10 years of research corrupted!!

Discussion in 'The Lounge Bar' started by tedfromscrubs, Jun 10, 2020.

  1. tedfromscrubs

    tedfromscrubs Junior Member

    Apologies if this is in the wrong place, but I'm interested in other people's views on how they keep all their precious documents safe. I've just suffered the trauma of the corruption of an external hard drive in which all my research was stored. Luckily IT professionals were able to recover it but it was an anxious few days!
    My son has long told me I should be storing everything in the Cloud, which I will now do. But that makes me dependent on an outside company which does make me a bit nervous.

    The best option still seems to be old-fashioned paper in a fireproof cabinet, although not as efficient or as cheap (printing costs and retrieval). What do other people do?

    Thanks

    Anne
     
  2. Buteman

    Buteman 336/102 LAA Regiment (7 Lincolns), RA

    One of our Members, a good friend of mine (Drew5233 - Andy) had this happen years ago. I'll try and find the thread, as it's shows what happened. This was before Google Drive/Smart Phones or any other similar versions. This was old school.
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2020
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  3. Hi Anne.

    Mine are stored with Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive. I can access both either on my phone/tablet or Computer. Very handy when your out and about. I choose these two because I know they won't cease providing a service anytime soon.

    Regards Damion.
     
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  4. Buteman

    Buteman 336/102 LAA Regiment (7 Lincolns), RA

    This is the thread. Lessons to be learned. I warned him to order some hard drives, but then this happened, 7 years ago. Technology has now advanced light years. People were so helpful to relieve his pain.

    Am I F****D?
     
  5. tedfromscrubs

    tedfromscrubs Junior Member

    Thanks Buteman - Andy's pain reflects exactly my own!
     
  6. Buteman

    Buteman 336/102 LAA Regiment (7 Lincolns), RA

    I've even kept all my SD cards from over the years. From 1 GB to 16GB. I've been able to recover most, not all. How sad is that.
     
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  7. hucks216

    hucks216 Member

    I have all my stuff on an external hard drive and that is the one I use if I need to access files etc but every 2 months or so I will upload everything to my Dropbox cloud storage as a back up.
     
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  8. idler

    idler GeneralList

    Our internet barely copes with the forum, so cloud backup is a bit of a non-starter.

    Instead, I invested in a small NAS (network attached storage) - basically a pair of drives that mirror each other in the hope that they won't both die at once. Originally, they acted as a backup to what was on the PC but since getting a new desktop, the NAS is the only place the data's stored. I really need to sort some form of external/offsite backup and actually buy a spare HD for the NAS, which I stupidly haven't done yet.
     
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  9. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    I keep everything relevant to my book in DropBox (updated on the fly) and also back it up to an external hard drive. Other files just get the external HD backup. (But that still means they are on my computer's internal drive AND the external drive)
     
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  10. bamboo43

    bamboo43 Very Senior Member

    I have always said that if this happened to me, you could hear the scream 100 miles away. I remember Andy's thread from seven year's ago and how many helped out.
     
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  11. gmyles

    gmyles Senior Member

    Hi

    I would buy three things.

    1 A good quality and reliable USB data stick (for day to day use).

    2. A good quality portable solid state hard drive (SSD). No moving parts means long mean time between failures (MTBF).

    3. Good backup software too. Something like Acronis True Image.

    I would also suggest you do a test recovery of your backup ASAP. Backups are easy to do but even easier to screw up and if you don't test it, how will you know it will work when you need it?

    Only plug the backup disk into your computer when you are doing a backup or recovering a file. To be super careful physically store it somewhere else.

    Remember "the cloud" is just some one else's hard drive.

    Depending upon the amount of data you are talking about you could do a full backup every month (the entire disk) and an incremental backup every week. An incremental backup only backs up files that have been 'changed' since the last backup and therefore take less time to back up less data.

    If you haven't already done so create a USB recovery disk for your system so that if it blue screens you can get things back to normal fast.

