Hard Drive Crashes & Musings

[ruwebby]

Is it just me, or, have others, upon perusing the posts regularly, see an alarming rate of hard drive crashes?

I mean it seems like some sort of boilerplate excuse, and please, I mean no ill will towards those whose hard drives really crash - having been the victim myself early last year, but it is starting to sound like a "My dog ate my homework." excuse LOL

We are all in the web business one way or another, and I have every site of mine, and every server, and every database backed-up three fold.

I read about these sites for sale with huge audiences then inevitably, a site with thousands of members now has none because the web server's HD crashed. Now there's only 10 users ... does no one back up any more?

Again - this is pointed at NO ONE in particular and if this even remotely sounds like you - forget it, it's not about you - it's just a ramble I thought of and wanted to voice my opinion on

As a matter of fact - I think everyone here should have a new 2005 resolution:

Keep backups!
Many backups!
Make backups of backups! (I had a backup hard drive crash once)
Yes, backups are your friends

Anyway, back to work ...

Hope everyone is enjoying the start to their New Year!!!

May 2005 bring much happiness, health and wealth

 

[jojoyohan]

My hard drives have never crashed on anything. About once a year I usually have to reformat my HD because of the spyware and adware that I got through internet explorer. I now use mozilla firefox and I havn't seen a popup in the 3 months I've had my new computer.

 

[Mr Webname]

Not really crashes but major data "losses" about 3 times in the last 15 years on my home PC's and 2 hard drive crashes on rented servers - I find external drives and Acronis Trueimage to be great for my home PC's.
I now have two VPS servers which get backed up nightly with proven reliability to restore at file level - a great peace of mind.

 

[ruwebby]

The hard drive of mine that crashed and burned was only 3 months old! A very decent and expensive 120 GIG IBM harddrive. I was so mad. It had 10,000+ digital pics on it that I had taken from travelling around Europe when I lived over there.

As well as work files.

Fortunately, I also kept CD copies of the work files - so they were not lost ... but the photos. I never thought I had to backup the backup.

Now we religiously back everything up in triplicate.

And we have one dedicated server online only for backups.

Yes, peace of mind - how good it is.


Of course until the world totally implodes ...

 

[Theo]

Yes, I was upset when I lost my pr0n pics too :-D

 

[unholy1]

Lost over 40GB of Data over 2 years ago. Had the data just been images or MP3 files I wouldn't have cared but it was 4 years of receipts, databases, spreadsheets and other important documents which I had compiled over a period of many years.
At the spur of the moment I procured a 6x80GB SCSI RAID 5+ADG file server for my storage plus a DLT Tape backup drive with CA Arcserve backup software and win2k advanced server.
It cost me over 25K but looking back, I think it was the best investment I made, as it has spared me countless medical bills I probably would have had to cough up if it had happened again taking into consideration the history of hypertension and heart problems in my family.
Expensive it may be for a home computer, but having peace of mind and a healthy heart, it was well worth it.

My data is now a lot safer even when travelling with my laptop, I simply store everything under my roaming profile and when I connect to the internet from other locations my data gets synchronized thru Checkpoint VPN to my server at home.