Update: Thank you everyone for entering this contest, I was completely blown away by the number of submissions (over 770 comments!). That’s more comments than any other PSTAM.com post has ever received, by a margin of over 300! I used random.org’s random integer generator to produce a value of the ID of the winning comment, with duplicate comment IDs and my own comment IDs removed from the calculation. The random winner was “Hitman”. Once again, thanks for participating and I hope you all stick around PaulStamatiou.com.
Xavier of Notebooks.com has been gracious enough to extend his hard drive giveaway to PSTAM readers as well as 9 other websites, courtesy of Seagate. Up for grabs are a 1TB FreeAgent Desk hard drive and a 500GB FreeAgent Go hard drive. If you have a Mac, let me know and we’ll send you the Mac versions of those drives.
The contest ends December 6th at 11:59PM EST. To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment answering the following question: Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
The winner will be picked at random, so don’t feel pressured to write a parable about your data loss and what you learned from it, although I would enjoy reading it.
The last time a hard drive died on me was with my first Mac: a Mac Mini G4. I was hosting PaulStamatiou.com on it from my dorm and after only a few months of overstressing the drive it gave up. After that I started keeping a cloned drive image (via Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) on an external hard drive so I would always have something to fall back on.
How I Backup
I’ve mentioned before that I rely on Amazon S3 to store my documents and personal files safe, and that is still the case. However, for the more important documents that could be used to steal my identity, I encrypt them with PGP Desktop before uploading to S3, even though S3 is already encrypted by Amazon on their end. This protects me in case someone is able to gain access to my laptop and I already have Transmit open (keychain asks for a password before opening), allowing anyone to connect to my saved servers or S3 accounts.
Other than that, some of my media files are in the cloud as described in my cloud life article below, and the bulk of my video files and movies are stored on my HTPC which has 2 750GB Seagate drives. I don’t worry about my MacBook Pro’s solid state drive dying on me, but I’m more concerned about it being stolen. I have yet to actually use OS X’s Time Machine but I should probably start doing that too. Likewise, I’ve always wanted to try a drobo.
Happy Thanksgiving to those that celebrate it, and Happy Thursday to those that don’t. I am thankful for efficient airports. I got through baggage claim and security at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson airport in under 15 minutes yesterday.
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With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like PaulStamatiou.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.
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I’ve never lost anything really important. I back things up by putting important files on a lot of drives and uploading it to the internet if I really need something.
I once was writing a huge paper for class and lost a good portion of it due to a hard drive error. I now use Time Machine and Amazon S3 along with Jungle Disk to back up my files. Time Machine does a full backup one a day and Jungle Disk does an hourly backup of all my important school files.
Hi Paul,
Is this US only?
I got a Mac and use TIme Machine. But before it was just DVD after DVD. Google Docs is great for docs. Google Notebook is great for code. And of course, Gmail.
My computer crashed and I lost all my pictures, college documents and a massive spreadsheet I had been compiling which outlined what I sold but hadn’t been pain on yet for work. I would have lost all my music too, but thanks to a recent iPod sync I was able to recover them. Thank god or I would have cried…harder.
Now I have a Flash drive I keep my most important documents on and Facebook helps me backup my pictures.
PS. I am one of “those” that has to specify they have a Mac. New to the MBP community :-)
@William – Xavier has asked Seagate if they will ship worldwide… still waiting on the reply.
I lost data once, when my house was struck by lightning! The strike fried the battery backups and surge protectors, and toasted the motherboard and hard drives. I had been automatically backing up the data – movies, music, documents, school work, etc. – with two external hard drives on a weekly basis (WD Studios), and after I bought new parts rebuilt my desktop and restored my data.
Back then (3 years ago), I used Windows XP. Now I’m on a Macbook Pro, and I use Carbon Copy Cloner and another WD Studio to backup my data weekly.
The only time I really lost important stuff was when my external LaCie fell off of a desk while running. I wasn’t backing it up, since it was essentially my backup drive. Oops. No big deal, though. I keep all my important stuff in the cloud now.
I back up all of my documents to an external drive. However one day my brother needed to use it (I’m on a mac and he is on a Windows). He couldn’t get it to work on his machine so he formatted it to windows format (I think fat32). Needless to say next time I hooked up my harddrive I saw nothing but limewire downloads.
Now with cloud, I store lots of my data on it. Otherwise I almost store data on an external 150GB USB 2.0 drive (one of the first USB 2.0 ext. HDDs and it’s quite big for nowadays standards). Hopefully, I haven’t had any of my drives dead yet. :-) Hope for winning one of these two drives. I run Ubuntu, I don’t think that’ll be a problem if I win. heh
I played with one of the early betas of Boot Camp, boy that was a mistake. Windows randomly shut down my (at the time one week old) MacBook Pro, and somehow managed to erase both my OS X and Windows partitions. Nightmare. Luckily I had all my important data on my iMac and was able to transfer it over.
That night I bought a copy of SuperDuper, which I used on Tiger until Leopard came out. Now I use Time Machine.
@Ren – ugh, that sucks! If my sisters had done that I would be pretty pissed off.
Wow, those are super nice enclosures! I’ll take them both, Paul!
I lost data several times back in my PC days. While I did have back-up solutions, they were all manual. So no matter when my PC went down (which as we know, happens all too often), I lost stuff… every time.
Since my move to Mac, I invested in a pair of 500GB external HDDs – one for manual back-up and storage of my media files. The other a clone of my boot drive, which is updated nightly via SuperDuper! I used to have Time Machine keep a back-up on my storage drive as well, but I found that I never used it. Or whenever I needed to, it didn’t have an accurate copy of the files I was after. Useless.
I lost a huge amount of data about 4 years ago on a Maxtor external hard drive. Since then my backup regime has become very strict. Since I’m on a Mac: Time Machine backups, nightly SuperDuper backups, once a month I swap SuperDuper drives with one I keep in the safety deposit box at my bank. I also have a good majority of my work stored in Subversion which is hosted by an offsite server.
I backup to a WD MyBook using Time Machine, before that I used Carbon Copy Cloner with a generic firewire drive. Never had any ‘major’ data losses except for accidental overwrites/file corruption etc. when the backup came in handy ;)
I lost my entire harddrive- without backups- in 2004 on my old iMac G5 (first gen! didn’t even have a webcam). Shortly after that I cloned my drive every few months(!) to an external drive as I couldn’t really afford a external drive bigger than my internal.
Nowadays I backup an image of my documents/photos/movies folder every week to a 1TB TeraStation NAS. The images are encrypted with PGP Desktop before storage as anyone who wardrives into my Wifi would be able to login to the TeraStation (they have really, really crappy access control). Incremental backups of my Documents folder is done hourly to the 50gb Backup user provided by my webhost. The method of my upload is simple: SFTP via Expandrive so that it’s mounted as a disk.
P.S.- My webhost, Dreamhost, provides a 50gb amount of diskspace entirely for personal use that isn’t redundantly backed up by them. They provide you with 5tb of overall bandwidth so I don’t think I’ll ever run past that. On top of that reliable (in my experience!) hosting with a huge (500gb) of disk space all for $10 a month.
P.P.S- I won’t be following this comment-stream so if you have any comments on my backup structure, send me an email!
I lost a bunch of my data about 8 years ago, when I was still getting into computers and in highschool. Basically, the operating system failed (Pretty sure it was Windows 98) and I had to delete everything and start over.
Around this time is when I discovered how partitioning works and now I partition my drives so the OS is on one, and other data are split up accordingly if it warrants it. (For example: A dual boot of a linux flavour on one parition)
Now, I run Ubuntu and have all my critical data backed up on a secondary drive, as well as some even more critical data being sent to my Dropbox account (It’s critical in the sense that I don’t want to lose it, but it’s not VISA numbers or anything)
I have a simple script that runs every few days via Cron to sync data to the directories/drives I want. I use rdiff-backup, a very simple python script that handles this really well.
Actually, I’ve never lost anything but I’ve never backed up…
so in reality, at any moment my stuff could be gone — scary to think about.
About 3 years ago I had a very small 10GB HDD which I stored my most of my important data on. Documents for school, movies, and purchased DRM’d music through the iTunes Music Store. I got the HDD from Wal-Mart through some special deal they had going at the time.
One day, when the HDD was just about up to the brim with data, I decided to copy some data off of it so I could utilize some of the free space on my computer, and free up some space on my drive for more important data. As I was copying files over I got an error. I can’t exactly remember what the error was but it wouldn’t allow me to move anything off the drive. Thinking it must have been a computer problem, I restarted and tried again, same error. I moved the drive to another computer I had lying around the house and it returned the same error. Soon after I realized that not only was it not letting me copy data from the drive, but it wasn’t letting me copy data to the drive. So I had data that could be played on the HDD, but could not be moved in any way. I still have that HDD tucked away somewhere.
Today, being smarter I use Amazon S3 to back up my most important data. All of my data, really. As cheap as it is, I would still like to store crucial data locally and without having to be online to obtain it when needed.
Thanks for listening to my story!
(Mac user)
I have my important data (music, documents, photos) backed up across a couple of small external hard drives and it serves me well.
I’ve lost data many times, and it’s mostly due to my weird inconsistent backup strategies. Most recently, I was upgrading my macbooks hard drive (to a bigger one) and my computer died in the process, but I was able to boot my imac from the macbooks hard drive (using an enclosure) and recover data. What is difficult is backing up Keychain passwords and App preferences and other system wide things, which is something im not sure time machine would be able to fix…
Anyway, some of the worse data losses of mine have been when hard drives fail.. although gladly i’ve never lost too much info.
The only time I’ve really lost anything is when I’m reformatting, and I forget to copy something over to the new install. My backup solution is fairly simple, I have an external drive that I have music on that I don’t fill up, and I manually copy docs over to it every once in a while. Eventually I hope to have a better solution, and back up my music as well.
I have “accidentally” deleted files on numerous occasions. And these weren’t just casual files (pictures, mp3 etc) but very important business documents. The only thing I could do was run a HD recovery and try to get them back.
Now I back up to two or three online options as well as physical harddrives and have redundant copies on my local machine.
I used to just have a spare hard drive in my desktop that I copied data to with a nightly batch. Now that I’m on a Macbook Pro and house data from my clients I take things a bit more seriously. The MBP is backed up with a Time Capsule, but most of my important data is on a Windows Home Server box. I really appreciate the automatic redundancy of data and the ability to add drives at any point. I don’t keep off-site backups yet, but I think I will look into it at some point.
Back when I had a Windows machine, my hard drive literally exploded. I had burn marks in the Shuttle XPC I had built. I’m not sure what had happened to this day… it might have something to do with the power supply.
I lost a lot of images that I hadn’t manually backed up to an external hard drive or burned to a couple DVDs, but it wasn’t all that bad. It was just that summer’s worth of data.
Now, it’s a mixture of constant Time Machine backups and periodical burning to DVDs. I’m going to start up using S3 for the massive backups soon enough.
back in the days, I had lost my 850mb hardrive due to electric failure.
Now I just copy alla the stuff in between gmail, hd redundant copies, a usb key and my 30gb ipod.
It’s kind of naive, but it worked pretty well so far :)
I have my important data (music, documents, photos) backed up across a couple of small external hard drives and it serves me well.
I’ve lost data many times, and it’s mostly due to my weird inconsistent backup strategies. Most recently, I was upgrading my macbooks hard drive (to a bigger one) and my computer died in the process, but I was able to boot my imac from the macbooks hard drive (using an enclosure) and recover data. What is difficult is backing up Keychain passwords and App preferences and other system wide things, which is something im not sure time machine would be able to fix…
Anyway, some of the worse data losses of mine have been when hard drives fail.. although gladly i’ve never lost too much info.
The most annoying data I’ve lost (due to stupidity (accidentally deleting important folders)) is my Keychain. I lost a keychain that was 3yrs old earlier this year. Tens of passwords gone, I’ve had to rebuild it and add passwords manually again.
I had a USB stick go dead on me, that had some documents that I didn’t store on my computer. Now I use Google docs, and occasionally back up to a DVD. I need to do it more often!
I had an external drive crash on me (WD not Seagate!)…lost all my backups, all my docs, pics, etc. I learned my lesson and store everything online now using Google, Amazon and web hosting. I have a mac.
A few years back I lost pretty much of my schoolwork because I didn’t do any backups at all. Had a really hard time getting some of my work finished but I managed. Then I’ve had a few breakdowns on some computers which I didn’t care about.
After I lost all my schoolwork I ended up doing a lot of backups, right now I am using TimeMachine and rsync’ing data to my “server”. A few scripts on the server (an asus eee box, yes I want to sleep at night) uploads the most important data to Amazon S3 and the rest is put on an external drive (that is at the moment 95% full). This setup is quiet, fast and reliable. If one hard drive crashes the data is stored elsewhere.
I lost a good amount of data by accident by simply deleting some folders that I didn’t think I needed. Turns out I needed all of it and did not have a backup anywhere.
Now I do a complete Time Machine backup and a photo backup on two harddrives and a backup to S3.
Never lost anything, I’m a photographer so I back uo to my mac’s hard drive, DVDs and online. Time consuming, but worth it.
I’ve been pretty lucky in that I haven’t really lost any important files. Knock on wood..
My current backup strategy: I use Time Machine to a 1GB Firewire drive. I also do a SuperDuper clone about once a week to a 500GB Firewire drive. I backup my Boot Camp partition to the same 500GB Firewire drive using Winclone about once every few months. In addition to that, I also use Mozy to backup certain files on my Mac offsite. Hopefully I’ll never have to use a restore, but I think I’m fairly well covered if I ever do.
I’m looking into a Drobo too.
I’ve never lost anything important, so I’ve never been forced to be responsible with backing up my data. I’m still living on the wild side!
I once FDISK’ed the wrong drive in my PC and lost my entire MP3 collection (around 20Gb at the time), was a very painful experience, managed to get most of it back off my iPod, I now have a ultra small for factor Dell OptiPlex with a 750Gb ext HD hidden in my TV cabinet, doesn’t matter how many times I format my laptop, my data is safe, my girlfriend currently backs up all her University work to it too, my life would not be worth living if that got lost!!
I’ve never really lost anything or had my HDD crashed. Currently, I have all my important stuff on a 16GB flashdrive that I use regularly, so I guess that’s kinda my version of back up.
We lost a 2TB raid 5+0 (12 250gig drives in two raid 5s stripped) worth of user data about a month ago. The server was fairly new and we knew we had to back up the data to another location asap, but it kept get pushed off. Long story short one of the drives failed and upon its replacement the raid broke and became unrecoverable. FYI – don’t run xfs repair on a broken raid volume, apparently it just scrambles all your data.