    Hope this helps

    Gus
     
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  12. Blutto

    Blutto Banned

    A caveat on dot point 2 above.
    Having experienced two SSD failures, unlike HDD there were no errors that might have warned of impending failure and the data on them was irrecoverable. So as already been said, its very much a case of not putting all eggs in the one basket.
     
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  13. Slipdigit

    Slipdigit Old Hickory Recon

    Never have just one copy of data you can't live without.

    I don't know what your are storing, but considering the size of what your are storing, consider getting another email address and mail what you need to save. I did that years ago with drafts of my book as I was writing it. Besides having offsite storage, I also had a built in version control.
     
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  14. JohnG505

    JohnG505 Junior Member

    I too have a NAS (which I also use as media sharing facility around the house).

    Both my TVs are wifi'd to it, allowing me to access films/videos/pictures on the TVs. It has all the 'family' documents on it, as well as all my research, nothing is stored on the PC/laptop, etc. As it has it's own IP address, I can access it anywhere from the t'internet, it's basically my own cloud. It's regularly backed up to a 4TB external HDD, which is also backed up (probably about twice a year) to another, older, 2TB external HDD.
     
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  15. gmyles

    gmyles Senior Member

    Hi

    It is best practise that you shouldn't backup to a permanently connected storage device.

    As it is on all the time the OS will work it all the time and therefore reduce its MTBF.

    Even if you have been very unlucky to have bought the worst SSD ever. Only connecting if for just a few minutes per month its should last a very long time.

    Newest software can do hybrid backups using hard disks and the cloud.

    You can never have too many backups, but the more you have the harder it is to manage without good software.

    Gus
     
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  16. Buteman

    Buteman 336/102 LAA Regiment (7 Lincolns), RA

    I commented on this thread 4 minutes after it was posted. My blood just ran cold, when I realized I had not done a backup in ages (A year !!!!!!!! :cop:). Doing two copies now, as I type. Thanks to tedfromscrubs for a timely reminder, as it's easy to forget the important files you've collected for many years and the miles to Kew I've clocked up in doing so. Interesting to read about the latest technology available.
     
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2020
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  17. idler

    idler GeneralList

    I used to run Synctoy to do incremental backups to the NAS but I eventually found its file limit, so had to chop my data in two, then had to run two synchs. Not remembering and bothering to do backups is the biggest risk.
     
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  18. Sheldrake

    Sheldrake All over the place....

    Distributing copies in the cloud is a good plan - but what of there is an internet wide problem or the product you use has glitches (I heard of drop box deleting material through in expert use.) An extra layer is to back up to an external disk drive that you plug into your PC. Search for external storage devices on T'internet

    Everything has a cost. Paper backup protects you from electronic corruption. But it is vulnerable to fire and you need somewhere to store it. There is also an indexing and retrieval cost. Maybe you have indexed and cataloged your research or can pay an archivist to manage your collection of papers? If you ultimately want to donate your research the receiving institution would prefer it digitized.
     
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  19. MongoUK

    MongoUK Junior Member

    This is true, however, the caveat to that is that if you use someone reputable (I use Google One for 200GB for £2.49 a month), they keep multiple backups on equipment most likely vastly superior to what we're likely to buy, for a fraction of the price.

    I previously used external hard drives and also looked into a NAS. My primary worry was what happens if the house burns down? Working in IT I've learnt that it's not only essential to have backups, but more important to have backups in different locations.

    If one of the cloud drives at google goes down, they will have mirrored backups at different locations that will fail over straight away. Although not impossible for a major issue to happen for you to lose all copies, it's significantly reduced. Plus if you lose the cloud backup, you have the version still on your own machine. If google gets hacked, they're only getting some Phantom war diaries, which I'm ok with.

    Just my own 2p.
     
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  20. tedfromscrubs

    tedfromscrubs Junior Member

    Many thanks all for your replies - food for thought once I've come down off the ceiling!
     
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