have for backing up a large amount of data. (For information sakes, 50Gb most of which doesn't change - excluding applications)

In fact as I put on my raincoat and grab my umbrella before heading out in to the sunny afternoon I really do think I should start a backup before I go

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