Coppola Loses All His Data 266
Colin Smith writes in with an object lesson in backup methodology — once you have backed everything up, take it somewhere else. "Film director Francis Ford Coppola has appealed for the return of his computer backup device following a robbery at his house in Argentina on Wednesday. He told Argentine broadcaster Todo Noticias he had lost 15 years' worth of data, including writing and photographs of his family."
Step 3 in The Tao of Backup (Score:5, Insightful)
Oops. Someone missed the 3rd step in the Tao of Backup : separation [taobackup.com]
That list again in full:
Backup all your data
Backup frequently
Take some backups off-site
Keep some old backups
Test your backups
Secure your backups
Perform integrity checking
And note that it's not necessary to purchase [taobackup.com] anything to achieve backup enlightenment.
Re:More than one physical location (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep an up-to-date backup in my office, and drop a DVD or two in a drawer at my parents' every year or so.
Safe deposit box (Score:2, Insightful)
Make it so it's no big deal.... (Score:4, Insightful)
And... look! We're back on topic!
I've been thinking of getting one of those hard disks with the network connector on the back. If you combine this with one of those "network across power lines" adapters you could put the hard disk anywhere in the house (attic, basement...) and still access it from your main PC.
For a "high crime area" this seems ideal.
PS: Yes, the chances of him getting his data back is zero. It's a pity he had to learn the hard way....
I go around telling all my friends to back up their data, how important this is, how they could lose 100% their baby/wedding photos in a millisecond, etc. but I know none of them ever do.
One should have at least THREE copies of data (Score:3, Insightful)
1. The HD in the computer
2. Backup device #1 that's intended for the next backup stored locally or off-site
3. Backup device #2 that's intended for the backup *after the next one* stored off-site
If one only has two copies, which is common, the problem is if the backup fails for whatever reason, then one can suddenly end up with messed up data on their HD *and* on the backup device too
The key to avoiding that problem is doing backups in rotation where at least one copy (ideally even more than one) is always off-site during the actual backup operation
Ron
nothing funny about it (Score:5, Insightful)
There is not a good backup solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people expected to keep a second car around if their main one fails? Are people expected to perform regular scheduled maintenance on their cars themselves? No, because it is too complex and troublesome for the average users.
I've reviewed several backup applications and services, and none of them would pass the "mom" easy of use test. I believe there is a potential market for a robust comprehensive backup system...
LS
use a memory stick (Score:3, Insightful)
Memory sticks have gotten to be large enough that I can keep a backup of my most important and changeable data in my pocket. They aren't large enough for audio and image files, but they hold a fantastic amount of compressed text. Burglars won't get it because it isn't at home, and it isn't very likely to be damaged in a natural disaster either.
Then you suck at backing up. (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless some fanatical group is hunting down your data backups, you should be able to lose a house (fire), lose a building (9/11), lose an entire city (Hurricane Katrina) and your data should be fine. There's practically no excuse for it in 2007, with storage as cheap as it is, and with that new-fangled Interweb technology everyone's talking about.
Re:Make it so it's no big deal.... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, that scenario still does not protect against things like lightning strikes... Unless you use decent surge protectors etc.
Data protection is not for the faint of heart, and unfortunately not for the average user either.
I've seen good results with Acronis TrueImage, in automatic mode. For "home user" backups, not disaster recovery that is.
Re:There is not a good backup solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory Penny Arcade link (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More than one physical location (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:nothing funny about it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What if a computer store loses your data? (Score:2, Insightful)
Giving the drive back put the responsibility back in to the customer's hands and holding on to the drive kept the customer from coming back screaming if the HD in his new computer happened to fail. Either solution made me look like a hero for planning ahead if the customer accidentally deleted something on the new computer. In all cases, it was just good customer service. Even if a customer handed me a hard drive and said, "I don't need anything on the drive, throw it out," I'd either tell him to do it himself (thus absolving myself of responsibility) or I would hold on to the drive for a while.
No matter what the situation was that caused someone to throw out the hard drive before the data was transferred, it was the store's fault. They simply didn't do what they were asked to do. If they had transferred the data and something happened to the data on the new computer, then it would no longer be their fault, although it's still poor customer service.
Digital safe deposit box - offsite backup service (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a cron job that fires off an rsync command every night - destination is my rsync.net offsite filesystem where I keep 7 days of snapshots of all of my data.
Easy, cheap.
bolt it to your desk or wall (Score:3, Insightful)
Offsite storage is the only way to go. As you point out, even a simple fire would have wiped him out. With all the talk of 'movie vaults' in his industry you would think that off site storage would have at least crossed his mind once.
Re:use a safe & lock (Score:4, Insightful)
In the real world?? What, do you work in the twin towers? Fires in office buildings don't generally proceed far enough to make the whole building collapse. Passing on a safe just because there is some wildly unlikely sequence of events that would still destroy your documents isn't very logical.
Re:use a safe & lock (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but let's not forget that what we're dealing with here is a forced entry into a place where the robbers were waiving knives in the staff's faces. Nothing makes a knife waive faster than when it's accompanied by the phrase (how ever you say it in Spanish), "I know you know how to open this safe, so get to it..."
If Coppola can't afford the bandwith to push to an off-site storage service, I don't know who can.
"As far as I know..." (Score:1, Insightful)
The key phrase here is 'as far as I know' since RAR is closed source. If your primary concern is encryption, why not use 7z instead?