back up

Before I went away I did a bit of a back-up.

I've got some USB hard drives I use for backing up everything.  This can take ages to do, as I've the best part of a terabyte of stuff to back up.  In all honest, I therefore tend to do an incremental back-up on some of it.

For most I delete the old backups and redo the whole lot, but for other folders where I know I've not changed anything I keep them as is.  If I've only done a few small changes I try to identify where they are and transfer those over.

I've come to this process after some real horrendous backups in the past.  My machines are obviously quicker nowadays, so that helps, but previously it has taken days to copy things across when I've just done the whole lot.  This time it took about half a day, most of which was just setting it going.

I also tend to use my laptop nowadays, so it doesn't tie up my main machines.  I can do this because I use a single large hard drive to store most of my stuff on.  I do have stuff on hard drives on my machines, but every week I ensure I move or back-up everything to the remote HDD.

I also try to keep a secondary back-up of the important things on CD & DVD.  Mostly this is things like scans, but there's some other stuff on there too.  This was the part of the process I didn't manage to do during my last holiday.  I will, however, make sure to do a full back-up at Christmas.

Indeed, I may well do a refresh of my back-ups on CD & DVD.  recordable CDs & DVD apparently have a lifetime on them of about six years or so.  I don't think I've ever had any actually degrade, but after I heard this I decided to redo the back-ups every so often, as loosing the content would be a disaster.

Also, because recordable media is so cheap and easy to get nowadays it's hardly a massive cost.

Backing stuff up is really important.  I've lost loads of stuff before because I didn't have proper backups.

My dad also recently learned this lesson as he lost almost all the pictures he had taken as part of his trip to the Canadian Grand Prix.  He basically transferred the stuff to his computer and then deleted it from the camera memory card.  He then was trying to process the pictures and (I really don't know why) was using the recycle bin as kind of storage area.

There's loads of errors there:

• he'd deleted the version on the memory card (!)
• he was working on the versions he'd transferred to the machine, instead of making copies and working on those
• he was using the recycle bin as a temp folder (!)
• he hadn't made and sort of back-up

To be fair I hadn't gotten him fully set up to do back-ups yet, but then why was he forging ahead with fiddling about with stuff until I had?

Of course they say you only really learn some lessons after you've had the disaster, and I think he's learned his lesson.