Backup day... disaster strikes... all data gone and no extra backups

Hi all

I'm suggesting a new Sticky Thread.. Backup day.

Not this thread perhaps, but i post this to get your all attention.

I'm new at this forum but on this short time i have seen people have disk failures or otherwise failures that make them lose personal data.
This is really sad to see as i know how sad people are, when they go to a data recovery firm and they get the cold shower.. It's only a 50/50 chance we can rescue your data... and all this because they didn't have backup of family photos or other really important documents.

Backup backup and backup... is often told.. that mean you should have at least three sets of your important files.. 1.The computer, 2.external disk, 3.offsite(cloud/external disk at a friend or family members house)
Why is offsite important.. If your house burns down and you have all backups in there.. how big is the chance that the harddrives have survived temperatures of 800-1200C / 1500-2100F ?? .......... Slim to none
or you get a burglary.. and the thief steals all the electronics and external drives.. Gone



Every time someone has a failure, everyone is telling the new guy how important backup is.. But in between catastrophes almost no one talks about it.

But updates is often talked about and news and every body more or less has posts of Patch Tuesday (or what day it is)

So backup day or backup Monday, might be a good new tradition here on 10forums and 11forums.

One thread where people post about how... today i did my backup.. so now I'm good for another week or day. weee

An active thread... will attract new register members.. and the first post can be with links to good backup software..
I mostly talk about personal data as pictures, documents and so on as that is the worst thing to lose..... But also system drive image backup is good to do



There is those who have an external backup drive. but only one....... 1=0... 2=1... 3=okay.
oh..... and, Raid... ain't backup it is only redundancy... everything plugged in is vulnerable for ransomware and lightning strikes.
The worst with this 2=1 people is, when they run out of space on their computers.. Then they start to delete data on their computers as. "i have my photos and files on my backup"...... Then the backup disk dies and they is in the same spot as if they never had done a backup in the first place.

I was thinking of doing a poll to see how many does backup and how many is the 2=1 guy and how many that actually have offsite backups.
But i won't.



So admins and moderators and dear members of Tenforums.. what do you think of starting a new tradition of "backup day" to get more people on the train to start backup before disaster strikes.




Sorry for posting this suggestion in this part of the forum, but i wanted to get the attention then posting in Chillout Room


Edit.
also in that threads first post should be.. If you do not have an backup, disconnected the failing drive as soon as possible.
Trim and the scheduled Defrag is the worst enemy ever in those cases.. chkdsk also a big no-no.
HDD with strange noises is not going to become better for every minute you still have it connected

Backups are a catch 22 that promote unsafe computing imo because people get caught in the line of knowing they can just backup which we see often is not always 100% the case so we know its not a guaranteed catchall.

How far this goes is hard to warrant because some of these people that have failures are running their computers with all sorts of parameters that allow grounds for failure. Anyone who is at the level of understanding of whether or not they need to do backups already knows enough here.

Any trained eye will be able to see when storage media is at the end of its cycle, and if you use your computer during a storm then you are asking for it to blow up at the same time, that leaves fire and theft i think at that point i would be more annoyed that my computers got burnt downed not that data on them and in the case of theft then my personal data being potentially compromised than the actual data itself.

Some of my computers i will cry when they die but none of them are close to showing me signs of failure yet, one of them has had a 10+ year cycle of never really turning off it spends more time awake then it does powered off, i do turn it off sometimes to rest it but it could go weeks without this.

Me personally i don't rely on backups i rely on safer and more sensible computing practices and therefore i am open to get burnt but not as much as you think, one restore point is all you need and this can get you very far combined with saving an export of your registry and also anything important goes off into the cloud or external media, i have a nas too.

I have just did my first restore point in years because i lost explorer from knowingly doing some things and i am still on the same windows 10 since 2015, without fresh installing over the top.

Combining some common sense with the above you are pretty redundant well close enough to the point where you don't need to overthink these things. SSD combined with new tech means we are less inclined to receive an unwarranted hard disk failure generally we will know before hand as it shows signs of degradation well before it fails.

