Rimfire Central Firearm Forum banner

Do your backups

1K views 4 replies 4 participants last post by  bgavin 
#1 ·
This a a good time of the year to do a data backup of your hard drive. I rotate two external drives to back up my data. When I go away on a trip one of the drives goes to work with me to get locked up in my desk. The other stays locked in the safe. I try to do a backup every 3-4 months. With all the ransomware going around these days it wouldn't be good not to have something to back to.
 
#2 ·
Thanms for the reminder.

I use an off site backup service AND a local backup drive. The off site service (Carbonite) is done in the background automatically. I back up to the local backup drive usually once a week.

Offsite is in case of local fire, flood, or breakin, or in case I forget to backup locally. On site is to make a major reinstall easy and fast in case of a main drive failure.

On site plus off site = peace of mind.
 
#3 · (Edited)
Backups=safety

I backup every two weeks to an external hard drive. Price on those things have really come down.

I store the drive in my shed in a safe.

Also, at the same time, I do a backup of the absolutely critical stuff to a USB flash drive.

Keep 2 backups at all times one each.

All in all takes about 2.5 hours but I use the free TODO software and you can "tell" it to shutdown the computer after the backup's are done.

Had to use only once but that one time was worth all the times I backed up and just stored the units.

noremf(George)

PS: Do restore points every friday.
 
#4 ·
Good way to do it George. It isn't like the old days when you had prints of photos and negatives. Too much of our life memories are stored in computer files. Too much to lose if something happens. See a lot of weeping when someone loses their phone with all their photos on it or the device just up and quits on them.
 
#5 ·
If you run a server in home or office, make sure the data backups are located in a directory that is NOT visible to your workstation.
A ransomware bug like Cryptowall 4 will destroy EVERYTHING it can see.
One of my clients caught this bug in a fake resume, and it destroyed two workstations and the server data shares.

Use an external drive such as the Western Digital MyPassport, etc. These are reliable and inexpensive. USB plug in and go.
Disconnect when you are done, and only connect to a machine that is NOT having problems.

Those folks using WinRAR file compression can take advantage of the command line RAR.EXE interface to make differential backups.

A differential backup operates only on files that have the archive bit set.
When a file is backed up, the Archive bit is cleared by the backup program.

When a file is modified, the Archive bit set to flag this file as needing backup.
This is a huge space and time saving for those with a lot of data and/or frequent backups.

Using the windows file manager to copy a file to your backup disk does NOT clear the archive bit.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top