We sent the raid card and the 12 disks out for data recovery and when they arrived we were told that there was basically no chance that the data was going to be recovered. In a last ditch effort they were able to reverse the effects of xfs repair and recover every single last file! (http://www.raidrecoverylabs.com these guys are amazing!!)
So, needless to say we made a number of changes to make sure this didn’t happen again.
1. We are running a raid 6 now (can lose any 2 disks) with 5 1TB drives (2TB usable with one hot spare). Your mean time to failure goes way up after your 4th drive.
2. We rsync the data to disk on another server once a day.
3. We backup to tape with daily diffs and once a week fulls so we can have history.
Before I got my MBP, the PB 17″ was my primary laptop… I did just about everything on it. I backed up regularly to an 320GB WD drive.
On the _same_ day, both decided to fail. Inexplicably.
I actually cried. Now I use Mozy (www.mozy.com) to backup my data to an offsite location. I also backup to an newer 320 gig Western Digital drive.
I’ve only had a really catastrophic loss of data a couple times in the past, the most significant of which was back in the late 90s. In recent years I’ve been using a combination of cross-PC file sync with FolderShare (for my iTunes collection and some of my videos; it works great for keeping my media library in sync and ready to go when I take my laptop with me, too) and cloud storage with SugarSync, a service I’ve grown to really, really love.
Data loss has happened to me too many times (and it really sucks) — now, I either use SyncBack SE to back up to external hard drives or I use Carbonite.
When migrating files from my employer owned Mac to my newer MacBook Pro, I set a transfer between the old and new Mac using Migration Assistant, and backed up my most important files to a couple of DVDs.
The assistant failed. My old computer’s HD was corrupted and actually caused me a lot of issues on both machines, and to top that all off, I found I didn’t move all of my necessary files to DVD. Since then, not only do I keep backups at S3, but I also move files to the permanent desktop in the house (also to keep my drive clean).
I’m going through a data recovery nightmare right now, actually. A pin broke on the IDE connector of a drive that has a lot of important media — pictures from high school and college, concert photos, papers…all of those things that are personally important. Now, the drive still physically works; it spins up, and since re-soldering the pin to the controller board, computers will recognize its presence, but can’t recognize that it has any storage. I would imagine that replacing the controller board might let me recover my data, but as it’s an older drive, I’m not holding my breath while I try to find one.
How do I backup now? Still not very well, I’m afraid. Most of my photos find their way to Flickr these days, but that doesn’t help me recover fun and random images I find around the internet, ones people send to me, etc. It also doesn’t help me with documents, videos, music or anything else. I have an external drive that I used to back up my laptop files not too long ago while I reinstalled the OS. But my overall backup plan is pretty piecemeal, partly because I’m lazy and partly because I’ve never bothered to set up a comprehensive solution…mostly because it’s one of those “I’ll do it later” things.
I’ve got all important uploaded on remote ftp server, but on my Ubuntu I got script, that backup my projects folder onto the other physical hdd in computer on shutdown.
I also burn backups on dvd every week just to be sure.
I lost very important data only once, when I ran computer with just one hdd and no mirroring on web. Will not make same mistake again.
I’ve lost all of my data once, music, pictures, everything. This was a few years back before I invested in a good backup storage solution.
I’m currently running a Linksys NAS with 2 external 500GB HDD’s attached. It works great.
I lost all my pictures when I forgot to back them up before doing a clean install of my OS. Learning from that, I now use Time Machine to keep everything backed up at all times, so that I can no longer forget to back things up before a clean install. I’m also thinking of implementing some sort of offsite backup to my VPS.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Despite two failed drives in my old Compaq with no backup, I’ve managed to never lose any files. I got lucky, for sure.
As for my current backup situation, I’ve got that old Compaq and a new MacBook Pro. The PC is not backed up, but it is no longer used for anything but checking Gmail, so there’s no reason to. My 320GB MacBook Pro is backed up to a 500GB external (Rocstor case with Seagate drive) using Time Machine. I’ve backed up with SuperDuper for years now, but I’ve now got a 120GB WD portable laying around so what I’ve decided to do is use Time Machine for the day-to-day backups (so it’s done automatically) and put a fresh install of OS X on the WD. If my drive dies, I can boot off that and retrieve the files I need from Time Machine… Best of both worlds. I’ve also got another 250GB external (no name) that I normally backup to a second identical 250GB external, but that backup drive has died; I believe it’s only the enclosure that went so I may look at replacing the enclosure for a temporary fix, but I need to upgrade to something bigger sometime soon anyway. So at the moment the external isn’t being backed up, making one of those Seagate drives actually quite useful for me at the moment.
Can you tell I’ve got a ton of external drives? :p No idea how laptop owners can survive without any at all.
Ohh, forgot to say I’ve got a Mac! ;)
I had a very doggy hard drive from China which gave up on me. I now use Time Machine to back up to a 500GB LaCie, it works super fast over firewire 800.
Last year, I was using my IBM Thinkpad to do all my work. I usually leave the laptop in my dorm room so that I wouldn’t loose/damage it, and I took good care of it! I guess it just overheated one day… I woke up to use it, and it took 10 minutes just to load up the login page. I took it to the IT people, but nobody knew what was wrong, and the next day it just stopped turning on altogether. At this point I realized that I needed to get a new hard drive, but I have not backed up anything since the previous year, and so I lost ALL my documents, especially that research paper I’ve been writing since the beginning of the school year! I hated myself so much! Since then I’ve switched over to a Mac, and I use the time machine feature like crazy to make sure I don’t loose anything again. The external hard drive I have now is only 250G though, and I’m running out of room. =D
I once lost 2 months worth of photos after traveling for two months and not backing up my Powerbook as I went. In fact, the drive in my 12″ PB failed the day I arrived home from being away. I had always backed up my computer while at home, I had just assumed that being away for two months wouldn’t be a huge issue. I was wrong, and now I back up to both portable and non-portable externals, with a few stored away from my computer. Lesson learned.
I haven’t lost anything yet, but I do regular backups with my 200 GB drive.
Luckily I haven’t lost any data. I backup to my external HDD with Time Machine.
Nice contest… Yes, I’d lost important data (a website design and the source code of a program). I was moving files through the network almost randomly, and some folders were left uncopied (and I didn’t noticed it till it was too late). Since then, I try to do partial backups, and when I copy a complete disk over the network I use a tool called WinMerge; which is very useful to compare folders and files.
Sometimes I mail backups of source code to my partners, so the code will be at my mail account (not safe, I know) and in my partner’s computer.
I completely lost a manuscript for a novel I was writing back when I was on a PC. I now use Time Machine on my Mac!
I lost these precious baby photos and I still dont have a backup solution!
I lost several MP3 files and some documents on an old PC that had a crashed HD. Never made backups but recently I’ve been using an USB case with a 120GB disk I had on the PC backing up my macbook with timemachine (with some directory exceptions since my MB have a 250GB disk).
I have never had a massive data loss (just your typical cramming to write a college paper and having your computer crash and losing it). But I am pretty sure I have just been lucky! As I am starting to finish up my dissertation, I am trying to get more diligent about backing up data, although I have yet to do an automated backup system.
My Macbook started making a noise like a vulture caught in helicopter blades and I knew I had a problem. Fortunately I had been using TimeMachine. As soon as I had a shiny new hard drive to fill, I plugged TM in, it asked me if I wanted it to restore everything. Yup, I said. And it did. Less than an hour later I was back exactly where I had left off.
I do use S3 for off-site back up of some important stuff. And I use iDisk for mail and Apply things.
But you can be sure TimeMachine is always on and turned on and doing its thing every hour, backing up to my WD MyBook drive.
Yes, I have lost important data. I was on vacation at Yosemite for the first time just after spending a day with Leo Laporte at TWiT Studios (O.O, it was the time of my life). It was also the day of WWDC. The connection was so bad at Yosemite that I could barely get audio of the address. That night, my 1.5GHz PwBk just shut off. Any attempts to power up were met with either a grey screen or a question mark. I was pretty much stranded tech wise for the rest of our trip down the west coast. When I got back, a friend from Canada walked me through replacing it (my first real computer repair) over skype. What an experience. At least I gained about 80GB in the process.
Now adays, I do a monthly backup just by burning a CD (college doesn’t provide a lot of funds kids).
I lost all the data on an old iMac G3 when the house was struck by lightning and I’d forgotten to unplug the computer.
I been fortunate with my hard drives otherwise as none of them have crashed up to this point. However I regularly backup to an external drive through time machine although lately I tend to forget plugging in the drive so my backups are more sporadic now.
Happy Thanksgiving!
i lost all my work when my computer crashed. im now gonna get a mac
I have lost photos from a vacation with my fiance years ago. An iBook drive failed after many years of use. Right now I don’t have a big enough drive to back up all of my data.
I had an iBook G4 (30gig) that started to make that horrible dying sound. Things would freeze up and I would have to shut it down. Eventually the only way to power up the iBook and try to rescue data was to hold the computer at a 30 degree angle with my USB drive plugged in. I felt like I was messing around with my old TV’s rabbit ears but with much more at stake.
I have multiple computers, and USB thumb drives backing up my stuff now. The problem is though that I have a lot of duplicate data and it isn’t organized much at all.
I used to keep my work on the school’s computers. But days before one of my CS projects were due half of my files went missing. I probably went over quota. Luckily, I was able to put it back together fairly quick. From then on I stored my stuff on multiple computers, and a flash drive, just to be really safe.
I would be devastated if I lost my graduate work, because I once lost my undergraduate work. Ughh
I’ve never had a catastrophic data failure, but I have generally tried to be conscientious about backing up. It’s easier than ever with Time Machine (which thankfully I’ve never had to use, but it’s there if I need it).
Whenever I’m doing a project or paper, I try to also manually drop a copy onto a flash drive after ever major revision (adding a section, major proofread, major formatting stuff, etc) so that I have a third backup.
I have a Mac, btw. (Obv. from the Time Machine comment, but whatever).
I’ve lost my fair share of flash drives with important data on them, but nothing irrecoverable. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never had an actual drive die on me, and admittedly I am pretty lax about backing up the bulk of my data (pictures, music, etc.) Currently I keep all of my irreplaceable data (sans pictures) on DropBox, as I love having up-to-date access to it from the various machines I work on.
i’ve never lost anything really important (thank god) but I have had to use Apple’s time machine on a few occasions to retrieve accidentally deleted material. I am very afraid of losing my photo library over anything.
I can recall only one situation where valuable data was lost. Back in 2000, my poor PC crashed and took the valuable 10GB HDD with it…
For years since then i’m backing-up my data to revisions with the help of my precious DVD writer, mostly development stuff. I keep my *valuable* data to 2 different DVD+R discs always and I replace them every 1-2 months and also i backup my stuff to a remote server, manually.
My short-future plan is to build a RAID powered PC for my data in addition of an external HDD. Through software of course :-)
The seagate beauty will motivate me enough to “RAID faster” than planned :p
My biggest loss of data was when my house was burglarized – I religiously backed up my computer to external hard drives, but unfortunately not only did they take the entire computer set up, but they also took the backup drives. In hindsight, this was obviously not the best solution…
These days, I have an external drive at the office that I Time Machine to, but it’s just started to make those unattractive noises that drives tend to make over time, so this couldn’t come at a better time really.
I lost a lot of data in 2001 when my Compaq had an issue where it would not start. I had many pictures on it and school work. I was devastated because the family pictures of importance were not yet printed. I currently have no method of backup. I don’t have leisure cash to spend, so I feel that taking my chances with no backing up at all is better than spending a lot of money on a backup system.
Lost an IBM Deskstar once. The drive was accessible again so I was able to retrieve some stuff but nothing really all that important. I have a secondary external drive that I use to backup important files.
The only time i have ever lost a large amount of data was when i was newer to computers and hardware and i had an old 300gb hard drive with 2 partitions, one for the OS and one for data. I ended up reformatting and accidentally deleted the data partition and lost all my data (movies,games, ect…) Now i have my gaming PC which I am on now as my main PC and i turned the old amd athon with 512mb of ram and that same 300 gb hard drive into a FreeNAS server. (http://freenas.org/) It works very well for me needs but i would love to have faster transfers but i would have to upgrade everything to gigabit and its just a hassle.
Oh! Yes! Lost more than 160GB once, I don’t remember why exactly, though I think that I was messing with the MBR. I recovered it by editing with a hex editor that sector. Woo! Now, I’m using rsync with a flash disk, hence my need for such a drive :)
In every format i do on my HDD, i usually don’t backup correctly due to the limited capacity of my backup unit (4GB flash drive) and lose some stuff, but as long as i have access to my emails i can recover.
Since i got my new private web server i use it to backup some data.
I’ve lost my important photos and school documents several times. I’ve since learned and use Time Machine to regularly back up my documents on an external. I also regularly burn DVDs of my important stuff, and put them up into the cloud… i.e. photos to Flickr, documents to Google Docs. Since this last week, I’ve been using BackBlaze.com, an online backup solution.
I’m quickly running out of space on my Time Machine drive and would love to have one of these drives!
Thanks,
Kambiz
Yes I have lost a lot of data in the past, videos, pictures, all kinds of data. I learned from that though, and now for the one windows machine I have, I started using Acronis True Image, for the Mac’s I use Time Machine.
Paul – Great blog. You really put effort into everything. Thank you!
I had a hard drive failure many years ago, and I lost everything on that drive. I had a few small writing projects on it, so that really destroyed me, although I was a kid. I now use time machine to backup, although since it is in a noisy server, i don’t backup as much as I should. I have a Mac so if you choose me that would be great!
Thank you and happy Thanksgiving!
I’ven’t YET lost important data (luck me).
I do not backup now; but I have my eye on acquiring an external HHD soon.
I’ve had about four harddrives crash on me at different times since being in college. The most catastrophic was an external drive that had all of the photographs I’ve taken on it. I’ve got an old shoe-box with all of my old drives in it so that I can recover them someday if I have the money.
gosh, I have lost all my stuff once-and it was a horrible experience. Right now, I have an Ipod I am using to back up my itunes library, just in case the inevitable happens again. I am not a techie person and don’t know much about backup solutions but have been reading about different ways to do so-and am slowly but surely getting prepared. My hubby’s nephews had a PC with a virus on it, which I didn’t know about. I went on to check something on google and got the blue screen of death. They lost photos, music (THOUSANDS of songs!) everything they had and I felt so guilty but it just happened at the time I went on to look something up. Lucky for me, they weren’t upset as they knew something was wrong with the computer beforehand. Thanks for the cool giveaway, this is definitely something I could use!
micaela6955 at msn dot com
Several years ago I meant to empty the trash on my PowerBook G4 using the keyboard shortcut. You probably know that this is only one key different from the command to move a file to the trash. Long story short, I accidentally moved my whole Documents folder to the trash… and then emptied it.
