Have you ever lost data?

The importance of backing up was drilled in my head in the early 1980's (pre PC). For my business, I was running a IBM System 23. It provided massive internal storage ... Two - 8 inch floppy disks housing 1.3MB each. At the end of a very busy business day, my wife stopped in with our oldest son in tow, about 3 years old at the time. As he runs to my office gleefully shouting Hi Daddy, his eyes zoom in on a large red (1 "x 1 ") object recessed into the right corner of the computer. Before I could I could draw a breath, I heard a "Click" ... screen goes black, the room is quiet. Yes, it was the main power off switch. After hugs and kisses from my son and wife, I call my programmer. We fire up computer and data status has rolled backed to previous day end. I had to input all of invoices for the day to rebuild inventory. Discussed with programmer to write updates at end of each invoice to floppy. Said that would be a good idea, have it done in a month or three. Call ended and I got a roll of wide masking tape ... that switch never moved to "OFF" until computer was retired.
When I started using PC's (home use) I adopted "GoBack" (before Norton bought company out). Saved my butt a number of times, but a near miss with a failing HDD convinced me safer solution was required. All of the computers on my network now run Acronis (image backups - manually run) and SyncBack for data (automatic - from time of day to when system at idle for 5 minutes based on data importance) which moves through my network and writes to my HDD-2 data drive. This info is backed up to external HDD weekly, selecting one of three HDD's. The newest one gets stored over at my neighbors house for off site disaster recover.

 

My case was rather funny.... I just lost many settings, no key data, so little pain. The reason of the loss is more interesting.

I use Windows and Linux, sometimes either/or, sometimes together. I often start a Windows PC in Linux for maintenance, fixint things, and backups.

In both Win & Lin there are default places for settings and data.


SYSTEM SETTINGS

WINDOWS - various places in the registry, mostly accessible via Control Panels, and the RUNNING system knows where it is, usually in a few folders in given places on C:\, but possibly elsewhere.

LINUX -most are in a folder called /etc/ and its subfolders, "/" being the "root" filesystem, and the RUNNING system knows where it is, either the only partition or a particular, chosen partition.


USER SETTINGS AND USER DATA

WINDOWS - again
- various places in the registry
- C:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\ and subfolders, mostly hidden
- C:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\Application Data\ and subfolders, mostly visible
(the Application Data folder is itself hidden)

LINUX -slightly simpler, as the folder /home/<userid>/ contains all data and settings, where all the latter and some of the former are in invisible so called "dotfiles ": any file or folder with a name starting with "." is hidden by default.

Also in Windows one can see strangely named folders such as
C:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\.gimp-2.6 ----notice the "." in .gimp.
These are mostly data folders for many open source apps that were born on Linux and are available for Windows too, such as "the GIMP ", a graphics program.

BEWARE WHEN YOU ARE BACKING UP BITS USED IN ONE OPERATING SYSTEM WHILE RUNNING ANOTHER INSTANCE OF THE SAME OS!

Same problem with Windows and Linux.

Say you are backing up data from an old & flakey HD, and you are running either ANOTHER Windows system disk or one of a zillion available Linux Live CDs.
What used to be C:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\ .....
may temporarily have become D:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\... which iswhat you really want.


In the Linux case, if you run a live CD, then what shows up as /etc/... belongs to the current running system, not to what you had on the HD. Depending on how the older CD was "mounted" on the Live CD system, what you want may have shifted to places like these:

WINDOWS
/mnt/WINDOWS/Documents and Settings/<userid>/ ...
/media/hda1/Documents and Settings/<userid>/ ...

LINUX
/mnt/sda1/home/<userid>/ ...
/media/hda1/etc/ ...

This is REALLY TOTALLY OBVIOUS STUFF but if you don't pay attention you end up with a nice backup of things you don't need.

To make sure, navigate to see some clearly "yours" files, and on a Live Linux type from the command line

mount
to see what partition is mounted where

df
to see how big the mounted filesystems are and how much data is on them, which can help recognizing the correct partitions and data trees.

