I do Mac tech support and just had another person call with the following:
1) Computer (4-year-old iMac) won't boot
2) Computer is full of family photos - "My life is on that computer!"
3) "No, I never got around to backing it up."
:-/
Please please please backup your data. Hard disks aren't designed to last more than about 3 years. Some last much longer, some die at 2 years (esp. in laptops)
If you have a Mac, here are 3 options:
1) Time Machine (builtin to OSX 10.5/Leopard and newer, just plug in an external hard disk and when it asks "Use this external disk for Time Machine backups?" click "yes")
2) BackBlaze ( www.backblaze.com ), or Mozy, Jungle Disk, Crashplan, or any of the many other online backup services.
3) SuperDuper ( http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDup...scription.html ). Use this to clone your boot volume. If your hard disk ever dies, the computer will revert to booting and running off the cloned volume and you don't even suffer any downtime.
Or wait for your disk to die, tear your hair out, and pay someone like me hundreds of franks to maybe recover your data ;-)
I however perhaps wouldn't say that disks were NOT designed to last over 3 years, since most manufacturers like to allege an MTBF of millions of hours and all that blah blah... so it's more a case of "they weren't designed to last forever, and failure can occur at any random time" (and worse for laptop harddisks since they're moved around so much and this causes extra stress on all those moving parts).
But backups, backups, backups. Can't stress it enough!
I hear that at least once a week, if not more. A cursory check often reveals a hard drive simply going "tick, tick, tick, tick", and then you have to explain to the customer that there isn't anything coming back off that drive for less than the cost of a brand new computer
I keep a Timemachine backup going, Make DVD's of important stuff, and I also periodically dump my entire user data to a NAS device.
Of course you are, but as a mac user I'm not qualified to offer suggestions other than to regularly use some kind of backup program. I'm sure there'll be a windows user along in a moment - they're everywhere you know
Same here - since going to Macs I've completely lost touch with the PC world. I know Mozy is popular for online backup. I don't know what the builtin PC backup option is for external hard disks or what to use for disk cloning. It used to be Ghost but that was like 10 year ago...
Not to mention $50/year for unlimited online backup. Then you're covered both for traveling and against fire/flood/theft (not that there's much of those in CH)
For PCs - I use a Buffalo NAS for day to day storage and it can backup automatically to a second drive attached by USB. In practice I find it easier to do it manually once a month (usually after I have made some major changes e.g. uploading a whole load of photos).
I had a harddrive failure in my macbook a couple of years ago. Using time machine, it restored my entire system (not just photos and music) flawlessly and painlessly to my replacement hard drive from a bog standard external hard drive.
Time machine is one of the most useful mac products out there and yet another reason to have a mac in the first place... it is free and included in the operating system from the get go.
I now use the apple version of an external hard drive, called a time capsule. This is basically a wireless router and external hard drive in one box, which then uses time machine to do the backup of my system every hour or so.
whether you use the time capsule or an external hard drive, all mac users should use time machine... now!
I have a Carbonite online backup subscription and also a Time Machine external HDD backup. Only recently started doing backups after I realised how many photos etc. I would lose if the hard disk failed...
FYI, if you use something like a QNAP NAS (or any similar device really) that can take 2 or 3 disks with which you're planning to use RAID (1 or 5 for redundancy), it might be a good idea to have each disk be from a different brand all together.
Getting all disks from the same batch could raise your risk of having a batch of faulty disks where they all fail at the same time...
In addition, keep a separate external disk aside to which you perform monthly backups of your NAS, and then place it in a safe place. Reason I say this, is because I know one person who ended up having a fried NAS on his hands when lightning struck his house and he had no surge protection.
So whilst his NAS was mirrored and each disk had a copy of his data, his NAS still took the brunt of the sudden surcharge which travelled via his DSL model, down to the router, to which his computers and NAS was connected to... thus losing all his data. It seems that phone lines are not always protected so well in some of the older houses out there =\
(and his PC made a whopping BANG noise as well... frying half the components inside... dayumn).
Yeah it's important to realize that RAID != backed up. Something as simple as a power supply failure in the RAID (or lightning, as you say) can leave ALL disks in the RAID unreadable.
Most NAS boxes have a USB port to allow periodic/scheduled backups.
I think what you mean is "If only Filevault worked better"
No backup solution is happy with HUGE files.
I work around this by keeping a secure disk image on my desktop where I put anything I want to have encrypted. Of course, if you want all of your email/photos/music encrypted then you might as well use Filevault.
I switched to Mac at the end of last year...after almost two decades of PCs. Got a Time Capsule and don't think about backup anymore. Not too be a fanboi, but krlock3 is right. Flawless and painless. I never found anything as easy with my PCs, though I know there are many solutions available.
First time I needed to recover a few jpegs for my Wiki which is on my Mac OS X server I found the backup file had been corrupted, apparently due to other Mac backups at the sametime.
It was not a big issue this time but went out and bought a seperate hard disk for backing up the server.
Intend to put another server in a remote location and duplex the files (not that big) but cost me a lot of my own time.
Not always taken that just because you have paid the money for backups that it is going to happen.
Now to the plan as to replace the timecapsule before it goes puff .... pity because it can do some clever stuff.
My MacPro will not back-up to my Cisco Media Hub NAS over the network. It will not connect simply. I believe it is more of a Cisco issue than Apple but still pisses me off.
So might have to drop a few bucks for the Time Machine...
Not sure I agree with the 2 year life on HD's. Each and every laptop/pc I had the drive would last for 4+ years..I would actually replace the machine with a perfectly well running drive...that all being said: yes back-up is crucial and everyone should have a NAS or a external drive these days.
On my Windows XP PC, I now and then do a full system save, using Acronis True Image and the one click total save option. I save all on an external disk drive. I also have an Acronis installation disk, should I ever need to recover from a total PC failure and rebuild it on a new PC.
Worth doing, otherwise some day you lose tons of data...