I guess it all boils down to how important or not important data is to you and also your level of computing, being proactive in a way where you don't really need backups.

in the event of a hard disk failure then all the stuff you need to be backed up is but you shouldn't have to feel like you need to rely on this and that should be a very minimal risk tbh anyway. i certainly am not backing anything up weekly and i am not cloning hard drives either i don't feel the need.

All subjective everyone has different needs mine are pretty much covered.

Wow. Most people don't have such a perfect existence. While many drives exhibit signs of failure I have had some that failed without warning. That is what backups are for. All drives whether they are a HDD or SSD will eventually fail. Your best strategy is a backup scheme of some kind. The more extensive the better.

I do daily backups of my most important data and weekly backup of my drives onto external hard drives. I don't plan on anything beyond that. Life is a risk so I am willing to live with the consequences of losing everything. However, I do need to get a waterproof and fireproof safe to keep important information in it.

Although you emphasized backing up your computer data what more people need to worry about is their phones. I have heard of lot of people lose years worth of photos because they lost their phone or it stops working. The same program that backs up my computers is also used to back up my phone. That saved me when my phone was stolen.

Malneb said:

This computer i am typing on now is still on the first line of Samsung Evo series of SSD which are around 10 years old give or take and i think last time i looked it was at 83% health i never look either like that was the first time l looked in a long time.

If your Samsung EVO SSD is 10 years old then it must have been very expensive. That is because Samsung didn't introduce the EVO line until 2013. It must also have been a SATA drive because Samsung didn't come out with NVME drives until 2015. I paid $285 for a 500 GB Samsung EVO NVME M.2 SSD in 2017.

I still have the 500 GB EVO but it is no longer in any computer. It proved to be too small so I replaced it with a 2TB NVME M.2 SSD. Now I keep the 500 GB EVO in an external enclosure.

The 83% health of an SSD is just a number based upon the estimated lifespan by the manufacture. It probably has a lot of life left in it. The problem with SSDs is that if they fail then there is probably nothing that can be done to recover the data. At least with a hard drives there is a chance, although not an inexpensive one, that the data can be recovered by a professional.

garlin said:

Treating backups as a religion will blind you, if you never tested actually restoring your data.

You may think you're doing backups correctly, but won't know until it's too late to correct your steps. Most users don't have the time/resources to test backups, even if they're consistently making new ones.

I've worked with really smart people, and they've been burned when their backups are incomplete, or their storage controller and medium are silently corrupting data. The lesson is don't get complacent if you're not testing restores.

*smiling* So true, so true.. I said that in another thread in here last week i think.. When doing image backup it is important to check so it works the first times and then to make random testings some times to make sure the process is still intact.
as for file duplication(Filesync) then you only have to check the total bit on folders between source and target to know if it is okay. (except encrypted backups, then you also need to check the decryption works)

But yeah.. your right a lot just assume it works.. and then i refer to the quote from the movie: Under Siege 2: "Assumption is the mother of all screw ups"

garlin said:

Treating backups as a religion will blind you, if you never tested actually restoring your data.

You may think you're doing backups correctly, but won't know until it's too late to correct your steps. Most users don't have the time/resources to test backups, even if they're consistently making new ones.

I've worked with really smart people, and they've been burned when their backups are incomplete, or their storage controller and medium are silently corrupting data. The lesson is don't get complacent if you're not testing restores.

The problem with life is there is never enough time to do the things we need to do. We just to do what we can and hope for the best. Otherwise we would be as depressed as Marvin.

Having a setup on a NAS is redundancy.. but it don't mean jack if disaster strikes as ransomware or if thunderstorm lightning hits and fry it all.

in the late 90's i had a server with 20 drives in three raid clusters and two desktops and lightning did strike and wipe them all out in less then a second.. they was toasted 0% possibility for recovering the data.
That's why you have external backups or offsite backup.. but best is both in combination.