I've noticed something on Twitter recently, the number of people who are actually backing up and recovering their personal machines. In the past, you would ask people how they backed-up their home machines and pretty all, even the professionals amongst us would look a bit sheepish and may some excuse that backing-up home machines was too hard; the medium we had available to use i.e floppies, then CDs, now DVDs just was not up to the job and tape, well tape is too expensive for a home user.
Who wanted to spend hours shuffling removeable media? But now, a number of things have come together;
Hard disks are now relatively cheap and there has been a mass growth in the use of external drives.
Multiple PCs in the home has meant that there has been a growth in home-networks this has led to file-shares and home NAS devices becoming common.
Broadband is now common and there is a reasonable amount of bandwidth available enabling back-ups to be transferred off site. Yes, we could do with more upstream bandwidth but it's better than it was.
And the cloud, I am not going to name the providers; they are doing well enough without me publicising them 😉
All of these factors are now leading to a situation where back-up is pretty easy to do for the average home user and from my observations, people are beginning to back-up their stuff at home. But I suspect there are still a significant number of large companies who still don't efficiently back-up (if at all) their mobile users, their branch offices etc.
There is simply now no excuse for this! If you aren't backing up; start demanding that you are! There's simply no excuse not to. And if you are backing up; perhaps try recovering files once in a whilst; you don't want to be panicking when you have to do a recovery for real.
I’ll add to the ramblings …
I use an external drive for backing up my Mac. I also back up my important files from my Windows laptop to my Mac using either Dropbox or the Windows synchronize facility. Works out pretty well. The only issue seems to be that on the Mac the file system checks if the external drive is there whenever I write a file, open a new file or start a new program. Since, the external drive is very sloooowwwww this has a horrible effect on performance. For someone who is used to the instant response of a Linux machine I find this slowness extremely grating. And sometimes I just unplug the external drive.
Since I use the external drive exclusively for backup it would be really nice if the OS vendors would not check to see if all the drives are there when something accesses the file system. It would be nice if the file system only accessed a physical device when that particular physical device is actually accessed.
Is this the effect of the LVM and file system not knowing which physical device the access will ultimately go to so it simply wakes them all up? Will virtualization have a similar price or is this just a part of an unoptimized file system on a consumer grade OS?
I hadn’t noticed that…interesting but I just use network shares anyway.
Dropbox is indeed fantastic for syncing files across machines..
Since (1998) having a Quantum Bigfoot 5.25″ HDD die in such a way that you could see the pattern the head had made as it bounced over the platter…
… that drive contained several unique cakewalk and rebirth projects, such that the tune we’d been working on for a few weeks was well and truly lost to the big dead hard drive in the sky…
Needless to say, I’m “backup” mad – archive is done to CD or now DVD, and copied every so often to new DVD – again having had a very expensive SCSI CD writer in the late 90’s, and been bitten by 10 year old CDROMs no longer doing the R part of ROM… I have backup and archive drive on every machine, and make about 5 copies of everything I care about.
This maybe as simple as 3 disparate HDD in a single machine, 3 machines and a copy of everything everywhere!
There is no need for a home user to backup to an online provider, simply add another HDD to each machine and copy it all everywhere. Why pay someone else to do what you can do? OK, so maybe or a single PC user who doesn’t know is a### from his e####, but anyone else… just buy another HDD, and anything you care about, backup to DVD every other week.
“There is no need for a home user to backup to an online provider”
Well, maybe not an online provider, but certainly offsite. Back in 2007, my house was mostly destroyed in a storm. There was extensive water damage to just about everything. I learned firsthand the value of offsite backups.
Now, if you want to keep a copy of important data offsite, then it comes down to cost, convenience, and reliability.
Now I could buy a USB drive, backup to that, and stash it at a relative’s house. USB hard drives are certainly cheap these days, but that would be awfully inconvenient.
I could enable FTP on my FAS3020, or maybe just do a file share over a VPN out to my brother’s house in CA. He’s a CMOS engineer for Intel, and quite the geek, so we could probably make some sort of remote storage or file share thing work. I don’t think that would be a good solution for most people though.
Oh wait, then there’s all these cloud storage services, they come with relatively easy user interfaces, and the prices for the most part aren’t that bad …
John
Barry, at $4.95 per month; Mozy for example is extremely good value and it gets your data offsite. Perhaps we are no longer talking about Home BackUp, we are talking about Home DR!
As we store more and more important information on electronic media, getting this off-site is becoming increasingly important.
Anyway, aren’t you backing up your home machines to one of the many arrays you have at work?
Agree with John F. Offsite is very important in case of fire, water, and/or electrical damage that renders the nice local backups as useless as the originals. Mozy is an excellent value, and the restore process is painless.
I backup to an external hard drive, and also to Mozy.
I don’t want to ever be in a position to lose important personal stuff like photos and stuff that only exist digitally.
D
At $4.95 a month, thats almost $5 a month I just couldn’t give to EMC. No matter what!
At one point someone worked out we could store the entire internet in our testfloor — the problem is that we trash it and start again too often!
Its a funny prospect – we have so much storage at our disposal, but we are trying to break it – and all to often we do – so I’d rather keep it where I can see it and break it myself 😉
Martin,
After doing some more checking it turns out that I am the victim of the nefarious Seagate spin down problem on Macs. Apparently, the default setting for Seagate external drives is to spin down after 30 or 60 seconds depending on the drive model. They neglected to offer Mac users a way to change this setting. Their solution is to have the users connect the drive to a Windows machine, install the drive manager software and change the setting. Of course if you power down the drive it apparently loses the setting you entered via the windows machine. Not much of a solution particularly if you don’t own a Windows machine. So word to the wise if you own a Mac stay away from Seagate drives. Apple recommends lacie for external hard drives.
If there are any Seagate employees reading this, get your frigging engineering team to fix this!