I’ve noticed you can’t do this anymore in Leopard, but I’ve still moved a few folders to the trash without emptying it. I found some Mac utility to attempt to recover the files, but it only supported certain file types. I ended up recovering everything except for several thousand iChat chat logs…
I only started backing up recently. I bought a cheap external hard drive and wrote a shell script to rsync my home folder to a folder on the hard drive. It works great, and since it uses rsync, it takes maybe 30-60s max for me to have a full backup of my most important files.
My music library is growing too fast for the drive now, and I’m looking for other ways to archive files.
A long time ago I lost some important photos due to “unneccessarily” defragmenting my MacBook.
I learned that at least I should keep some photos backed up (on my flash USB memory -.-)
i lost two similar external drives by accidentally switching the power supplies, lost all my pics & music. Currently considering a raid setup.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
I have lost very important data before, it kind of happened when my youngest daughter managed to climb onto my desk and use an external HD that I was using for pre back up (gathering of information into one spot to then burn on to DVDs) as a football. I think that maybe she was showing an interest in the upcoming Grey Cup. Either way, I lost some 1st bday photos of my kids, and some working files,as well as some archived job folders.
Now, I have a system that is way out reach and also gets backed up daily to an external HD and from there to the net/DVDs.
Never will I make that mistake again putting all my information in one central place at once.
Thanks, have a great extra long weekend.
Yes I’ve lost data before and unfortunately did not have a viable solution to retrieve the data. My current method is not 100% and it would be resolved with an item like this. I currently partition my hard drive and separate my OS from my files in case the OS dies or needs to be replaced I will not lose those files. Not great, but good.
I, personally have never lost data (knock on wood) and I am horrible at backing up. Keep meaning to put a system in place to do this.
At work we had a major data lose the day the tech guy was showing the coop student how the hot-swappable RAID drives worked on the server and how you could pull one out without any problems and the student grabbed a second one to try before he put the first one back in!!! :-(
Not pretty but…
The last harddrive I lost my harddrive due to overheating (a cheap emachines pc, back in 2004, with only 20GB worth of data). In order to avoid losing data again I tend to take more precautions in general (better cooling on the tower, shutting down laptops when not in use, etc.). I also have regular backups on an external 120GB harddrive for all my important items and Amazon S3 Backups as a last resort (mainly used for website backups)
A guy from my school spilled coke in my laptop’s keyboard. I’m getting it back tomorrow after using a borrowed powerbook for 2 months, while it’s being repaired. When I get my pc back tomorrow my files won’t be there, and that’s probably 5 gigs of photos and lots of music lost. Some of my files are still on my external though, but right before I lost my computer I was backing up some of the files on Mozy.com, but haven’t uploaded them all, due to slow upload speed :(
When I get it up and running again, I’ll use mozy for ALL my files.
If I’m the lucky one this time around – I’m using pc :)
The hard drive in my old Dell died after I upgraded the RAM. I lost school-related documents and a few random files. Now I use Time Machine on my MacBook, using my trusty Hitachi 500 gb external hard drive. Easy enough.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
My scenario at this moments, is when you realize that you have a lot of precious memories in photos, videos, etc.. and you are about to loose them… thats because my three main computers are not avaible anymore (at least 1 of them): My Imac its in repair service since 5 months ago, my home pc it’s also in service repair for video issues, and my Mac Book Pro was stolen!!!!… At this moment i only have my Photos on the web and on my IPhone : (… I really hope to get them back soon… Anyone with kids will know what i’m suffering at this moment, since all my important photos and videos are from my litle baby!!!!
I lost the hard drive in my MBP, had a Time Machine backup. Took something like 12 hours but it restored just fine.
When I was younger, much younger, I was searching for esater eggs on google and ended up pasting in a command that erased the windows registry.
This was in the days before linux live cd’s and I ended up making my dad’s computer unuseable :(.
How do I backup now? I don’t really. Probably should start *hint hint* :P
I lost a lot of data, including months of research, on my first 1 Gig hard drive back in the mid 90’s. That experience converted me into a back-up fanatic. I’ve used lots of software and hardware since then. Today I do nightly back-ups to external hard drives, weekly back-ups to other machines and back-ups of all “critical data” to the cloud as needed. And now I am about to begin using Live Mesh.
I’ve had several data disasters and unfortunately I don’t feel I’ve really learnt my lesson. The first time of note was during my first year of teacher training when somehow or other I managed to lose a year’s worth of notes and lesson plans. The second time a power surge took out my hard drive and I lost everything again including the photos I’d taken at two family weddings that year. I now have a surge protector and use SugarSync to sync between my laptop and desktop but it doesn’t feel like a particularly robust solution. I’d really like a large physical drive or two that are portable, reliable and permanent without having the need to buy something else next year.
so many computers, so many hard drives, so many failed hard drives, i’ve lost count and while I have lost data, somehow I’ve never lost anything major. I still have files from 1996. Not sure why.
My current backup involves two externals with my important stuff (synced with chronosync). I also have a .dmg of a fairly recent image of my hard drive stored on on there… I have another hard drive that I use with time machine, although I haven’t had to recover from it, so I’m not sure how reliable it is.
I don’t use a drobo for personal backups, I have a client that I suggested it for and it is easy to use and works as advertised. However, it’s not the only backup I have for her, because that software it uses has been known to act up and corrupt the files.
I have never lost any significant data, due to HDD failure. Now I use an external USB disk and Time Machine.
I saved everything on my computer; photos, things I had written, homework assignments. I never realized how sad it would be to lose all that until it was too late. I had a Windows PC, and got a virus on my computer. The computer completely died, the hard drive was useless. They had to completely erase it, so when I finally got the computer running again, there was nothing on it at all.
Now I have a macbook pro, and try to back up all my important data on a maxtor hard drive, because if I lost everything again, man would I be sad.
I’ve never had a hard drive fail, with the exception of my blueberry iMac rev.B which seems to have had a drive failure sometime in the last two years (the last time I plugged it in, it wouldn’t boot :( ), however, having recently switched to using my new MacBook Pro as my main machine, I’m increasingly worried about losing it, having it stolen, or dropping it.
Another drive to use as a Time Machine backup would let me rest easy!
Thanks for the contest!
I had my MB stolen and therefore all of my data stolen as well. Luckily, the computer was powered off and would require the user to login to the computer.
For my replacement computer, I bought a MBA. It came out the week before the theft and I was looking for an excuse to get one. Thankfully, constantly ran TimeMachine and my MBA was up and running in no time.
Quick recovery and no data loss; only the sick feeling of $2200 unnecessary bucks spent because I forgot to lock my car.
I’ve never lost more than one file at a time but I did almost lose 2TB when my Raid card “forgot” my configuration, leaving me with 5 worthless striped drives. I did recover it all after 2 months of trial and error. I’ve since abandoned Raid in favor of a Windows Home Server, now with 7TB of storage. It automatically backs up my 3 Windows Vista PCs every night. My one Mac has a hacked time machine backing up to the server. Finally, the server backs up off site for the important data.
I have never lost any data, but I’m worried about it.
As the family tech-go-to-guy, I had been asked to videotape my Opa’s birthday and put together a video for the family. I have always been more of a photographer and thought that doing this side project would be a great leaning experience. So I started importing 6 hours of MiniDV tapes to my trusty MacBook quickly realizing that this was more than I had expected. I backed it all up onto my WD My Book at home and took my portable external with all the video with me and started editing it. Twice I had iMovie crap out on my, having to redo transitions and remember how I had done things in the hour I had last saved (frequent savings have become second nature now). I had almost finished it when all of a sudden my drive starts to make a horrendous clicking noise! for no apparent reason it had failed. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the data back. There went over 24 hours of my life.
I’ve never lost data! but I don’t want to! that’s why I’m commenting :D
I lost my research paper and video-.- While it really wasn’t anything at all, it was horrifying that 2 months worth of Google, sweat, and tears was lost and due in 2 days.
2 all nighters and a very hair-tearing A later, I still haven’t really learned my lesson. I don’t really backup. I occasionally use ADrive’s free 50GB online backup service, and anything bigger than 1GB I just burn on DVD. Most of my stuff is also on MediaFire and MegaUpload so there’s nothing that I can’t redownload.
(There’s always Ubuntu in case something bad happens, and I know well enough not to do a rm -rf in sh.)
Corrupted hard drive = lost all of my music. Not fun. Had to buy one external hard drive, but it’s almost full.
I’ve been luck enough to never lose any important data.
My current backup strategy is Time Machine + SuperDuper for local backups and Mozy for off-site backup of critical files.
I have lost the first few years of code I ever wrote in (wrote it in the late 90’s) 2003 in a hard-drive crash. There was no backup system; so I guess I learned. Now, I use Time Machine on a–sadly–slowly filling up Maxtor external hard-drive and important stuff goes on the cloud.
I use a Mac!
Thanks,
Avinash
Yes, have lost data before, many times before. In some cases data was permanently lost. Current solution is to back up to DVD every few months. A hard drive back up plan would make things much easier and quicker.
I backup all of my important data monthly – and take to my in-law’s house. I have two external USB drives – and just keep rotating them to work so I always have my data.
I also synchronize nightly between PCs in my house, but that wouldn’t account for major fire damage (thus the offsite drives above)
I’ve lost hard drives, but never more than a couple of days worth of data.
I’m starting to run out of room on my external drives, so it would be nice to upgrade.
I’ve crashed like three of our computers to where I could not retrieve the data: college pictures, honeymoon pictures, lotsa music. Wifey wasn’t too pleased.
Right now I am not backing up enough, but when I do it I do it with a 500gb WD elements external HD I picked up for $80 last year at Target on black Friday.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Lost a whole 320gb drive last year…. Fortunately it didn’t have anything crucially important on it. Now I use Time Machine with a 500gb drive, I haven’t needed to use it yet though.
I did not lost any data on my home computer. I backup using time Machine, have a dropbox account and ftp some important stuff to my server.
Yeah I’ve lost some data before, this was literally hours after I caved to a colleague of mine that had been nagging me to back up my stuff, day after day.
I went out and bought a 160gb external for my 80gb drive on the notebook I had. I got home and turned on my notebook. It was dead.
I lost about 4 months of writing I had been doing and basically all of my music files.
I still have that 160gb external and try to update the backup as often as possible but 1TB would be excellent to have so I can use Time Machine on my Mac!
Thanks.
I have lost a few USB drives, but the worst was when the main drive on one of my previous desktops failed. I lost quite a lot of data that time and have since then been a lot more cautious about making backups. I currently backup work documents to a share at work with iFolder, my personal documents are stored on Live Mesh and I have a more extended backup of media and other stuff to an extended hard drive.
I have also lost some data due to deleting wrong files, but misc recovery tools have helped me in those cases.
I’ve lost an import project at work because the CD-RW decided to stop working. I immediately went to using an external hard drive.
I’ve lost all my music a few times, the first when I used mainly iTunes it wasn’t so bad but then I lost most of it again and had to get what I had from old ipods and friends who had my cd’s and stuff like that.
it was really annoying, and I try to backup but the harddrive I have is running out of space and I have no money to buy another.
I’m mainly afraid for my photos though, the only backup I had was an ipod, which had its harddrive fail a few weeks ago.
Sweet, I love Seagate hard drives!
I fortunately haven’t lost any files yet.
I currently use Amazon S3 and JungleDisk Plus to backup files that aren’t photos, music, or videos. I also backup my [Adobe] Lightroom catalogs — block-level file updates help save time for those.
I also have a Drobo for 1) backing up my data partition nightly with Karen’s Replicator, and 2) primary storage for my photos. I currently have three 500 GB hard drives, which is 1 TB of protected storage.
Of course, I need another level of backups (especially for my photos) that should be off site.
I had a Compaq desktop and the hard drive died. I had photos from Europe in there and tons of music. But luckily I had saved those photos onto Photobucket and I had all my music on my iPod so when I got my new MacBook Pro, I used some program to transfer the music into iTunes. External hard drives are definitely a must!
The first time a hard drive died on me I lost all my email/address book/pictures.
Now I backup using Time Machine to another internal drive, and I use JungleDisk (S3) as a redundant backup. I also use MP3tunes.com to backup my music.
All my servers use Duplicity/S3 encrypted with GnuPG.
I nearly lost my thesis a couple of days before the last deadline. I managed to spill some milk on my desk shorting the VGA port on my iBook. After drying the machine and cleaning the port it worked, and the files went up to S3 and my desktop machine.
Now all my really important data – keepass database, documents – is backed up to S3.
On a mac. Time Machine to a 120GB external firewire drive. Plus rsync to an encrypted sparse image on a portable USB drive.
My work laptop’s hard disk died on me this past weekend. I normally use SyncToy to schedule daily backups of some key work folders and my “cloud” backup for most documents is the company’s exchange server. However, I turned off the daily job when traveling and forgot to turn it back on. The hard disk crash resulted in loss of 4 weeks of work for a client that I’m reproducing on thanksgiving weekend.
I’m still trying to figure out a better way to back up data locally at work.
Lost data? Hell, yes! I had a Lacie d2 Quadra and it died on me – taking with it all my iTunes collection and other important documents. I don’t mind those that I ripped but those that I purchased needed to be restored. Was lucky enough for Apple to give me another chance to download ‘em. And oh, the TimeMachine backup is on that drive, too!
Anyway, now I have back-ups on DVDs and multiple external HDDs.
PS. Lacie couldn’t repair it and couldn’t offer a replacement – gave me a 75% refund off of my purchase price! So unfair.
I had a Windows 95 PC that had a major hard drive failure about two years after I owned it. Lost a lot of data, but the important files were on floppy disk. Now I backup important files on the internet or with time machine.
It was a horrible disaster. I do web development locally and use git for version control. I usually work on something on the primary HDD and then clone it to a remote repository later when I reach a certain milestone. I neglected to do that and when I was around 40 hours into my project, the hard drive made click-y noises and died; there goes my working copy, and the full version history.
Lesson learned!
Now I still do work on the primary HDD, but have since got a 2nd hard drive and set it up for going back through time via Time Machine. I also immediately clone my repository to a two remote sites (Dropbox & my VPS) and “push” changes whenever I take a break or when I am done a certain task. So now I always have 4 copies of full version history of all my work.
