Have you ever lost data?

Many times when I first started using a PC. Back then what I lost wasn't significant. Now I back up to an external drive and CD.

 

I had one hard drive start to fail and used Active@File Recovery to get all the data I needed off the drive before it completely went south on me. Yes, that was my pre-backup era. Now I backup to my slave drive and then to an external drive.

 

A long time ago now but my first experience with PC's was an Apricot bought 2nd hand. Anyway during exploring the 20MB HD I found recover.exe

For those that don't know recover.exe in an MSDOS system is not something to play with

 

Yes but none of the above. I once formatted a hard drive before I recovered all the data. However I did manage to recover it using Handy Recovery.

 

I had the exoerience of, having carefully set up daily automatic backups to DVD, when my hard disk was said to have failed, discovering that my backups could not be restored. These backups were to a format unique to the program I was using.
I now am using Genie Backup Manager Pro. With this I have created a disaster boot disk, a disaster backup, a full backup and daily differential backups of which the last three are retained. These backups are held on an external hard disk and are standard Zip files.
To cover me for the ultimate disaster of eg. a fire, I use Memopal: online backup and storage to backup my important files to the internet. This program is free and you pay for the amount of internet space you require. It is backing up my important files whenever they change and retains previous versions.

 

I lost all my data when hard drive quit. Put in new hard drive & found I was not able to transfer data from external (backup) drive. Am now using Seagate Replica for backup - so far so good.

 

yep, too many times to remember them all - from burnt-out hard drives to formating the wrong partition (by accident - middle of the night). Now burn everything of importance to cd/dvd (only problem now - where the H**l did I put that last dvd?). Sometimes you're just not meant to win!

 

I had my backup on a second drive on my laptop. When the main drive failed, I was sent a new drive by HP. After installing the new drive I used my restore disc to format it and restore it to a fresh as new system. However, it turned out the new drive was defective also and without warning the restore program reformated the next available disk (yep the one with my current backup) and I lost all data. I now have a network based autmatic backup system.

 

Cross my fingers and my toes, haven't had a hard drive fail... yet. I do backups to DVD regularly, and I bought a new computer when my old hard drive was on it's last legs.

 

Another vote for Genie-Soft backup. Because of the amount of photo's(Yesterday 419) I take I need a reliable backup system, I normally backup to a network drive daily.

 

I have been a mainframe systems programer for 46 years and backups have always been a major function of running mainframes. Being able to do a disaster recovery is very critical and we test the procedure on a regular schedule.

I am ashamed to say that I am not nearly so careful about backups for either my PC at work or at home. I have external hard drives on both but I do not follow a regular backup schedule.

The problem with external hard drives that are always at your PC is that if your house is destroyed so is the PC AND the external hard drive. So I have two 4GB flash drives that I use to back up critical folders such as My Documents. I then take the flash drive to work for storage and bring the one already there back home for the next backup. Off site storage is another part of mainframe operation and I have adapted to my personal data.

I have never had a PC hard drive fail but it has happened on the mainframe.

One last piece of advice -- test your restore procedure. Backups that can't be restord are, of course, no value.

 

Backup hourly? :|

I backup when I fell the old DVD's are out of datewhich usually takes about 15 minutes...

It just costs too much...

 

Two day's worth of shadow copies on the server. Server get's backed up nightly. So, of course, what crashes? The external raid I use for editing and storing gigantic video files ! ...and not a week after I said to myself - "I really should buy another drive to back that thing up. "

 

I have always partitioned my hard drives. Some years ago, while still using Win98 on a previous computer, I intended to format my C: drive (using the Windows native format program) before re-installing the OS. Instead, it formatted the entire drive, and I lost everything.

When I got my present computer I set up its two hard drives in a RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration. This worked well for awhile, until one of the drives went belly-up. Western Digital must have had a bad design in that particular drive, or a bad production run, as I had several (including two replaced under warranty) fail over a period of about four years.

By that time I had instituted a regular backup schedule, using Powerquest's Drive Image to backup to the second internal drive. Unfortunately, DI sometimes refused to restore a backup, telling me that the data was corrupted.

After Symantec bought Powerquest they discontinued their similar product, Norton Ghost (also acquired through the purchase of the company that developed it), and replaced it with DI, re-labeled as (are you ready?) Norton Ghost. Having had numerous bad experiences with Symantec products, I will not have one on my computer, no matter how good a review it might get.

Today I use Acronis True Image 2009, with which I never have had a problem, and backup regularly to an external hard drive. In addition, I keep my desktop computer synchronized, as closely as possible, with my laptop. It, in turn, is backed up to its own external drive.