Worms, viruses, fried HDs, OH MY!

Soooo.. for those of you who missed it, one of my HDs gave up. Unfortunatly I lost a lot of stuff. Fortunatly I had two HDs so I didnt lose everything. I *mean* to back things up but, well I don't. I used to be better when I had a rewriteable tape drive. Burning CDs to back up is a pain for me. This leads to why I'm posting.

Do you back up? Using what format(tape, zip, cd.. other?)?. It seems HDs are getting bigger but storage media isnt... or is it? Am I missing something? I learned my lesson and want to turn over a new leaf of backing up regularly. What methods do you swear by and why?

(ps I dont want to drop too big a chunk a change here)

I use DLT IV drives for backups, but due to cost considerations I wouldn't suggest this. However, I will suggest 2 simple options:

1) Use a DVD-RW for backing up information that you need to keep, and don't worry about backing up the programs/system itself, just reinstall and restore your actual needed 'data' that isn't part of the programs.

2) Get a RAID controller and mirror your drives. It's a waste of space, but it's better than using removable media backups, as it's a perfect running mirror. No restore times, just a constant hot running up-to-date mirror of your drive. This is probably also the most cost effective method of maintaining perfect data integrity at this point in time, as the cost of HDs is low enough to allow for this.

but if its a constant, isnt it vulnerable to worms & viruses just as the first one is?? I keep all my virus definitions up to date but occasionally stuff (like this current worm) gets through even when you are dilligent.

Thankfully I missed this worm but I know plenty who got it.

Go to addonics.com and by an external USB or Firewire HDD case. Put whatever size HDD you want to in it, and use it for backups. If you're concerned about virii, just do manual backups, and disconnect the drive when not in use.

the combo HD enclosure? Hey this is pretty cool looking. So far this sounds the easiest & most secure

As far as viruses/worms, keep yourself patched (windows update) and keep virus defs up to date. Also, get yourself a good firewall and don't open things you aren't sure of.

(IE: If someone sends you a "really funny" or "really important" attachment, ask yourself, why the hell are they sending me this?)

Past that, you're no worse off than the rest of the world.

yea I do all that. So far I've been ok against attacks but you never know... and Im not the only one in the house.

I have a clean os and software install, then make a image with Norton Ghost and backup to a secondary partition. Complete partition reinstall takes about 15 minutes.

Xavier

Very cool Xav thats exactly what I do.

But I run like 5 hard drives and I save the image on one of the other hard drives. I also have a USB 2.0 Drive kit and sometimes use that as I have multiple systems that are setup fairly similiar so the setup of multiple machines are made so easy with ghost and usb

I think the use of RAID drives for most users is a bad idea. I've seen multi-thousand dollar raid systems lost due to minor configuration errors and that by people who are paid to do this kind of work. Even with a perfect set-up, a microcode error in your controller card can lead to inconsistencies and even system failures.

I think concentrating on DATA backup is a good idea. The hardest part of that is the fact that by default Windows stores user files in so many different places. The eventual addition of the My Documents folder has helped that a bit, but many applications still store user files in their own special areas. If you can organize things so that all or YOUR creative content is in one place (with your own filing system directory structure to help you keep track of it) then you might be surprised how much will fit on a single CD.

An unpluggable USB or firewire hard drive is PRIMO. If you are blessed with two or more PCs you can also use them to back each other up. From time to time I copy the entire contents of my home directory (the Linux equivalent of My Documents) to another PC and call it "Backup-pcname-date" or something like that. I'm not talking about 20 gigs of stuff, more like a few hundred meg. MP3 files, downloaded movies, or other things that can be easily downloaded again don't really need to be backed up for most of us.

The Ghosting trick is useful too. I've Ghosted systems after a fresh install (and then used the Ghost image immediately as a test that it actually works). Ghosting as a back-up strategy I think only makes sense if you have some way to test it from time to time, and that probably means multiple machines to work with. In fact the last time I used Norton Ghost you HAD to have two machines to do a bootable image at all. The process was a bit tedious. Is it really as simple as Ghosting to a spare hard drive now? Can you do it while the source system is up and running? I think that was the problem before. You HAD to boot from a floppy on the source system to get a valid image. Like I said, more trouble than most people want to take. Also, any sort of backup to another partition on the same hard drive is risky in the event the whole drive fails. Even backup within the same machine to a second hard drive can be a problem, but its better than doing no backup at all.

Just to add another vote for the use of Norton Ghost. This little program has saved me many hours of work over the years.

I use it to make an image of my whole main system partition every 3 months, thats a heck alot of CD-R's but the security is worth it. Once a month, during my monthly maintenance, I burn off my data partition for that is far more important as everyone else has stated, inculded in that burn is a dump of the registry for safe keeping. On a weekly basis is just a normal backup of data folders to my second harddisk.

It's good to plan a regular schedule and stick to it. Likewise for updating virus defs, windows updates/patches, drivers and software updates. Really like the ideas of DVD-RWs, external HDD and clean os ghosting, will look into including them in the future

Our little home network has a Linux fileserver which I use to back up all my data every couple of days. I have cygwin installed, and I've written a script which tars&zips all the data directories then dumps it on the fileserver. It's scheduled to run using the Windows scheduler - set it and forget it!

Unfortunately, it took a toasted HD (my fault) to teach me about the value of backups too..

I also use norton ghost - great lifesaver of a program!
I ghost my main (working) 80gig drive to a removeable 80gig drive once a month, after virus checking and defragging (us 3D artists can really mess up a drive with all our anims and stuff lol).
Once every three months I take the removeable HD into work and ghost it onto our backup server, so I have an off-site backup.
I also backup individual projects (paying projects) to pairs of CD's at production milestones.

Anal? Superstisious? You bet I am! I get through one or two HD's a year - guess I must be a super-duper-power-user or sumink

But wouldnt you know it? My last two HD deaths happened before the end of the month, and I lost stuff. Bum.

My backup method is pretty boring compared to some that I have read. I have the HP DVD300e external DVD drive. I keep one DVD+RW disk in the drive and have configured Stomp's
Backup MyPC to perform backups on a nightly basis of files that have changed since my past weekly backup. Both backup types kick off at about 2:00am using the scheduler and run unattended. I receive a report of any failures and can review the contents at any time.

Since I don't backup the entire system and only backup my data and configurations, I can fit an entire month of nightly and weekly backups on one DVD+RW (4.7 gb).

I do data backups to CDR twice a month. This would include writing (both my wife and I write professionally, though she is far more prolific than I,) Resume's, financial stuff, saved games of long term RPG's Im playing etc.

I do a seperate, monthly backup of all our digital images (we primarily use a digital camera now and are slowly scanning in a lot of our olf photos.)

As for the rest, well, if it's a cool movie, ala Tripping the Rift or Troops, I'll do a seperate "movie" CD once an a while, and I have a utlities disk I keep on hand for all the extras we use (notetab, winzip, Kerio personal firewall etc)

The rest of my hard drive right now is either programs I have the orignal CD's for or MP3's of albums I own. So, if I lose them in a crash it's not mission ciritcal.

I do have Ghost images of most OS's at this point. Having worked in SQA, I well know the value of being able to have a clean OS boot in under 20 minutes.