Back UP
Posted by Jason Wu on January 23, 2008
Instead of coming up with my own blog ideas, I will steal other people’s.
http://drew.ricefarm.net/?p=334
My backup system is pretty important to me. After the great MP3 loss of 2003, I’ve been consistent in backing up my data. The good thing about that hard drive failure was that it was only music. Music can be recovered because I did not create the music. My pictures however can never be replaced.
I use a freeware program called SyncBack. It uses windows task scheduler to automate backups. Backup isn’t really all that complicated, copy from here to there. I like to constantly backup my pictures to my external drive (from Sunny) and daily backup my school notes from my laptop to my desktop. All of these run while I sleep.
The program also allows sync. I have my music and picture collection on both my desktop and my laptop. Sometimes I will get new music or edit pictures in both locations so I need to sync my laptop and desktop. I’m anal so I run the sync myself so I can overview the conflict resolutions the program does.
The ultimate thing I do revolves around Quakecon. Since traveling is always a danger to hard drives, I backup everything to DVD. It takes time but I don’t want to lose any data in the move and provides a set yearly schedule for my backup to media. I usually try and store these discs at my parents house in PL. This keeps my backups safe from a lightning strike or fire that would take out both my computer AND my external HDD.
Flickr also serves as a last resort version of backing up my pictures. Since most of my pictures are uploaded to Flickr, I hope to never lose them, even if my computer blew up.
On a different note, Apple’s Time Machine sounds like Windows System Restore. Someone enlighten me about the difference.
January 23, 2008 at 2:35 pm
oh cool…i need this…i’ve been backing up my laptop once a semester…if i remember.
January 23, 2008 at 7:55 pm
ah…… QCON2008……… can’t…
wait………………
January 23, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Good idea, automating backup. I’ll have to look into a good solution for my OS. As it stands now, I manually drag and drop photos/email every 3 months. Which is just 2 folders, so it’s not that bad, but I should really automate it so that it does it every day or at least every week.
My goal before the end of the year is to be able to lose any one device and not put any private data (photos, emails, web history, chat logs) at risk of inadvertent disclosure (by using strong encryption) or of data loss (by using backup). Hopefully I’ll get automated scripts doing everything behind the scenes, but I’m one hell of a procrastinator.
January 23, 2008 at 10:45 pm
i know what time machine will do, why don’t you explain what windows system restore does. wait that can be a post….
January 23, 2008 at 11:31 pm
after putting osx on the pc i finally got to play around with time machine and decided that i dont need to incrementally backup THAT often. it’s probably better for people that have more important data that constantly gets updated/added/removed on their computer. The amount of harddrive space needed to use time machine for any decent computer seemed ridiculous to me.
all i do now is take disk images and store them on DVD and on a backup drive. You can also run windows off a DVD to restore it all too. (google “Windows PE”).
but i just lost all my mp3s a few weeks ago. i had them all on separate partitions on one hd, so i didnt see the need to back it up. i just forgot that when you delete the MBR………………………