On my laptop, I have copies of photos and my FLAC encoded music. My photos are uploaded to Flickr and burned to DVD, and I have the original CDs. I’d have to re-rip the CDs which would be a pain in the butt…
If I lost important data I’d be gutted. Thankfully it hasn’t happened…. yet…
It took me a few occassions of bad backups to realise that I wasn’t immune against computer failure! My first incident was when a virus removal tool managed to muck up my Windows installation when W32/Gibe.F (I think) was detected on a computer that I owned many years ago.
My second incident was when I backed up, and a few days later my hard drive began to show the tell tale signs of it beginning to fail. On my next backup, there was a power surge resulting in my external hard drive failing!
An emergency trip to Dell.com (I couldn’t be bothered to self-build my PC this time) resulted in £1200 (GBP) being spent, mainly on new software licenses. I decided against replacing hardware as this box was around three years old, and I wanted an upgrade.
So, backup and me finally get along. I am a neurotic person now – I backup to an external HD, Windows Home Server and to Mozy, an online backup service.
Many many years ago, when I was 8, a power failure cost me hours of hand typing a program from a magazine. Traumatic experience for a child!
I’ve been cautious ever after, copying file to other drives, emailing files to myself, etc.
I must have the worst luck ever, but I have lost so much data that it’s not funny. A few times I have accidently deleted something, and while it is deleting, I think “OH CRAP I SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT!”, and by that time, it’s already too late. I have also had many hard drives just simply have a mechanical failure, and require replacement. I have fortunately, learned my lesson. I now back up all of my data twice: once offsite, using Mozy (http://www.mozy.com), and once onsite, using a hard disk that I converted to an external Hard Disk (Western Digital mechanism, no-name case). I use ChronoSync to back up to the External.
-Chris
I lost all of my files from my high school graphic arts program (including some projects I had won awards for) to the old Zip Drive Click of Death. Completely unable to get anything back. Now I backup to a 500GB external and a 1TB Time Capsule.
I’ve never really had a hdd fail on me as such, apart from when my friend managed to knock my external onto the floor, that busted it pretty bad.
Now I back up to a Time Capsule hourly and am trying to get into the habit of backing up important stuff to S3 but my net connection really isn’t fast enough to do that here in NZ!
I used to host my site adimofunne.com on my macbook pro until one day my hard drive died and I had no back up, in fact I never really believed in backing up anything till them. It was so frustrating and I had to start all over again.
Right now what will be the worst thing to loose on my computer will be my picture collection. i take picture everyday and store them on my computer. I have been meaning to organize them and store them away sometime but have not had the chance yet.
I have indeed lost important data on my computer a few times; one was due to OS X deciding to crash while I was moving some files… I couldn’t recover them. A couple of times, I was the sole responsible for the data loss; i.e. I accidentally placed important files in the wrong folders, then I went ahead and deleted those folders and when I realized what I had done it was a little too late.
My current backup strategy involves a drive partitioned in two parts (which isn’t exactly the way to go w/r/t backing up –I know–, but I’m short on cash at the moment), Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner.
Time Machine backs up my MacBook’s drive to the first partition hourly, and Carbon Copy Cloner mirrors my drive to the second partition daily, through a task I’ve set up in the program’s built-in Task Scheduler. (BTW, CCC’s developer is an amazing and helpful guy… Fellow CCC users should definitely consider donating him some money for his hard work.)
That’ll be all!
Never! I make 5 copies of important files…
Thankfully, I’ve never lost anything important. Currently, I use a 256 GB hard drive that I use in conjunction with Time Machine on Mac OS X.
I’ve only ever lost important data once, and even then it was just a small folder of photos. Still, I decided that was reason enough to ensure a good backup and data storage plan. I tend to store most of my documents in the cloud with a local copy on my computer, so it’s generally just photos, videos and music I’m worried about. I’ve set up a nightly automated backup with Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive, which just copies over files that have been changed since the previous backup. It’s fast, efficient, and works well for me.
I’ve definitely lost some data before, back in the days when I did CD-R backups. Now I backup all important files to an external hard drive, and have most (if not all) text files in the cloud with Google Docs. Keep copies of all my photos on Picasa Web Albums, videos on Youtube or Google Video, and for random other files I’ve tried online storage like box.net, and that and similar sites seem to work decently as well.
Have lost data several times. Currently the plan is to back up to DVDs every few months. Not the best I know. A hard drive solution would hemp with more frequent backups
Earlier this fall the screen on my laptop went black—I wasn’t able to get at the vital homework documents I needed, or the iTunes library that keeps me sane. After getting the laptop fixed I started backing up my music to an external HD every week, and opened a Dropbox account where I keep important documents so they are visible both to my local filesystem and any campus computer I log in to.
Never, ever in my years of owning iMacs have I ever had a system failure or data loss that would have benefited from back-up.
Must be my turn soon, I guess :(
When i was around 12 ish, i lost all of my music and quite a bit of data because i wasn’t backing up….
I then started backing up using an external hd in a vantec enclosure.
And just this past year got my mac book pro so now i have a time capsule so i have automated backups, and 3 other externals totaling to around 1tb for various files and more backups….
I definitely learned from that experience and never want it to happen again!
Never lost more than a few hours’ work, except for a overmatched drive eaten by Tivo.
>> “Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?”
Oh yeah, but fortunately nothing super-critical. Now I copy data to an external USB drive and occasionally burn a CD w/ iTunes data and digital pics from vacations, etc.
And thanks for the contest!
I lost about 160gb of music that I didn’t have backed up. I was running an ftp server way back in the day which was basically a dump site for music. I came home from college and heard a funny whining noise coming from the pc and sure enough the hard drive was going dead. I restarted and the badboy never booted up again. After that I switched to a my first mac which was an ibook g3 and have been using macs ever since. Now I backup anything important on a small external drive and use dropbox for any files that I need access to away from the home.
I have lost some data becuase of a virus where I had to reformat my hard drive. I usually do not backup my things except media files and documents.
Yes, I lost a ton of data a few years ago when my HD crashed and I didn’t have a backup. Now I backup regularly with Time Machine to a Western Digital MyBook.
Of course, I’ve lost important data on my PC before. Once was when my entire HDD was attacked by virus and bugs, my brother had it formatted, at the expense of my data. Another incident was that my HDD just died on me one day for no good reason, or perhaps its time was up. For both cases, I had to bear the pain of losing some really precious data like photographs, school projects etc. Ever since, I began learning different ways to backup my data, be it upload it to gmail, box.net or my personal webspace. Being the budget conscious type, I tried many different (free!) methods as I moved along.
However, I hope it can win this hard drive so that I can finally settle on the best backup solution, that is back up with a standalone external hard drive : )
Once lost a 10giger (back when that was a lot), mostly with ebooks. Now I sync my data between two computers and burn all my movies to DVDs. Works okay but I’ve got a lot of DVDs sitting around now…not very efficient.
I lost a ton of purchased music in the past, and rely on a simple, manual backup to a Buffalo LinkStation NAS right now. When I add new music to one location, I also copy it to anther — done!
I have mac, although I seem to be one of the only people that doesnt use Time Machine. I have lots of incomming/outgoing files, so backing up would only backup those constantly changing files that I wouldn’t mind if I lost. Instead, I use mobile me for the main documents, with all my default settings and things saved to mobile me as well. That takes care of pictures, documents, settings and all that. I have music and media saved on my drobo, and every month I sync up certain folders from the drobo to an external usb drive (basically the drive I used to use before having a drobo). So even if the drobo completely failed I’d still have my music and some other large files. Pictures and docs are also on the drobo/external drive.
I’m a bit obsessive about this after an old SATA drive of mine completely failed a few years ago. I lost everything I had, and nothing was recoverable. Luckily I’d burned individual CD backups of most things, so I was able to piece together things like my music collection. After that though I didn’t want to take another chance. I do want to look into another way of doing the drobo -> other hd backup automatically rather than manually though, but other than that I’m happy with the setup. :)
My Western Digital My Book 500GB external hard drive failed on me about two weeks after I got back from a once-in-a-lifetime two month trip through the Caribbean and Central America by ship, and all my pictures and videos were unrecoverably lost, along with my entire collection of more than 300 movies and TV series.
I have not as of yet replaced my hard drive, but I use a server in my house to back up my large files such as movies. I use Flickr to back up all of my photos and small videos. I use Google Apps for things like e-mail and documents.
I’ve lost quite a lot of important data due to a disk failure. Lesson learned, I back up my files on DVDs and an external disk at the same time. The only problem is syncing the folders correctly.
I like how dropbox works, so I might use that for back up, once I get a faster connection.
If I lost my home movies, I would be devastated. I backup to an external 500Gb drive using Time Machine.
I backup with JungleDisk, Carbon copy cloner, and time machine. :). Photos backed up on Amazon S3 and External hard drives (2 copies locally)
Yay for mac :)
The first day of senior year of high school, I was eating my breakfast before school, and all of a sudden I moved my arm, and bam there goes a full bowl of cereal and milk all inside my (at the time) Black MacBook, gone.
You know how you have to “eject” a disk off your desktop before physically removing it? I used to ignore those warnings, and just eject whenever I want. Until one day my drive wouldn’t mount anymore due to an error. Fortunately, I managed to recover the disk in the end. Not as tragic as some of the other stories here, but I definitely ended up with lessons learned in the end.
Now I back up to Time Machine on an Airport Disk, and keep my really important stuff synced online with Dropbox.
A few years ago my computer crashed and I lost EVERYTHING I ended up losing so much data that I kept on my computer for my job, and as you can guess I got fired. It really sucked. Now I still don’t use anything to put my data in which is not a good idea.
I lost a laptop drive in an old powerbook a while back. It contained all my tax records and more importantly, thousands and thousands of photos of my sons life from birth till about 3 years old. I could care less about the tax records, but the photos were irreplaceable and only a small fraction of them were “backed up” to Flickr.
Now I run Carbon Copy Cloner every night on a schedule.
I lost many pictures and websites from several years ago from a computer crash/upgrade.
I now use iDisk for small documents,
Amazon s3 for media,
& DVD-Rs for random temporary files
My music hard drive once got corrupted and took me almost a year to find a software program to recover it (a joyless year, if there ever was one).
Now I keep a second copy of my music on my Linux home server via rsync as well as a copy on an external hard drive via my MacBook’s Time Machine feature. I should probably also back it up into the cloud, but haven’t had time to figure that out just yet :-).
Unfortunately, I’ve lost data a couple of times. The first time I came home from a long weekend (memorial weekend) and powered up my computer to listen to some music… and then I saw something was wrong. Eventually I figured out my hard drive died, and I had just lost around 3,000 songs. This was around 6-7 years ago, and I was most bummed about losing so many songs.
The second time I lost data was because my laptop was stolen. I was living in an off-campus house and moved in during the summer so there weren’t too many people on campus. I was at my internship and got a phone call from my room mate, we were actually supposed to have a party that night for his b-day, so I thought he was calling about the keg or something… let it go to voicemail.
I checked it a couple minutes later and as soon as he started talking I knew something was wrong… he said we just got robbed and he was at the house and waiting for the police to arrive. There wasn’t much I could do at that point, but I didn’t feel like staying at work anyway so I told my boss what happened and came back to my house.
My laptop, Ipod and digital camera were stolen. It was the summer, so I had no school work which I needed on the computer, but I had some priceless pictures from a incredible 3 week class I took in Yucatan Mexico I took the past winter along with other pictures from college and a ton of music…. after sitting in our apartment for a little bit being bummed out, we decided to still have the party and if they came back for our 42″ TV, we’d have a lot more people than 2 to kick their a$$
Now, I have an external HD which I backup all my data too and I also pray that I don’t get burglarized again. I’m also in the process of building a home server using Ubuntu.
While waiting for worldwide shipping, I just post my comment
Last year my harddisk broke and I lost all my data, at that time I only back up some of my data (photo & music) on my iPod Video 30GB
Right now I use Maxtor OneTouch 3 Mini (I borrow it from my company)
I have been juggling hundreds of of photos and various modified images for several years now. As a (poorly) self-taught Photoshop user, I rely on those piles of backups and edits to make proper comparisons for various projects. 2 months ago my big storage solution, a 320-gig NAS drive, crashed and burned in the middle of a nightly backup. Not only was the latest batch lost, but it took the previous months of files with it.
Learning my lesson, I now use two smaller, but seperate and mirrored backup drives. I would love to use Online storage but cant always count on being able to connect, and wouldn’t want to be locked away from my bits and bobs.
Oh Random Picking Gods! Let My Entry Be Selected! I Need More Room!*
*for to have a chance for things like more videos and the like.
I’ve screwed up Fedora multiple times, leading me to have to re-install it multiple times and a fair amount of downloads. I’m actually going to install Fedora 10 tomorrow. One time I got rid of GRUB by accident and was freaking out, but a re-install saved me again. Haha.
I’ve never really lost important data (thank God). I backup using SuperDuper to a local USB drive and a DROBO on with DroboShare (so a NAS).
I’ve only deleted things by accident, and forgotten to “Save As.” Now I use Time Machine!
I haven’t lost any major data yet, fortunately. However, I’ve helped enough friends with data loss that I realize the importance of my own backups. I have Time Machine running on an external eSATA hard drive, via an ExpressCard/34 for my MBP. Also, all of my active software development projects are checked into an offsite Subversion repository that is backed up nightly as well, so it’s even more secure. A few of my projects are also mirrored on my lab’s file server, adding even more redundancy.
i just manually back it up using an external harddrive.
The only time I ever really lost data was when I tired using a Lexar Media JumpDrive (a fat ol’ purple one) on Windows 98 after installing the driver for 98 SE. The computer blue-screened, and I didn’t find out until connecting the drive to a different computer that all of the data got wiped out.
Right now, I only have one copy of most of my data, sitting on one of three hard drives hooked up to my computer. Although I’ve never had a disk go bad, I really should back up this stuff, since one day God might decide that I shouldn’t have any of it anymore.
My main barrier is having a transparent system for backing things up. Perhaps if there was a system like Time Machine for Windows, it would be much easier.
Hi Paul,
I have lost important data on my computer one time. After that I became anal about backing up everything. Local storage first then remote storage.
I use my macmini to backup my macbook pro using carbon copy cloner. On the windows side of things I close the hard drives using Acronis.
-Gary Zaydman
ugh before I got a Mac I pretty much lost data every single week. Dell FTL. The one major failure that really taught me my lesson was when I lost pretty much everything from my freshman year of college – particularly photos. Since then I’ve been backing up to an external HD pretty frequently. I bought an Apple Time Capsule to make it more automatic and friendly last year and since then I’ve been backing up to both (Time Capsule hourly and then the old external about every few months).
