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bluejam · Jun 18, 2003, 11:20 AM

Hi everyone. I have just loaded my CD collection on my 17"PB. Also, Im beginning to get quite a few photos in it. I am starting to get concerned about backing up my goodies and already have another thread regarding the subject in the software forum.

My question is, how many of you have actually lost your iTunes library and/or photos from your powerbooks?

Timo · Jun 18, 2003, 11:26 AM

I've lost stuff by syncing, even when I was trying to be careful.

cambro · Jun 18, 2003, 11:35 AM

Optical media are cheap.
External firewire hard disks are reasonable.
Data is time.

TAZ · Jun 18, 2003, 12:01 PM

YES BACKUP IS CRUCIAL. The crash problems of Apples are nowhere in same league as those of Winblowz machines, but it can happen. You have a SD machine and media is incredibly cheap, so put them to good use. Mr. Murphy is a stickler for biting one in the keister. If you dont want to back up everything then slectively back up CRUCIAL stuff. I back up my financial files weekly, the rest maybe one or twice a year. Phontos get burned to a CD immediately. Its really not that time consuming, but its a heck of a lot easier than redoing everything.

DigitalEl · Jun 18, 2003, 12:04 PM

Optical media are cheap.
External firewire hard disks are reasonable.
Data is time.

...and for most of us, time is money.

mism · Jun 18, 2003, 01:15 PM

Not lost anything from my power book but I've lost everything from a G4 tower when the drive failed, and everything from a G3. It is not pleasant.

All my mp3s are backed up to DVDs and CDs, I just don't fancy re ripping 3100 mp3s from the original CDs.

My addresses, contacts etc are backed up to our server, to ATI tape, to my iDisk and to my iPod (am I paranoid?)

My various important work documents are backed up to our server, to AIT tape and to my iPod.

I back my whole home folder up to our server roughly once a week, from there it goes onto AIT.

Backup seems a hassle until you loose everything, after that it can become an obsession....

Buck_W · Jun 18, 2003, 10:24 PM

I learned the hard way. The Western Digital hard drive that came in my Cube bit the dust and I lost two years worth of data. It was extremely troublesome.

I've learned my lesson. I back up to CD. I also purchased Disk Warrior from Alsoft.

Chris Grande · Jun 18, 2003, 10:35 PM

Learned the hard way myself. My IBM (DeathStar) died in my desktop taking years of work with it. I now backup EVERYTHING all the time. I would never wish this horror on anyone.

ibookuser2 · Jun 18, 2003, 10:53 PM

I backup all my stuff to three different sets of DDS tape, and have had to use the backups several times. Not only is it nice to have a backup when you lose everything, but if you accidentally delete a file or something...

Freeflyer · Jun 18, 2003, 11:23 PM

Backup is never, never, ever crucial.

Until everything goes horribly, horribly pear shaped.

Your best guarantee of never losing any data is to back it up regularly. There are two types of people. Those who have lost data, and those who are going to.

My father has been in the computer business since 1960 (yes, when you entered 8 bits of code at a time by flicking 8 toggle switches to set the data and then a 9th to enter it into the stack. When we got our first computer in the mid 70's he drummed into me, over and over again, don't be worried about your data, be completely and utterly paranoid. And of course I listened to him and backed everything up religiously.

Until, of course, there was a time when I didn't. Everyone on these forums, I'm sure, can come up with a tale that's similar and so, eventually, will you.

When that time comes, it won't be something petty that you'll miss, it'll be that priceless file that you happen to need desperately at precisely that moment.

Back it up, back it up again. One day, you'll need it.

Am I repeating myself here?

Good. Then you'll get a taste of what I got every bloody day for years.

Cheers,

J.

PS. And just for once in his life, my father was right about something.

jetta_gt · Jun 19, 2003, 12:07 AM

You can get a FW enclouse for about $80, a 120GB IDE drive for another $100, and Carbon Copy Cloner for $5. As far as I am concerned, there is simply no exuse not to back up at least once a week, if not more.

Burke · Jun 19, 2003, 12:51 AM

Originally posted by jetta_gt:
You can get a FW enclouse for about $80, a 120GB IDE drive for another $100, and Carbon Copy Cloner for $5. As far as I am concerned, there is simply no exuse not to back up at least once a week, if not more.

And hope that drive doesn't fail...

DigitalEl · Jun 19, 2003, 01:24 AM

Backing up your data when you don't have all the storage space you really want or need also forces you to take a long, hard look at just what you're saving.

I used to back up years worth of e-mail... Stuff I haven't read, well, since it first came to me... All tucked into neat and organized little folders. One day it hit me. "What the hell am I saving this for?"

Definitely backup your data, but think about just what you're doing, too. I'll bet there's stuff you have that you don't really need.

Andy8 · Jun 19, 2003, 01:34 AM

The question I always ask is,

"How much are you prepared to lose?"

mixtup · Jun 19, 2003, 02:01 AM

Originally posted by mism:

My addresses, contacts etc are backed up to our server, to ATI tape, to my iDisk and to my iPod (am I paranoid?)

I don't think you are paranoid. When I go to school to make a presentation I take a floppy, a CD and upload the files to my server. There are so many people that have problems with presentations and important documents like that, that I have learned.

I think the Internet opens up a great backup solution (albeit the bandwith limitations $). If you have a server you can access your files from any computer connected to the 'net. And if your web host is decent they'll keep regular backups in case things go wrong in their datacenter.

A more direct answer to the original question is: what would happen to you if you lost all your files? If you don't have backup this is a very real possibility...

ngrundy · Jun 19, 2003, 02:25 AM

I've suffered disk failures.

I had the boot drive fail on my PC back before i had a mac and stuff. I got bit by the IBM 75GXP mess that time. After that I have always backed up to Other disks and other servers.

