Do you backup?

Vidar Andersen 15/08/2007 03:01 Comments

I was reading Chris Pirillo’s latest blog entry about backup and file management this morning and it inspired me to share what I do to back up and mirror the important stuff. (Watch the show featuring Chris’ dad if you haven’t already.)

The hardware: Two cheap and identical 500 GB external USB hard drives from TrekStor. € 99,- / USD 135,- each.

The software: MirrorFolder for Windows XP from TechSoft. € 28,5 / USD 39,- per computer license. (If anyone knows of a better software solution for mirroring and for other platforms, please leave a comment!)

Important files and folders on my workstation(s) and laptop are set to be automatically mirrored on both of the external disks. Projects, music, settings, etc are all mirrored on both of the disks for redundancy.

Further more, I can take one of the disks with me on the move without worrying too much about data loss.

Works for me ™.

What do you do? Please share your experiences and leave a comment!

[tags] Vidar Andersen, lessons learned, backup, file management, usb, Joe Pirillo, Chris Pirillo, back-up, MirrorFolder, TrekStor, TechSoft, mirroring, windows xp[/tags]

Comments
  • Hi Ruben,

    It could be that Getdataback has improved since I last tried it. However, I've never ever been able to recover anything of importance with it.

    I've been able to fully recover hundreds of gigabytes with EasyRecovery Professional 6 where Getdataback had failed to recover a single file. Your mileage may of course vary.

    When using EasyRecovery it's important to use 'AdvancedRecovery' with the 'Advanced Scan' option checked under the 'Advanced Options' / 'File System Scan' tab. If that doesn't recover your data, try a 'RawRecovery' instead.

    I'll give Getdataback a try when EasyRecovery fails to recover my data.
  • Ruben Beer-Svendsen
    Vidar, regarding your statement about Getdataback vs. Ontrack. I've had several cases where Getdataback has recovered data where Ontrack couldn't. Never the opposite.

    For the record: I don't use data-recovery software as backup. Mostly I burn manually to DVD (photos and archives) and FTP transfer (recent documents and projects).
  • Manuel
    By now it's just a second (built-in) harddisk (99,- made me think though)and a complete backup once a day.9In case of disk-failure (excluding damage to the whole PC obviously) it would take me all of 5 Minutes to be up and running again with at the most 24 hours of lost data. Rsync, i.e. the rsync + shell-combo, has almost no limits ragarding the destination of your backups. External Devices, remote sites (optionally encrypted via built-in ssh-tunnel that is), choice is your's. Backing up to CD or DVD might need a different approach. Nothing 5 Minutes of shellscripting couldn't handle, I believe.
  • Hi Manuel!

    Cool! Thanks for the advice. Back up and scheduling software is all well and good, but do you do anything to prepare for hardware failure as well?
  • Manuel
    Well, there is rsync. For Unix-like OSes anyway. Small shellscript, a cronjob and no more worries.
  • Hi Ruben,

    Usually it's too late when you have to use recovery software.

    In my experience, Getdataback makes a <del>piss poor</del> abysmal job of recovering NTFS partitions. Getdataback is IMHO a non functional toy.

    I have had much better results with OnTrack EasyRecovery Pro. Comes highly recommended.
  • Ruben Beer-Svendsen
    At home, I use Getdataback for NTFS.

    :|
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