I keep very little on my laptop now, just in case. Most important documents are on Google Docs or something and I try to upload as many of my “best” photos to Flickr in original size since that’s what saved my butt the first time. Luckily since I’ve gotten Macs (I’m on my 2nd now) things have been pretty much smooth sailing. w00t.
Why yes I have. I was partitioning my drive to install linux and my computer crashed halfway for some odd reason. I was stunned to say the least. Thankfully most of my projects were in the sky, photos at flickr, and music on my mp3. But there was one thing I couldn’t recover. I was in the process of making those “x days in x minutes” project. Normally you can start over but the sad thing is it was a record of orthodontic jaw movement (nerdy enough?). So it was done once in a lifetime.
Right now my computer has a second partition that backups my whole hard drive as an image, which maybe useless in the case of a hardware fail.
Hopefully I can get an external hard drive soon for my image copy ;)
I have a Mac, and right now I backup using a small 200-GB external hard drive. It’s full and has been full for quite some time. From time to time, I have backed up more permanent data onto DVDs, but it’s rare when I do that. Too much of a hassle…
Pick me!!!
Last time I lost my comp data was my Maxtor SATA drive went dead, even though Maxtor changed a new drive for me, still I feel upset with the loss of data on the old drive.
Since then, I began to back up some important files regularly.
1) Sync the linux dotfiles (as long as they has nothing to do with my personal information) to my dreamhost account via rsync
2) Burn the media data into DVDs.
3) Tarballize my Gentoo system into a DVD for instant rolling back, re-do a whole Gentoo stage 3 installation could be a pain in the ass :)
I work as the design director for a University paper and the day before production my drive just wouldn’t boot. I lost all our client’s ads, my templates, all of my fonts, the term’s finished files, not to mention all of my personal files.
I quickly devised several redundancies.
1. Every publication is backed up to DVD-R twice – one for me, one for the students
2. All working files are saved to the server
3. The server has a WD mybook set up to Time Machine (it’s an all-mac office) for another level of redundancy.
4. We now use google apps for our email, so all incoming ads are also saved there.
5. I created a paper copy of all crucial operating documents.
This may sound obsessive, but i’ve since managed to save the day several times when things go wrong in the eleventh hour right before we go to press.
Yes. I had a drive burn up in a PC I built in college. An app I had spent the better part of a year developing for class was lost. I used to back everything up on an external, that has since become my music drive (its 150gb) and mostly use my web server as a backup, simply out of the lack of anything else. I could definitely use a large drive to back things up, since I am starting to freelance and the files on my comp are no longer just important to me.
Thankfully, never lost a whole lot more than about 5 years of email that I had meticulously saved and organized. Now, I back things up via Time Machine and keep two drives offsite at my workplace juuuust in case. I also throw things online for good measure from time to time.
About 2 years ago, I lost a ton of data when my laptop died. I didn’t use any means of backup at the time. Today, I keep 2 1TB HDs fully stored with data, one I take with me if/when I travel, the other stays at home.
Currently, I’m only backing up my photo library (and even then not really backing it up properly) as I can’t afford the bandwidth to backup to S3 and I can’t really afford another hard drive to back up to. :( I’ve used Spinrite in the past though, and it works wonders.
I bought my first external drive four years ago. After transferring files from my pc to the external disk, I deleted most of those same files on the pc to free up space for some video projects I was working with. About an hour later I moved the external disk to another spot on my desk and noticed a screw was rolling around inside the case. Next thing I know the screw either fell onto the rotating platter or wedged elsewhere, and crashed the disk. Luckily Western Digital replaced the drive, but I ended up losing 80% of my data.
Since then I’ve been much more careful about backups and used redundant techniques to prevent loss. I’m also looking into S3 as a backup method in the near future.
Thankfully, I’ve never lost any data due to a hard drive failure but I have accidentally deleted a file and regretted it for the rest of the week. At the moment, I just back up to a rather paltry (especially when compared to the 1.5TB Seagate) 160GB external hard drive via USB using Leopard’s Time Machine so that I won’t have to worry about backing it up since it already does it for me every hour or so. My external hard drive is filling quite rapidly so I’ll probably upgrade soon-ish.
Cheers,
I once lost my entire website due to a server failure. Since then, I have backed up all business files in 3 locations: on my home server, on a remote server, and on S3. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to do that for all my home media files. A new hard drive would certainly help. Thanks!
Have I ever lost data? Lets open the storybook of time and flip back to the days to me having a 8gb hard drive, I usually left my computer on whilst I wasn’t at home anyway i came home one day to a non functioning computer needless to say i poked around and the hard drive had appeared to of over heated and one of the visible chips had cracked and busted open and that time i was working in my school project in hospital for the third time getting surgery for the tumor and moved my whole project onto the flash drive ready to be handed in and it got lost =(
How i back up my data now? I use the copy function when using flash drives and such and i burn important data to DVD’s
First and only time I lost important data was when my 1st edition Macbook Pro crashed on me and was stuck on the grey intro boot-screen. Went to the ‘geniuses’ and they wiped my harddrive without informing me… Immediately after that happened, I researched and bought my first external harddrive, my Maxtor One Touch II. It’s only 300gbs and I believe it cost me upwards $200~ at the time! I am currently using that to save my data and am in dire need of a more ultra-portable external HD upgrade.
back around 97, my dad had an Iomega Zip drive built into his Dell XPS. I quickly grew accustomed to that, since we had several portable zip drives (they used the parallel port; lol)
The 100mb limit quickly became a problem, and I stopped using them.
Then I migrated to CD-Rs/RWs and DVD+-Rs/RWs, but these discs would not even last 5 years. I ditched them.
Now I have a HDD enclosure with a 100GiB 2.5″ drive. I’m pretty lightweight, so I really don’t have too many big files (games, movies, etc)
Time machine does the trick for me. :)
I’m also using Dropbox for my documents. I’ll probably go with some cloud service in the future like S3. I might setup a raid-5 NAS or similar, but I like the cloud idea better!
I lost some data when my PB G4 drive died while doing a backup with SuperDuper. Only lost a tiny bit of data, and Apple Care took care of the dead drive :)
I have full backups of my iMac and my PB drives. Even though my PB backups could be done more regularly, I now use dropbox for instant backup of the most critical files. Finally my media (about 400 GB) is on a RAID 1 external drive of 1 TB.
I lost all my school files a while ago. It was on a shared computer, so I wasn’t the only one who wanted to completely destroy the computer. Destroying it wouldn’t have helped, but it would’ve been fun. Since then, I keep some of my documents on a USB pen drive and/or in Google Docs. Neither of those options is actually safe, but considering most of the hardware I own is cheapware, it gives me a better false illusion of safety that keeps me distracted enough.
I have had a catastrophic data loss, some 1 year back. I had all my photos from various international Trips, Photos of my growing up, and precious ones of my school’s farewell, even my office documents blown away.
What happened was that i had 3 partitions in my 80GB comp hard drive, one for OS, one for my stuff, and one just had crap. I wanted to reinstall the windows, and merge the partiton conataining crap with the OS one, instead by mistake I formated the one containing my data and merged it with os and installed windows on it.
After booting up, i realised and truth…and it was like lightening struck me!
After that, i had learned my lesson and i try to backup only very imp stuff weekly to a 20gb external drive.
Yup twice exactly :) Use Time Capsule and SuperDuper to backup now.
Paul – as usual great contest.
Yes, I back up with time machine, box.net, and mozy.com – I’m trying to follow your lead more on the cloud.
Recently, when delicious library 2 came out I upgraded and somehow it totally killed my entire catalogue of books, close to 800. I freaked, there was no way I wanted to reenter that many books! Fortunately, I was able through time machine to go deep into Mac OS X’s library and dig out the right file for DL2 and updated it to about 95% of what I needed.
My HDD died like 3 years ago. No warnings or nothing, just died. Thankfully I had backups of most of my pictures and music on CD-Rs and DVDRs. Now I don’t even backup to discs, I’m just waiting for the inevitable day where i lose it all again, unless I win one of these drives of course ;)
I lost 3 drives in the course of a year on my first Apple computer. It was an iMac G5. As it turned out, the power supply was bad inside the Mac.
I had CD backups of some things the first time, but quickly went out and purchased an external drive and a copy of SuperDuper for the Mac.
I now have an Apple Time Capsule and do all of my backups for my laptop and newer iMac using TimeMachine, but would prefer to perform a second backup for each machine using the original SuperDuper method.
If only I had an extra 1.5 TB…
I lost some pictures and music a few years ago when my iBook’s harddrive died. I had a backup, but it was a good few months old.
Now I maintain an up-to-date backup of all my data using Time Machine and also backup some of my more important files to cloud storage.
Lost a heck of a lot of data when I first switched over to Linux and didn’t understand how the filesystem worked… especially when I was using beta versions of Ubuntu. Had a bad application that corrupted my home directory and I had to format and start over.
Currently, my backup consists of several DVD’s… just got a mac though, so I’m exploring options now, but I don’t really have much that changes. Any apps I have I keep a list of them and just re-download if I ever have to.
When I was writing my Masters thesis a few years ago it was one of the hottest summers on record and I would hole up in my apartment all day and most of the night typing my thesis into my computer. I would go back and forth between my apartment and my office at the school saving multiple versions on my home and work computers.
I had been working at home for two very productive days of data analysis and writing when my computer couldn’t handle the mid-day heat and overheated and shut down on me. When it cooled off and I started it back up I realized that I had lost two long days of work! That has to be one of the worst feelings – re-doing work that you’ve already done.
After that I started backing up daily on a remote server at the school which helped but since I’ve moved on to work, I haven’t been backing up any of my personal data so it would be great to have a drive to bak up onto.
On a Mac and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Yes, I have; I lost a lot of my photos and personal documents. Obviously, it was not enough for me, so I still do not do backup.
I would be devasted if I lost a clients work. I’m a graphic designer and you can spend hours if not days working on projests. This happened to me two years ago when my iMac had a hard drive failure in the middle of a print job. I had to drag out my old machine, which is slow and start again. A very late night and I now never work without the safetly net of a backup.
I’ve never lost any important data, I deleted half of my music collection once thank to rm -r * from the wrong directory, but that wasn’t to big of a deal =P Up until recently I just stored most of my important files locally as well as on a shell account. I have time machine running on my new iMac now backing up to a 500GB external. I still keep important things off site on my shell account though, in case of fire or something =)
Yes I did lose my data a year back. It happened after some software install on my imac. I now use an external hard disk and back up every sunday using SuperDuper.
I’ve been lucky/fortunate enough not to loose any data. At least I don’t think I have, although in many years with computers I don’t seem to have accumulated any data either so I must have lost some along the way.
What I need is a big external hard-drive to start accumulating data.
Mark
cool question and contest!. I have answered my question earlier itself on a post in my blog. You may want to check that out:-
http://www.vinodlive.com/2007/08/20/amazon-s3-storage-tools/
My laptop was stolen recently, so I lost a huge amount of data, including client data. Sadly I haven’t exactly learned from my mistake yet, as I don’t really have a backup system in place yet.
Very good question… I’ve lost things before, but have recovered them. Nowadays, I use LaCie and Seagates to backup my stuff. Works Wonders!
I thought I could beat the warranty system by foregoing apple care for my powerbook. The day (exact day) after the warranty ran out, my harddrive crashed and I tried to replace the harddrive myself but ended up snapping something off the motherboard.
Now I use timemachine, have a cloned copy of my hdd on my external, AND have the most important school docks backed up on DVD.
I use time machine to backup the raw files of my digital camera on a – way to small 80 Gig external harddrive.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened
No. Till date i take very good care of my System and i havent had any problems. But i do backup to avoid problems of data loss since the data on my harddrive are precious and valuable for me.
And how do you backup your data now?
Well i backup using Norton360 and my WD Passport 250GB
I lost an old hard drive long ago and with it lost tons of music and documents. Currently I just use cds to backups which isnt so reliable.
I am a tech student at the Bauhaus University. Momentarily I have quite a few projects that accumulate vast amounts of code. All I use is a 1 year old black MacBook. For backups I use a 5 year old Maxtor Touch 2. I am just getting into ‘cloud’ backups. Dropbox and S3 is on the list.
I’d also like to add that I, as a German tech student, really enjoy reading your blog. Keep it up.
One time I was resizing some partitions on a drive in my then main Windows 2000 machine using Partition Magic. Little did I know but there were some sector errors on the drive. After reaching the faulty sectors PM stalled and never continued even after letting it sit for a few hours. The partition that was messed up happen to have most of my main data on it – email, college work from previous semesters (current data was on a different partition), etc. I was able to recover some of it, but it was from a several-month-old backup I’d made to CD.
Today I use TimeMachine on my Mac as the primary backup routine. I also have the data deemed super-critical also backed up to S3 using both Mozy (daily backup) and JungleDisk (less frequent until 2.5 with the background processing), with the iTunes data also archived to DVD.
I’ve never lost anything big, just presentations and stuff, but if I lost my family photos and videos, life as I know it would change forever!
I currently use an unacceptably small portable hard drive to back up essentials.
I lost everything on my Mac IIci. I was sitting on an exercise ball, (I have a bad back) I had my then 6 month old niece (now 17 years old) on my lap, my UPS was on the floor, and I started to fall off the ball. Stuck out my leg, hit the power switch of the UPS with my foot and removed power to the whole system. Restarted the machine, no hard drive could be found… Had floppy copies of most of my clients tax returns but not the nearly completed 20 page return I was working on that day. Most of the floppies couldn’t be read after sitting on a shelf for a year or two… No backup… Bought Retrospect and an optical backup drive the next day. You know, the ones that looked like fat floppies and help 128mb of data?
Now I use SuperDuper to clone my MacBook Pro daily, and Time Machine to do the incremental stuff. I could still lose an hour’s work, but I think I could handle that…
im a college student and i lost all my important assignments right before finals…let me tell you what stressful is when you have to write three ten page papers in two days, and study for all your tests…but now i save all of my assignments and important information on cd’s…not really that efficient i guess, but it works for now. =)
My friends and I used to skateboard a lot when we were younger, and we always took both a video and still camera with us to catalog the days events.One day we were skating at an abandoned office building when some other guys showed up and started talking about an awesome spot to skate in the basement of the building, and we could skate it if we were somehow able to get inside. One of the guys then proceeded to punch through a glass window in an attempt to break in. He managed to cut his wrist very badly and blood started to squirt everywhere. The bloody man and his crew fled the scene but left behind large puddles of blood. I took several pictures of a butterfly drinking from one of the blood puddles, among the most interesting pictures I have ever taken.