I went and spent 800 AUD on a firewire box from epowermac here in AU http://www.epowermac.com.au/Stores_A...3&Item_ID=1126

It takes 2 IDE hard disks and automaticly mirrors data between them. (Hardware RAID 1).

I make a disk copy image of my home directory every week onto it and keep about 3 weeks worth of images. Which ammounts to about 30gb of disk space in use just for backups but when your data is worth time and time is money or in my case 40% of my mark for a university subject then it's invaluable.

Currently I have to have the hard disk in my powerbook and two other hard disks fail before a complete data loss occours.

ibookuser2 · Jun 19, 2003, 04:08 AM

I've got more time to post now, so I'll elaborate on my earlier post.

I used to not care much about backing up. I'd copy a few important files to a zip disk. I didn't do it nearly often enough. One evening I had spent hours adding code to and debugging an application I was writing. I hit save, shut down, all was good. The next morning, powered up, and was greeted by a flashing question mark. Booted up off of the system CD and ran disk first aid- didn't look good, massive directory failures. I was lucky enough to get my data back after running Norton on the drive a few times, but it was really close. The thought of losing all that time spent coding kind of made me paranoid about backing up.

I made it a habit to regularly keep backups on CD-R. That worked, but it was tedious having to manually back stuff up.

About a year ago, I grabbed a couple of SCSI DDS2 drives and about 100 tapes off of eBay for pretty cheap. I threw one of the DDS2 drives in a SCSI box, plugged it into an old Mac Performa running OS 9, and bought a license to Retrospect 5 Workgroup. Retrospect is always running on the Performa. Every day, it does a network backup of my powerbook and my other machines onto tape. I maintain three identical sets of tape (yes, I backup my backups

)

It works great. All in all, I spent around $300 ($50 on the drives and tapes, and something like $250 for Retrospect). It's all automatic, I don't have to do anything except change tapes every once in a while, and I know my data's getting backed up every 24 hours.

And hey, I found a use for that old Performa!

iNeusch · Jun 19, 2003, 06:12 AM

Crashed my Ti's drive2 weeks ago...
Had a backup from the night before

Got a LaCie 120Go which is cheap, fast, reliable... they even have bigger sizes now, in FireWire 800 !

sportymonk · Jun 19, 2003, 07:19 AM

Hard Drives are like light bulbs, they wear out despite the best of care. BTW, most HD manufactorers have dropped their warranties from the old 3 years to only 1 year! Supposedly to come in line with the restof the warranty on computers. i.E they are having to replace to many within the 3 year window. My HD just failed on a four year old pc. You don't have to backup unless you want the data later.

Happy computing.

iNeusch · Jun 19, 2003, 07:39 AM

Originally posted by sportymonk:
Hard Drives are like light bulbs, they wear out despite the best of care. BTW, most HD manufactorers have dropped their warranties from the old 3 years to only 1 year! Supposedly to come in line with the restof the warranty on computers. i.E they are having to replace to many within the 3 year window. My HD just failed on a four year old pc. You don't have to backup unless you want the data later.

Happy computing.

The point of having a backup on a cheap HD is to have a identical copy of your data in case you break your drive... the backup could break too, but it becomes less possible to have both broken at the same time

Freeflyer · Jun 19, 2003, 11:40 AM

On a related note, what do you all actually back up.

Do you just back up your users home directory. That's a pretty easy thing to do, and should cover most peoples data. It's what I do regularly to my spare drive.

However, I'm considering how it would affect other applications. I can always just re-install the software from my discs or from downloads but, being newish to OSX from windows, what else would you need to back up to keep any settings etc.

Should you back up the /system/library or the /library.

I'd appreciate some info on what would make things easiest to recover from a crashed disk. My regular data is backed up, so that's not a problem, I'm just thinking about the rest of the system etc.

I recently bought a 120Gb drive in a firewire enclosure (for $150 shipped), would I need a separate partition on it for backing up the system (eg with carbon copy cloner).

I have an old DDS2 drive in an old pc that I plan to run linux on, which will be good for weekly data backup using retrospect once I have everything setup.

Any good advice from people on their backup strategy would be interesting.

Thanks,

J.

iNeusch · Jun 20, 2003, 03:12 AM

Originally posted by Freeflyer:
On a related note, what do you all actually back up.

I backup my home and my /Applications folder... maybe I miss stuff, but I don't really care

mrtew · Jun 20, 2003, 06:48 PM

I clone my entire drive to an external drive at least once a month. That way I know I have everything and if I ever bork my drive good or if it fails I will have my computer back the same way as it was in about half an hour. I also do it before sending it to apple for repairs so I can erase my drive. I don't trust them since they went in cahoots with BillGate$.

icruise · Jun 20, 2003, 07:02 PM

Originally posted by Freeflyer:

Should you back up the /system/library or the /library.

Assuming you mean the ones in the root of your hard disk, it's not necessary to backup them at all. With the exception of a very few programs (system additions) that add things to these directories, everything there should be more or less the same as when you first installed the system. Your personal files will be in your home directory and in Applications, and possibly Documents (in the HD root).

Freeflyer · Jun 21, 2003, 06:50 PM

Originally posted by Icruise:
Assuming you mean the ones in the root of your hard disk, it's not necessary to backup them at all. With the exception of a very few programs (system additions) that add things to these directories, everything there should be more or less the same as when you first installed the system. Your personal files will be in your home directory and in Applications, and possibly Documents (in the HD root).

Thanks, that makes sense. WIll make backing up easier. I didn't want to clone the drive because that would be repeating a lot of stuff that didn't really need it.

Also, I figured I'd need a separate partition for that otherwise I would have to overwrite everything each week. Not that it's that big a problem, but just not something that's really necessary for me.

Cheers,

J.