Data backups... they are IMPORTANT!

[Benz]

Just thought I would share my expensive lesson with some of the good folk here on aulro.

My partner and I were silly enough to have all our eggs in one basket when it came to storing our many years worth of photos.

We had all the digital copies stored on a single external hard drive.

Unfortunately the hard drive decided to die on us a few weeks back and we just heard back from the data recovery guys today...

I'm just going to say it's going to be VERY expensive to retrieve all of those photos.

So if your silly like me and ignored the risks involved with data storage on electronic devices and would rather not loose your data or pay through the nose to get it back...

invest in a second backup device.

would of been literally 20 times cheaper for us if we had

[MEANZ06]

always back up. I've got a 2T and two seperate 500G memory drives i use

[Marty110]

not only do you need multiple back ups but also ensure they are not all together in the same place - if like us you live in a fire prone area - if you lose your house you lose all your backups. I always have at least one removable disk off site (usually in the back seat pocket of the car). Paranoia rules when it comes to data (or photos)

[WhiteD3]

For photos and data I keep a USB drive at work on which I backup the home PCs weekly. Also keep a hardcopy (DVD) backup of photos and home movies at my parent's house.

[Lucy]

I have been using cloud storage (dropbox), which gets around all the problems of hardware failure, plus I can access my files from any computer anywhere any time.

[dullbird]

how much is it to use the cloud?

[RVR110]

Hi Lou,

Entry level plans for online backup of a full PC (not just 5Gb) start from about $60 per year for one PC.

I take 2 backups:

• Local hard disk (external)
• carbonite.com

The local hard disk backup is relatively fast, but doesn't protect you if your house burns down taking your computer and external hard disk with it. I take full image backups using Acronis True Image. This protects me in the event of a PC failure such as a hard disk crash or corrupted file.

The initial Carbonite backup took about a month to backup all my data, but now that's done I've configured the backups to occur each night so that they only use up off peak bandwidth. The added benefit is that I can download files from the backup when I'm at work. There's also and iPad/iPhone app that lets you access your data.

[sashadidi]

5gb to 7gb spaceare usually free on dropbox and sugar sync and microsoft and many others which is not a lot for photos. Also maybe print them on good photo paper as well.
Having dropbox was brilliant after Christchurch earthquake for a pharmacist friend as he had backed up the night before, the earthquake happened at one and the building was semi destroyed and the USB backup was in the computer!!! left in the building so there was no backup as such!!! except the cloud. Also many law firms were paying for daily backups of all their documents and had not verified the backups, when they tried to restore they were two months behind or even more and no way of accessing their papers
Get two hard drives and use a regular backup program like sync back Pro and it will automatically (after intial setup) back up all your favourite folders automatically to the two hard drives.
SyncBack Backup Software by 2BrightSparks