Linux live CD's are a Windows system's best friend, but it takes some care to get them to make friends!

 

Not because of a drive fail, but I once tried to 'Cut-and-Paste' about 4GB of music from one drive to another, and the computer froze... After a reboot, everything was gone.
From that moment I always COPY and Paste, and then delete the original file(s).

 

I've lost data even with the belt-and-suspenders approach. (multiple backups, backups of backups...)

Most backup utilities are GREAT at backing up data (or so it seems, even with a verification pass)... but most SVCK at restoring data if the slightest little thing goes wrong. Many won't even attempt to recover data from damaged backup archives -- and let's face it, getting back some of your data is way better than getting back none at all.

Bad (tape) media is by far the main reason I've lost data.

Now that I've stopped using tape, and backup to removable hard drives and internet backup providers, problems occur much less frequently.

 

Never Lost Data

I use an online backup, external hard drive, and burn permanent unchanging data to dvd. I did image backups of pristine XP Pro, SP3. Since I have these measures in place I haven't needed them, save each January 1 when I reinstall my operating system.

 

Actually Vista crashed and could not be restored using the restore discs (which were somehow corrupted). When I reinstalled a fresh out of the box Vista operating system (provided under warranty by now defunct Circuit City) it could not read the backup files created by the crashed version. After several local geeks tried and failed, I resorted to copying file by file from the recovery data on a portable hard drive and was able to painstakingly recover all but my Pinnacle Movie files. Looking for a better backup!

 

Yes, but I was genius enough to back it up onto the main drive, which either got corrupted during the backup, or failed...

 

Recently. Sent my PC to HP for warranty repair. When I got it back my lightscribe wouldn't work so I had to "revert to the day it was born ". Fortunatey I had a backup on DVD, only lost about three days of stuff.

I backup incrementally monthly. When I can afford an external drive I'll try a clone or something like that.

Mitch

 

have lost data many times, but never due to hard drive failure... I switched to all raid systems a long time ago. Have lost many a system to bad os config's in the olden days, and have had systems stolen with unreplacable (but well secured) data. Most recently lost a week of corporate e-mail due to mcaffee letting a virus through and then catching it later (by catching it later I mean it deleted the entire exchange database as corrupt and the log file as well) all with no warning.

 

last year i lost all my data- photoes, important documents as i didn't do backup since then i always do weekly backup because i wanna keep all my information safe.
my software is Acronis True Image, very reliable and easy to use, i like it.

 

Interesting poll. One of the options is have you ever lost your backup. On my current computer, I have not lost my data yet, but the external disk that I was using to backup my data failed, and I lost all of the backup data on it.

 

Sorry should have said one of the options should be "Have you ever lost your backup data "?

 

I think some common problems aren't included in the poll options:

• Yes - Had backup, but it was corrupt and I couldn't restore from it
• Yes - Had backup, but the new version of the backup application was incompatible with it and I couldn't restore it. (Windows backup anyone!)
• Yes - Had backup, but it didn't include a couple of vital files I needed.
• Yes - Had data backed up but didn't have application disks and the application wouldn't run from a copy restored from backup.

You need back up. You need to review and test it often. But you must always work on the principle that you're main backup won't work. So back up in depth - don't use a single backup media, and use systems with built in resilience (e.g. RAID hard drives).

I am a very paranoid IT manager. My servers have shadow copy, backup to removable media (with a backup rotation), and a couple of large NAS boxes in obscure parts of the building scheduled for large backup everything jobs at the weekend.

 

Thanks, I agree with you.

 

At home, I backup like yearly (but for important data, i usually move it to laptop which i could use it at office). In the office, daily backup is a must.

 

I've lost all my data once many years ago when a hard drive crashed and nothing could be retrieved from it since then I back up my important things want to keep on either flash drive or CDRW once a week if make changes to anything, have a copy of my email address printed out and if add new names I write them on this print out and I now have a password and username book with all the sites I use and regularly update that as I learnt a hard painful lesson that day.