The computer I stored all of my photographs and video footage on at the time (a fussy Dell), was prone to random lapses in helpfulness. It was during one of these lapses that the computer somehow managed to erase all of my videos and photographs, including the pictures of the butterfly drinking blood and everything before them.
I put all of my most vital files on a 4gb thumb drive, but I would love to be able to back up all of my files (video and photos included) so that massive and heartbreaking data loss like I’ve had in the past won’t happen again.
PS. I now have a mac and love it
I’ve never lost anything, because I backup my important data. How I do it, is very simple, what are binary files (movies, music, photos) I sync them on external hdd and what is source code, text files, … I keep them in a subversion repository, in this way I can benefit also from version control and to have also backup. Cheers.
I haven’t lost anything terribly important, but one of my internal drives on my old PC died and had a bunch of movies and music on it that I didn’t have backed up – so that was a lot of re-ripping/downloading.
After that I backed up to DVD (4.7GB at a time baby) – but that wasn’t very efficient. I eventually bought myself an external when I got a Mac, but I can’t stand Time Machine, I don’t need a fancy UI – I just want to revert to the old copy I had.
Well…I always trying to avoid loosing any data…so far it never happened (I never lost important datas from my PC&Laptop) but it could be the right time to backup all the stuff laying on my HDDs…Picture, Movies,Music,Emails,Databases, etc etc etc
So it could be a reason of winning :-)
V.i.k.t.o.r
I lost my data when my external hard drive gave up the ghost one day. Simple as that, and because I never backed it up in two places, I lost most of my picture and music collection that. Upsetting. Life moves on.
Now, I backup to two external hard drives, various memory sticks and online storage both S3 & DreamHost. – Although, due to the lack in fast internet connection (we are talking 20kb/s up) – sucky british internetz. I rarely have a chance to backup to S3 unless I’m at College with 50mb Up.
I lost a significant chunk of my Mac G4 a few years back when I was backing up on jump drives. Now I use a solid state drive with my new MacBook and TimeMachine. Haven’t needed to test it out, thank goodness. I like how it reminds you after 10 days to backup again.
I have lost a few items that I wish I hadn’t lost!!!! I had won a macbook air and an ipod, BUT…the business I won from went bankrupt. For some reason when they sent me a notice asking for that information so that I can claim it again (after I had already sent them a signed affidavit). Unfortunately, I didn’t have it anymore because something happened with my computer shortly before that and all of my files were lost (it was something my husband was doing)!!!!! So, the one chance I had to getting my own computer and ipod was ruined!!!!!
Count me in please, this could do me a lot of good for future purposes! We just have too many people on one computer and the hubby and I have documents that would hurt us badly if lost!
-barbarabaker :)
I don’t currently have a backup plan because I haven’t lost any important data, yet. This probably isn’t the best approach.
Thanks for the opportunity.
I’ve never lost anything important before (thank goodness!). At the moment I currenly backup to a 320GB external hard drive, but I’m very close to having no free space. (I’ve only got 1GB left), I also backup very important documents to windows live SkyDrive.
Who had never lost data? I know I had.
And after that incident, I bought a Seagate external driver, that I never got around using, because it wouldn’t show up on my laptop no matter what I did, and I kept postponing looking into that. It’s been long enough that a new data loss may occuer any moment, but I am such a lazy person! :-|
Thanks for the awesome contest.
The first time I lost my data was back in 2004 when I was using an old graphite Powermac G4. I never backed up back then and blackout happened almost everyday. Eventually, my hard drive corrupted due to the improper shut down.
Now, I back up regularly on a 250GB. I gotta pick through each and every one of my files though as the hard disk space is insufficient so I need to decide if a file is worth backing up.
My very first laptop a Dell Insiprion 600m, died my first year of college. Luckily I had an old 20 gb external drive that I kept my documents and media on. So I was able to keep most of the important stuff. I lost all of my game data. I got a 300 GB drive and replace the 20 GB drive. I used to keep 3 images of the my laptop’s hard disk, on the 300 GB drive.
I got new laptop with a 100 GB drive in it so its a little harder to keep the same images, so I just keep my documents and media on it, until I can get a 1TB drive…
Recently, the internal drive of my iMac died. Fortunately, I’ve been trusting in Time Machine for my backups. I didn’t know that you could restore from Time Machine while installing OS X from disc. After a few hours, I was back in business.
At the very least, I tell other Mac users to upgrade to Leopard for Time Machine alone.
Ever since my hard drive died on me, I have tried to put all my stuff in the cloud now.. my emails are in gmail, pictures are in flickr, documents are in google doc. All the rest of my stuff goes to an external drive.
Lost my precious data twice.
Now i always have backup of the backup for my precious data,
and these backups are store in different places.
reason for not using internet file hosting due to security awareness.
I use a USB thumb drive for important docs. I hate to think about losing them!!
When I moved back from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I made the mistake of shipping my laptop back and not carrying it with me. Somewhere along the way it got bumped around or something and the hard drive was fried and the battery was dead when I got it on the other end. Luckily I had backed up my school work to a 2GB thumb drive before I left. Now I do regular backups of my important folders and programs.
Luckily never had a catastrophe happen, but have had a couple of close calls. Since switching to a Mac, been using SMARTreporter to tip me off whenever a drive is close to failing and have avoided the worst several times. After trying out several different backup solutions SuperDuper is the software of choice for me because of it’s smart updates and bootable drive/disk image. Been considering using TimeMachine as well for all those times where some random directory of file is mistakenly deleted. Since usually things on my drives are encrypted or securely deleted doing a whole restore would be overkill, but having a dedicated TimeMachine drive would be ideal.
In high school, I made the mistake of editing a paper downloaded to the temporary folder on my PC. So, after shutting my computer down, the temp folder was erased and my paper lost. At the time, I didn’t backup. Now, however, I use my macbook with time machine and an external lacie 320 gb hard drive.
I had an internal drive in an external case. I dropped it on the floor and it was gone. I am now very anal about backing up. I’ve been pretty fortunate in that I havevn’t had an internal fail.
For every internal drive in my mac pro, I have a matching external for backup. I use superduper to clone them. For my laptops, I have externals (3.5″) to back them up as well. I have a few 2.5″ portables I use to DJ with, which I backup on 3.5″ externals as well…
Yes, several years ago I had the misfortune of losing most of the contents that I had on my hard drive. It was like attending a funeral. I was stunned and never thought that it could happen to me. Wrong!
Today I have one 280 GB Seagate disk that I backup as well as SugarSync (SaaS) that is continually working behind the scenes and is easily accessible wherever I am.
Thanks,
Jeff Payne
http://www.ascendworks.com
jeff@ascendworks.com
I worked for one month on a WWII video documentary for a class, and the data got corrupted when the Mac kernel panicked. The most recent backup was one week old… a lot of work was lost!
Today, Time Machine is more than enough for my backup needs — and has already saved me twice.
Seeing as my last data loss occurred this week & lost 1 months worth of work so I’m learning to simply make use of my current backup solution more. I’ve got 2 seagate hard drives (250 & 500) that are currently very full so 1.5TB would be nice. :)
We had the HD on our iBook G4 go out on us about a year and a half ago. I mostly (still) use CD or DVD to back things up once the machine needs some space cleared off. We have no regular back-up plan other than that. It’s pretty scary sometimes when I think of it, which I try not to.
Sometimes it’s difficult to talk the misses into spending money on a one time HD back-up purchase than the smaller CD spindles. She just doesn’t get it.
This would be an excellent prize.
“Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?”
I have indeed lost important data on my computers over the years. When I used Windows every time windows would completely core itself I would lose everything so I bought extra hard drives to store al of my important documents on the secondary hard drives and stopped trusting my C drive entirely. This is a practice that I follow to this day on the rare occasion that I use Windows outside of work.
On the Mac side I have never lost any important documents as I use Super Duper and S3 to backup my entire OS image. I came close to losing everything but a friend of mine talked me through booting my iBook into single user mode and we were able to repair the partition. I am on my Macbook Pro santa Rosa these days and I have had not data lose issues.
Thanks.
Brett Elliff
http://gatewayy.net
brettelliff@gmail.com
I do backup, but don’t think your safe you need a backup for your backup. :)
Oh yeah, I’ve lost stuff. I had a 1 TB NAS from Buffalo, set up with RAID. Went on vacation, came back and had lost power. Booted up the NAS… 2 HDDs failed, everything gone :(
My current backup strategy includes Time Machine to a Time Capsule, Mozy, and iDisk. I haven’t found a good way to backup the bigger files like videos quite yet.
Have not lost anything yet. I save my important documents on an flash drive or burn a DVD. But don’t do it as often as I should.
I never lost anything valuable either. Ages ago I backed my stuff up do CDs, then DVDs. Now I have a Seagate external HDD for Time Machine in my Dorm room and a NAS + External HDD at my parents house. So should be pretty save…. *knock on wood*
Oh, yes, about 6 months ago the hard drive crashed…. totally. I lost everything from the last 4 years. All my pictures, music, financials, taxes, everything… quite an eye opener. Now I back up my must haves on cd’s. An external hard drive would just make me much more secure with my pc and relieve a major headache.
I lost everything when my computer died unexpectedly, hadn’t backed up in while so most of my backups were old. Since I’ve been using flashdrives and DVDs to back up but I’ve been looking for a desktop hard drive.
Yes I lost all my personal data when my hard drive quit working. I now use an external hard drive for my personal data.
I have never lost really important data. I keep some important things on a flash drive. I really need to get in the habit of doing formal back-ups and this set-up will motivate me to do that.
I recently lost all of the photos, stock photos, and files I had on my old external harddrive. I’m still in the process of trying to find someone who can affordably recover those files! Since then, I’ve been using flash drives and CDs to back-up data. Hopefully in the near future I will be able to win or buy a new EHD.
-Cat
Cathryn@GraphicsByCathryn.com
I have never lost important data. But I have trillions of floppies, cds, a 4gb old computer and Acronis partition on my computer. It would be so nice to have all the information together on an external drive I could store elsewhere as a secure backup.
I haven’t lost anything recently. But I used to have format my computer alot, and I always lost EVERYTHING.
well my computer did crash and we had to redo the hard drive and lost everything. sad to say i still dont have anything. thanx
don’t really back up..need to get on the ball..I know I should hubs friend a computer once improving it and really I should learn
I have lost data once. Now I run Windows Home Server for backing up my Windows computers. The Mac that I lost the data on has a new hard drive in it but I still don’t backup often. I used to backup wirelessly to the Home Server but it worked so sporadically that I stopped using it. Now I try to copy over folders every so often. I would use the drive with time machine.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
I have never really lost important data, cept that one time when I saved a paper on my friend’s temp files instead of saving as is.
I use dropbox, gmail and my school’s ftp for most small files, but I also have a 500gb external.
Right now, i want to use the 500gb to backup my current computer’s files, but since it is full of my old computer’s stuff, i can’t do it so another hdd would be extremely apprecaited!
i have never lost anything important even though i don’t backup… wait, this means i’m due, aren’t i?
i lost some of my pics online. what did i do about it? nothing i just stared at my comp willing it to come back with my telepathy skills. what do i do about it now? i burn all my pics on cd and stash them in a cabinet in my office! thanks
I only back-up when I’m backing-up
not yet; just lucky
On my windows work machine we dont have any automated backup service so I manually save my pst and docs to an external hard drive (that’s usually when I remember to do it). Have lost non critical emails and work docs but so far nothing catastrophic (fingers crossed)
At home on my Mac I use time machine.
I lost an external HD once and had to use disk warrior to get my stuff back, would prefer to have multiple back-ups
VERY COOOOOOOOOOL FOR LOTS OF PHOTOS OF MY GRANDCHILDREN
I currently use only Time Machine for day to day backups. Once in a great while I back up my photo library to DVDs and my music library to DVDs, but it’s getting a lot harder now that I have a DSLR and I shoot in RAW sometimes. I then move those DVDs offsite, usually to my parents’ house.
I have lost pictures and documents in the past due to a hard drive crash. I currently try to back up to flash drives and cds….but I have a ton of digital pictures of my grandchldren and really need a large external hard drive for backups.
We once lost all of our mp3 songs when the hard drive crashed. We currently back up our information on DVD’s. We are looking to buy a external hard drive this Christmas season.
A few years ago the hard drive in my PC laptop died a few months after the laptop was in an accident. I tripped over a toy walking through a dark room, laptop in hand. The laptop flew across the hall as I fell. Not a pretty sight. Though a little bent up, it worked fine… for a while at least.
I was right in the middle of several big projects and had several deadlines looming when it died. I really should’ve known better but didn’t have a solid backup solution. I did a manual backup to an external drive every once and a while (maybe around monthly) and didn’t have a recent backup, so I was in big trouble.
After researching data recovery services all night long, I called a few and settled on ActionFront (now owned by Seagate). They answered the phone promptly (it was really late at night) and they had a location in Atlanta, which appealed to me. I drove the drive up to their office the next morning. They called me two days later after having inspected the drive.
They had to take the platters out of the drive and load them into another enclosure to get the data off… it ended up costing me over $2000 to get the data off the drive! An expensive lesson that could’ve been avoided with a $200 backup drive and some software.
Now I have Time Machine which backs up my drive automatically. I still do a SuperDuper backup occasionally to get a full, bootable backup on an external USB 2.0 drive. In an emergency I could work from that temporarily.
Lesson learned, the hard way… but ActionFront saved my butt and I was at least able to finish some large projects (which helped pay for the $2k bill for data recovery!)
I only back up when I have room, ie: soon as I get that tb drive.
I’ve been lucky not to have lost anything major yet. I use CarbonCopyCloner and Time Machine for OS X to back up to external drives, and I’m starting to use Dropbox as well (getdropbox.com). Heavy external storage like this would definitely make things simpler!
Just recently, I had gotten a virus on our computer. I called the computer manufacturer to help guide me to get the computer working correctly. Basically, we had to dump everything and reenter all the start up programs. I had never backed up anything before, not knowing how too and I lost everything that I had on the computer. Photo’s, financial info, etc. I was heartbroken.
I would love to win this to help protect us in the future.
Thanks for this giveaway.
I once lost an almost completed AutoCad drawing and had to stay at work all night to replace it. Where I work now Imy computer automatically backs up to a back up server.
I have lost my college documents many times! I still do not have any way to backup the data unless I put all my files into my gmail account! This is a very tedious process since I have over 320 MS Word files, 54 PowerPoint presentations, and over 1000 images and music files!
