Re: Friendly warning - BACK UP TODAY!

Richard Heathfield wrote:
I had a narrow escape this morning.

For about an hour, I was under the ghastly impression that I had lost
several ***years*** of work to a machine failure. For the majority of that
work, I had no backups whatsoever.

For the last few weeks I've occasionally had a little niggling thought -
"backing up would be a good idea at some point" - but I never actually got
around to it.

Fortunately, a little gefingerpoken recovered the box.

I have spent the afternoon backing up onto as many different media as I can
find!

Those of you who are bright enough to back up regularly can chortle happily
at my panic, of course.

But for those of you who, like me, keep forgetting about the last disaster
and keep thinking "well, obviously there won't be a disaster *today*, so I
can put off backing up until *tomorrow*..." - think again!

Well to be honest, the way I do this, is I creat a heirarchy of
"importance" and I find ways of doing implicit backups as part of what
I am doing.

This maps reasonably well to what I do -- I consider my source code the
most valuable, so I use CVS where the repositories are on a different
drive. So I can lose either drive, and I am not totally screwed. For
certain "high need" directories, I actually make 3 copies onto 3
seperate drives.

As for full backups, I only do this occassionally, as I do not believe
in being a slave to my computer. Computers are virtual slaves -- they
*MUST* do what you want, at your pace, when you want, how you want it.
Where it fails to do this, or it forces *you* to take action you are
not interested in (install/run a virus scanner, physically backing up
your data, cleaning out your registry, etc) your system is simply
failing you. This is a failing system making a decision about the
value your time.

RAID and journalling are important technologies that are slowly
starting to make it into mainstream use. This is clearly the right
answer -- not taking ridiculous time outs to do full backups.

While you might be motivated by a "near escape" -- I had a slightly
different problem. Actual loss. My Win98 install had finally failed
on me in a way that was not realistically recoverable. So I upgraded
to Win 2003 server -- everything seemed to work fine at first, however,
it eventually just *lost* my FAT12 drive, and I actually lost stuff.

--
Paul Hsieh
http://www.pobox.com/~qed/
http://bstring.sf.net/

.

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