I have been lucky so far, but don’t like to tempt fate.
I did lose a years worth of pictures when my Dell laptop died. Since then, I save all of my pictures and music to 2 drives and then burn a copy on DVD. I keep one of the external drives with me and leave the other at home. The DVD copy goes in a folder. Most of the pictures also end up on Kodak Gallery or Flickr.
I am running Leopard now and really like the Time Machine feature. It is very easy to go back and locate original files.
I use DropBox to back up all my school stuff on a daily basis. No problems yet…
I cant say I ever lost anything and I currently use a memory stick for backup
i had a lot of data on my old computer – mainly papers, music, pictures. one day my hard drive messed up because i installed somthing or it might have gotten a really bad virus and i would constantly get the blue screen of death. I had to reformat my entire hard drive because that was the only solution. i had a few things backed up on cd-rs and zip but i wish they had external HDs back then. oh well – now i have stuff backed up on external hd and i email myself all school docs and gmail stores them all so i just need to type in the name of the paper and i have it. i also upload it to google documents to back up imp. files for school
I just recently lost some important files for school when a virus got into my computer. Now that it’s fixed I always back up my data on thumb drives or external drives. This package would make it complete – I have some pretty big digital files for art classes!
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Not really.
Using free SyncBack, I regularly sync my computer files with a 320G external drive that’s 11.4 x 7.7 cm, small enough to slip in a purse pocket and take with me wherever I go. Because syncing only affects changed files, it only takes a few minutes to backup, and I do it 2-3 times a week. Would do it every day, but I’m too lazy to take the hard drive out of my purse. Wish it had wireless sync.
If I win this contest, keep one of the seagate drives connected to my computer all the time so I can hit “sync” everyday. It’ll also be a second backup in case my purse backup fails.
I’ll replace my purse backup with the other drive. With all the extra storage on the new drives, I’ll be able to backup all my about-to-scratch fave DVDs.
Several years back a power fluctuation destroyed my desktop PC’s hard drive. The data stored on it included digital photos of my baby brother as an infant. However, thankfully, my step father had the images backed up on his laptop, so nothing was permanently lost. Since then, I’ve obtained a Macintosh laptop, and my only forms of backup include two flash drives with a cumulative capacity of one and a half gigabytes.
Thanks for providing an awesome opportunity to win some great prizes!
Nathan Day
I suffered from massive data lost (music, pictures, work documents etc.) when my HDD crashed on me one fine day almost 8 years ago. Back then, HDD were very expensive and limited in capacity and DVDs were not popular yet if I recalled. I did backed up data using Iomega 100MB zip disks (heh…old school huh) and into CDRs from an external cdrw drive. It was a painful lesson and all the years of compilations and work just went down the drain!
Since then, technology has advanced and hardware is so much cheaper. The backup strategy that I employ now is automated. I have an external HDD connected to my machine and I have configured scripts to schedule automated backup of data that have changed from the last backup. I also image my HDD once a month besides the regular schedule backup. Data I wish to preserve are duplicated into DVDs and stored away in a separate place for safekeeping. On top of that, daily important documents and emails are sync to my portable thumb drive and FTP’d to my server as well for redundancy purposes.
This might sound a little overkill but it keeps my data safe and I can always revert back to the last backup if something screws up along the way :-)
I have lost a few things such as videos and documents due to restoring my computer. I only have cds with my pictures on it and a 2 gig usb drive. I need something a little more reliable so I don’t loose anything else.
I lost about 15,000 MP3s a couple of years ago in a very weird power surge (it’s the only one I’ve experienced before or since here in San Francisco) that I thought fried my hard drive (it wouldn’t mount or show up at all). No back-up — I was just in the process of switching to an all-Mac music system, and hadn’t quite figured out my back-up scheme yet. I was apoplectic and did a lot of googling to see if there was a chance to recover my date without spending a fortune. I stumbled across Data Rescue and tried the trial version. It recovered several of my music files, so I sprung for the full version. It saved my whole music collection.
Since then, I keep a second and third hard drive with backups of music and other important docs, and a full clone using Super Duper. I’m also now using Time Machine, though not on its annoying hourly basis — I run it once a week or so.
As we’ve all heard, there are two types of people: those who have lost data, and those who will. I’m the first type. My last notebook took a dive to a tile floor from atop a couch. Hard drive physically crashed. I lost a bunch of client files and have had to deal with recreating work when they call up to have changes made (brochures, flyers, etc.). Now I have a mirror of my notebook’s drive on an external, and Time Machine backing up to another external. I really feel the need to start off-site backups though. I’m getting paranoid…its worth not losing data again though.
Got no back up , driving an old Dell XP, with a teenager, college student and no telling what’s being accessed or downloaded…it’s now or never for backup.
I have not lost anything yet, but i don’t back up now either, but i know i should and i have a fear of losing important files. this would be great to win and thank you for offering it.
I did lose all my data a few years ago on my old notebook – emphasis on old! Something went awry and the hard drive appeared to have melted. It was a disaster to say the least! I lost everything I had, including emails from way back, my music, and many of my photos. Luckily I wasn’t investing too much of my data in my notebook at that time, but now that I am, I don’t want to lose anything ever again! I still don’t have a backup solution, though, because I fear they’re way too expensive. I do want to get one though, and this contest sure would be wonderful to win :)
Yes I had a nasty malware on my comp and it tried to kick my comps butt.
It did some damage but I fixed it and got everything back that I lost.
It was a miracle!
I’ve never lost important data on my computer, and I don’t backup my data now. Uh, oh!
I lost several years of tax returns. This would be great for back ups. Thanks.
I have lost some data in the past, mostly due to formatting the hard drive without having backup all my data. But until now I’ve always been able to recover the most important bits. My most important loss however were some microscopy pictures that I had archived in a DVD+R which went bad – a lesson learned the hard way, I spent three weeks repeating the experiments and taking new pictures. Now I still archive older data on DVDs but always keep copies on a hard drive, which I find is much more reliable.
My current backup consists of a three-layer system. I usually carry with me a portable 160 GB hard drive (actually it’s my old laptop drive that I replaced and bought an enclosure for it) to which I frequently backup my documents and pictures from my tablet. At least once a week I synchronize all my documents and pics to my old desktop computer drive (which pretty much just works as a kind of NAS). Then every couple of months I make DVD backups of all the important stuff, label them with the date, file them and hope I’ll never need them. I’m thinking of adding a fourth layer (OCD alert) which will be online backup of my most important documents, but I’ve been to busy to check the available (free) options.
lordy have mercy, I need this. NO backup system and yes I’ve lost important things before because of this lol.
I usually have to format my computer and lose everything. I don’t have a backup plan because I only have a 250GB HD! This would enable me to store an image for recovery.
Yea… sadly…. i have lost brushes for a photoshop assignment I had a while ago… I HAD TO MAKE MY OWN……
I have a mac now, so I just conviniently use Time Machine to back up all my files everytime i connect my external hard drive to my laptop. :-)
This will be great to back up all of my photos
I have lost files before. Back in the day of floppy disks, I accidentally formated one not realizing that I had forgotten to copy files back to my computer first. About the only other time that I have lost files is by accidentally deleteing them on my computer (I don’t use the recycle bin/trash…which is part of my problem). Regardless, I backup my files about once a month to DVD-RW disks and replace them every year or so. I plan to move to online storage as soon as costs come down…mobile me sucked as far as transfer speed so I am wating for something else to come around.
I lost a ton of itunes and some recent genealogy data in my Family Tree Maker software last June when my computer crashed. There was no recovering that data. I try to backup my data now with cd’s but it takes a ton to back-up anything.
In case this contest is open to those outside the US…I haven’t lost any data yet. To back up, I send every file that I have in my hard drive to my gmail account. Tedious but hey, that’s why I’m joining this contest for the chance to win an external hard drive. :-)
Many a time have I lost personal data. As a student I lost a lot of code while doing my thesis and again when writing the final report. My system went boom, so I asked myself how to prevent this from ever happening again
The thing to ask is: do you need to crash your car so that you can call yourself a good driver?
I think not. But it sure helps. Don’t know car statistics, but data loss in the digital age is like milk and cerial – it’s common (mal)practice. There are movies and TV shows made about it.
So now I am working on a backup plan that I adopted combining experience from working in 3 different jobs as a software designer. All archives stay in external drives (currently 500GB) and DVDs for the latest, as an alternative cost-effective solution. My data warehouse in total I would say is a bit bigger than 2 TB, but not very conveniently stored.
The internet also is a nice new way of working without relying to local resources. But that opens trust issues, which I’m struggling with. So the real important stuff stays in my hands, and if it’s work-in-progress, then it’d better be in my 5 GB worth of USB flash drives.
Nope not yett. I have no way of backing any thing up, besides disk, but that is a pain.
I had everything backed up on my Maxtor external backup and it crashed. Now I use and external and disks.
No, I have Norton 360 with 10 GB of storage.
i never had a data lost incident i couldn’t reverse (touch wood…)
I lost everything once when my daughter accidentally erased everything on my harddrive. I need this prize.
Had a couple of drives dying on me, one because of a mechanical failure and one because I dropped it on the floor… SSD ftw? It’s been a couple of years now though, now I use DropBox quite a lot, been looking to use S3 but never really got around to it as I thought it was too much of a hassle to set up, so now I’m happy just using DropBox, especially the ability to share certain folders with friends. Not too concerned with security though, but maybe it’s something to look into in the future… Other than that I run Time Machine wirelessly through my AirPort, it works like a charm… haven’t really used it to retrieve anything yet though… lucky I guess… I’m really looking into storing as much as possible in the cloud, but have yet to come across the ultimate solution. As of now I use DropBox for documents I use a lot on the go, flickr for photos, S3 for really important documents, and mobileme for bookmarks, contacts and calendar, my mail is on a google hosted domain solution.
Luckily, I haven’t lost anything important. Thanks for the giveaway.
Never lost important data. I never let the drive get to a point where they would fail. Usually it’s windows that craps out and I can then just access the drive once I rebuild windows, or move the drive to a new PC. Right now I sync important data to a second internal drive in my computer. Still a bolt of lightning would do me in. An external drive would help. Would allow me to sync/backup important stuff once a week and put the drive off in a closet in between. Currently do that with my work laptop.
I have had a couple of computers that had permanent, fatal crashes, where we lost everything. We now have a small external drive that we share, and is reaching the max capacity.
I have a self-assembled PC, and used to treat my HD like a USB –> remove , carry in a bag and plug it into friend’s systems. Crashed 2 of them back to back :( . Now most of the critical data and photos are backed up in mail ids and web albums. Movies and Songs are always available for download, generally dont back them up.
I do not have a very good backup system…no regular one anyway…it just takes too much time. Well, my computer crashed and I lost about 1 year of photos and ALL of my documents. I need an easier backup system like the Free Agent. I recently saw it on TV and I said that looks like something I should look into…It would be great if I won one. Thanks for the great giveaway!
computer crashed ink and pen
i haven’t recently, but my back up just quit, so I need to replace it ASAP
I back up to a 750gb drive in a SATA dock using Time Machine. Unfortunately It got messed up and would not recognise the drive a month ago, adn I had to reformat that partition. so I lost 6months of versioning, but not the original data. I have never had a primary hard drive failure, but both my Mother-in-law and father-in-law have and lost everything. They now back up to each others laptops using Foldershare.
I don’t know how to back up my data, that’s why I really need this.
I was lucky for now (knocking on wood) and when my HDD failed several times I always was able to recover it’s content with some recovery software (even after formatting it!)…
I now bought a TabletPC and when i try to synchronize most of my improtant data between my PC/TPC/WM phone with Live Mesh and Dropbox I periodically have some data on my TPC which arent synchronized. Most of them are work related and it would be really bad if I lost them which is quite easy as normal notebook HDDs fail quite often and SSDs are too expensive as of now :(
Q: Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
A: Surprisingly I have never really lost important data on my computer! I don’t really have a back up plan either because my hard drive is not that big. I also try to you as many cloud-apps as possible so I’m not responsible for the loss of my data.
Yes, I lost data once in my life. I lost some pictures and since then I use Mozy as my primary service (off site backup) . For $4.95/month unlimited storage….
I also have an external drive connected to my file server.
Yes, I lost my hardrive and now back all important info on flash disks……….
Lost data a couple times early on in my PC history. Had to redo the files based on the best copies I had at the time. Now everything is backed-up regularly to a NAS.
In my book there are two good advices for backup strategies:
1) Make backups. Regularly.
2) Don’t rely on a single backup location. If you keep your files e.g. in Subversion or git, make sure that you have two checkouts on two different boxes, ideally in two different physical locations. This way if your primary work station fails and (Murphy is watching you) your backup server fails as well (been there, seen that), you still have access to your data via the second checkout.
About 3 years ago my backup hard drive bit the bullet. Unfortunately, that was were all 60 gigs of my music was stored in addition to all of our family’s digital photos. Ever since then I have used an online backup service, but love the fact that the terabyte storage is finally becoming affordable. Thanks!
Once, I lost a hard drive that had all of my email archives, photos and documents stored on it. I had to run a disc recovery program and I ended up getting about 80% of the data back, but I had to sort through it all. It was a mess! Now I back up that data to another hard drive in my computer. I would however like to have an external source because there’s no telling when your power supply could fry everything in your computer, lightning, etc…
I lost everything on my old laptop when the hard drive died. I was traveling light and had no way to back up. I want to use Time Machine on my Mac now, but my files have outgrown the small external drive I own.
Yes, I got a virus and lost alot of my music and pictures. I now put all of the important things on a flash drive.
I have had the terrible experience of loosing important data, a drive that froze and is thus unretrievable. The new system would truly change my habits, or lack thereof for backing up my data.
We haven’t lost any data but also have no back up plan.
Yes I lost my entire drive on my pc testing machine. It wasn’t a huge deal because it was just a testing machine, but now I clone it once a week so I don’t have to redo all the settings if it happens again.
my backup plan is horrible because i really dont have one my pc crashed 3 years ago you think i would have learned thanks for the chance
I had my system hard drive crash and loose everything, not fun at all. Now i have dual hard drives in my computer that mirror the data, but i am finding that the drives are getting old and are also a little small.
I have lost some data before, but it’s been such a long time that it didn’t seem to be that big of a deal. Probably because I didn’t lose that much data. But anyways…
I currently use a Maxtor III Firewire external hard-drive for all backup purposes. I am on a PC (not by choice) and frequently use the Windows Power Toy called SyncToy to backup up important files and directories on my computer. I also have begun to use Amazon’s S3 CDN, where I am hosting a lot of web image files and other things.
Not byet, but I have 4000 photos and I am afraid of losing them
I’ve lost some small chunks of papers along the way, plus some larger files that I just couldn’t seem to find.
I currently use Time Machine for both my iMac and MacBook, a bootable backup for my macbook, CDs/DVDs that are stored in a fireproof and waterproof safe, and I upload important files to Dropbox.
Yes, I had a hard drive crash recently. When I suspected it was failing, I used the Microsoft feature to export our data files from that XP box to a new Vista box. Need a regular back solution though..
I have lost things occasionally, but it has never been totally irretrievable.
Laptop was stolen. The only stuff I could recover were things I had posted to my iDisk and .Mac. Now I use Time Machine, but I should still probably have an offsite backup.
well… there was the time that my hubby formatted the wrong drive… lost alot of stuff that still hasn’t been replaced
I’ve lost some photos before, by backing them up to CDs and losing the CDs. I now backup all my files to a Drobo with 2 drives (BeyondRAID) and have the Drobo backed up to Amazon S3 via JungleDisk every 6 hours (only copies modified files).
Currently I Have no backup plan for my PC and laptop. Im living on the edge. Nothing of a disaster has happened before though!
The most devastating thing will be losing around 10 Gb of VITAL DOCUMENTS, 60 GB of my Pictures and about 40 GB of music.
I got a virus and lost all the data that I had saved on my computer and was not able to recovery any of it. I try to put things that are important on cds now.
My first Mac, a 7500, crashed when I turned the scanner on and I lost everything. I now use a 7 year old Linksys drive. This would be a very nice upgrade.
Never lost any data yet….
My comptor died and I did not have a good backup. Lost lots of stuff
I had unexpected computer issues a couple of years back; the techs wound up deleting two years’ worth of documents and photos from my laptop without being able to copy any of it over.
Unfortunately, all I have at the moment for backup is a fairly unreliable USB drive.
I once lost a bunch of very valuable family photos as a result of a corrupt partition. Luckily I had them backed up on DVD and was able to restore everything back to the new hard drive.
My computer crashed last spring. I used to just copy important files to an external hard drive. I now use SuperDuper! to clone my entire hard drive to an external hard drive.
I could use this, no problems, yet, but I have a lot of photos online I would hate to lose.
haven’t loss data yet. back up to CD’s every 3 mo
I’ve never lost anything too important in the past. I try to back up pics by burning on a disc. Right now I don’t back up my system I’m embarrased to say.
I could always use a new hard drive, darm NEF files. I use time machine, plus SuperDuper as my backup plan.
I once lost a Windows drive that had lots of programming code I had been working on for a couple months. I was able to find a backup copy, but had to spend a lot of time making it work the way I expected… a lot of time lost to stupidity on my part. (I have a Mac now.)
I’ve lost useless crap countless times, but there was one experience where I had full harddrive failure and lost a lot of files for active projects. Some of the files were totally wiped away. Thankfully at the time I had just discovered version control, and had a lot of the files backed up on a server online.
Currently I back my stuff up via s3 and version control (git).
I was nearing completion on three 15-20pg term papers and my Toshiba Satellite crapped out on me. Everything was lost and I almost spontaneously combusted. I flipped out for about one full minute and then went and bought myself a Powerbook G4. It was the best purchase of my life and I’ve been using macs ever since.
I now use time machine to do automatic weekly backups on my 250gb western digital external and daily automatic backups of important (smaller size files) to my idisk.
No problems, but I hope I never lose my pictures.
The only data I have ever lost was a 5 page paper for school on a floppy disk. The next day, I got my first USB drive of 256MB for the low low price of $70. This would be great to win though because I am always running out of disk space on my laptop, and I could actually back some stuff up with it.
Luckily, I haven’t lost any data off my computer. I back up files on cds.
I’ve lost an entire backup of my computer due to a shitty CD-R backup program that I thought was working correctly…
Now I use Microsoft Office Groove and an old 60GB external (now full)
Luckily, I haven’t lost any important yet. Optical disc back-ups have been sufficient for me so far. If I win this, I’ll definitely start cloning my hard drive.
I lost a ton of pictures. The cat knocked over my external hard drive. We were not able to recover anything off the drive.
Last time I lost my data was when testing Leopard WWDC beta.
I havn´t got a lot of important stuff now located on my machine, all my projects source code (I’m a dev) is on github.com and I use Time Machine once every 2 months for administrative documents.
Just lost all my data, because of a Raid0 setup. I’m planning on getting a USB backup HD, before I reformat.
I have not lost anything yet but I am backing up to the internet since my external hard drive died.
I use BestCrypt for encryption and DVDs. Very simple and efficient
I use Time Machine and It’s a good think I had it setup when my iMac gave me the red screen of death, the motherboard was fried. I also use SuperDuper for backing up only my user folder.
I lost all my old documents when the computer crashed so now I backup on a portable harddrive.
i really don’t backup my files or data because i don’t have any device that i can use it to back it up
i don’t backup
I have a small portable hard drive that has too little memory for all the graphic and video files that I have to backup. I haven’t lost anything yet. Winning this would certainly simplify things a lot.
Luckily I have never lost any important data or had a drive fail. I have some old backups on DVD-R and now backup most of my stuff to a 500GB Iomega Firewire 800 external drive. I’m still running Tiger, probably will until 10.6 comes out. At that point I’m looking forward to checking out Time Machine.
I did lose data back in the day when a hard drive gave up the ghost. I now use an external drive where I back up a smaller parttion main drive, but that external drive is used for data and is pretty full. That sleek drive pictured would give me much needed back up space.
When I moved all my files to a new computer I missed a bunch of stuff that was on a partition other than the one that my documents folder was on. My backups were limited to the stuff in my documents folder so the omitted files were lost when the hard drive in the old computer was reformatted.
I still just backup irreplaceable documents and photos because of limited backup capacity. With a 1 TB drive I could back up just about everything.
Files disappeared but was there a backup? 1 gig thumb, 2 gig thumb, 80 gig external, CD… Finally found a partial in an email.
I could use this to backup stuff from my somewhat unreliable laptop.
Hasn’t everyone lost data at one point in time or another? Right now I’m backing up important info on a jump drive!
I have sorta lost my data in the past after a failed OS install. The main partition became hidden and I was unable to boot to an installed OS and it took quite a while to pinpoint the issue with a bootable CD. Good thing I found the issue and recovered…. scary times.
Over the years, I’ve lost files a few times when my hard drive died, usually documents and programs for classes that I had finished (fortunately, nothing that was current.) Now, I keep copies of everything important on both my desktop and laptop computers.
Thankfully I have never lost data–hope I win this because I’m sure my time is coming! Thanks for the contest!
Over the years, I’ve had hard drives die a few times. The most important things I lost were documents and programs I had written for classes that I had completed. Now, I copy everything important between my desktop and laptop computers.
Some idiot once wiped my hard drive clean and so I lost all my files and stuff. Now I set a system restore point first, so that I can fall back on something. I also keep all my important on an external hard drive and I store some of it on an online hard drive as well.
I have lost everything – I relied on someone else to make a copy of my hard drive before it was sent to Apple, and they lost the backup. I now run Time Machine on an external 80GB FW400 hard drive.
For me, backing up data was like pulling teeth and, yes, I did lose data (although, thankfully, it was not long after a back up, so I didn’t lose much). Now, we have an external hard drive and I try to remember to back everything up once a week.
Lost nothing yet but I backup with Retrospect/CCC/SuperDuper.
I have lost data, but I just wrote it off. Now I backup irregularly to an external drive, but still I am not very good about it.
I lost all the lecture notes to the lectures I give academically. They had to be rescaned in from hard copy withhired help. I now use Carbonite online backup and Acronis disk images on a schedule.
Lose important data?
Not in the sense of a catastrophic hdd failure. I do misplace stuff all the time. Some of it I still haven’t found.
Great contest and perfectly timed as my girlfriend needs a hard drive as a time machine backup for her new macbook pro.
My first sad, sad experience was with a laptop hard drive that contained four years of research data and literature citations from a biomedical lab I was working at. I had things backed up onto a WD 2.5 inch external a week earlier, however, and I assumed things were fine. Unfortunately, I was wrong. When I plugged in the external, it powered up but didn’t appear. I plugged it into another computer and the same thing happened.
A lot of repeated experiments and two years later, I back up everything via Time Capsule as well as uploading compressed data onto Amazon S3 every morning and again every evening. Larger system backups onto externals are no longer done.
I have lots lots of important stuff, usually when an IM client fails or when a place closes early with no warning, or when the internet fails or moves too slowly. My last external hard drive was stolen, it is the only way to run programs on many comptuers. I am homeless so I have no other way to save data including application settings, which takes of much of my time and prevents me from accomplishing something. Many files are saved to my e-mail, but some are too large (20 MB limit), and many are lost when you hit the wrong key, since e-mails I send to myself wind up in the SPAM folder some how. I am always looking for some way to get an external hard drive, but they are very expensive.
P.S.: If I am the winner, could you please also leave a message at (630) 830-7088, since I currently have over 100,000 e-mails in my inbox due to the lack of 24-hour computer acess coupled with the time spent setting up the options each time and saving/recovering URLs “in prograss” from my e-mail. Thanks.
Back in the days of a Cyrix chip, which burned ever so toasty, I had a head crash of my hard drive (it died SCREAMING!) which I still blame on the heat of the Cyrix.
It was before digital cameras, so I had no pictures on it…but my professor didn’t care for the reason I didn’t have my homework.
I’ve had an entire drive die on me without having any means of backup. It just died out without any explanation and couldn’t get it to start back up again. It was incredibly unfortunate because I had some important documents on there for school and had to restart them all. After that, I’ve been saving things on USB flash drives with a few gigs on them but I have yet to save my pictures on anything and have been meaning to save up for a back-up drive – hence why this would be useful!
-Adam
I haven’t ever lost any data that I wasn’t able to retrieve, but I’m in desperate need of storage. I’ve just been using cd’s.
Yep, I’ve had OS crashes. Needed to do a complete reload. So now I use external hard drives for back-up.
I encrypted data on an old computer and when I lost that compuer I could not access my encrypted data on my back up. so now i dont encrypt anymore
I lost some of my school documents and personal photos. This happened when I did a re-installation of OS and forgot to backup some of the files. Now, I go through all my files and back them up into a DVD-R. I have only one hard disk, hence the need to use DVD-R disc.
I have never lost any data from my computer. My current back up i using 2 8GB usb flash drives that have all my pics and word docs on it this prize would make life so much better.
I don’t back up, I need to we lost a lot pics before when my husband went to some dumb website.
Hey Paul, Great Blog.
I’m in Melbourne, Australia, so if they don’t decide to post internationally, it doesn’t matter because I’ll tell you my story anyway (although I would like to win :)
I have a PowerMac G4 400Mhz running as a VPS for my website testing on my client’s websites (i’m a web designer). Anyway, long story short, at the start of this year my family’s (i’m 16) main computer (a PC…) broke down (harddrive failure…) and I said they could have a lend of my server as their computer for a few weeks. I showed them a crash-course on using OS X, and I went back to my MacBook Pro.
While they were using it it was still being used as a server, and so I was using it over wireless for it’s common use of website testing. Add a few days, and my little brothers playing a few stupid flash games and the PowerMac starts making it’s ‘hardware fault beeps’. I open it up and notice the harddrive is clicking… great. Long story short, I had to completely recreate my then current client’s website as I had no backup.
Other than that i’ve just had the 2x 4th Generation iPod harddrives fail (20GB and a 40GB… now two useless doorstops… :( )
Love the blog Paul and keep up the good articles.
- Tim.
I have not lost any really important things on my computer (daughters pictures, etc.) I have lost some stuff at work though, and I had to redo the work. :(
I backup my stuff every now and again by burning a CD of my newer pictures and movies of my daughters.
I’ve lost my project for school, photos, and some music.. Stupid 6 year old Dell with half a gig of ram.. Thank goodness I’m getting a Mac for Christmas. (which is what ill use these drives for).
I currently have no backup whatsoever.
I have lost data two times in two Maxtor hard drives of 250GB each one ¬¬ (now i hate maxtor), Now I use S3 and Time Machine which is just amazing.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Yes, yes I have…I changed one of the security settings on Windows and apparently Microsoft doesn’t like that so it went ahead and reverted all my settings on a lot of programs back to default and deleted a lot of my files for example my .log files. D< that was not very nice.
I back up most of my data apparently not quickly enough for some things by having it on my secondary hard drive, then external and then on DVDs. Also some stuff I upload that way I can retrieve it if ever lost.
I haven’t backed up my data for years… using a HD just to store copies of stuff seems like such a waste of space – think of all the exciting data I could be using that storage for.
I use a 4 GB USB Stick( no moving parts) for backup after my Seagate External hard drive failed.
nope i havent lost any data till now on my computer
boy do i need this…mine is 8 years old
I’m currently using both Time Machine and SuperDuper! for backups, but I’m running out of space very quickly. I haven’t actually lost any data yet, but need to remedy this soon. This storage would definitely be put to good use.
I was using Windows at the time, and I wanted to try Linux. At this point you’d probably guessed what happened: formatted the backup partition instead of the windows one, and lost everything.
After that one, I lost all my data one more time, after formatting (again!) the wrong partition, but instead of copying the second backup (not that dumb!), I erased it :/
After that one, I always keep one more backup just in case. But I had yet another data loss: When I formatted my windows mobile, I went to sync it with my macbook to restore the data. Clocks weren’t synced and the sync ended up deleting everything from my macbook.
My current backup schema:
Important data from my Macbook (work machine):
- programming stuff in either SVN or GIT repos on my webserver
- time machine in my 2.5” external disk
- daily rsync to my network storage disk.
- monthly backup of the latter to my desktop computer.
- emails and feeds all in google mail & reader.
I lost some work once when I was working as a university researcher. Luckily, I was able to duplicate it in about a week. My current backup situation is practically nonexistent.
I run both OS X and Windows XP on my pc laptop, and I ally installed an update to Mac OS X without all the necessary tricks, and had to wipe my hard drive. I thankfully had my most important stuff backed up on a DVD, but still lost a lot. I’d really appreciate a backup drive.
The one and only time I lost data was when, by mistake of course, I kicked my 500GB WD MyBook with all my CD/DVD-Rips… Fortunately, I was able to restore my collection (endless re-ripping) but all my precious files were gone .
Nowadays, I use Time-Machine, I rsync my desktop with my home-server and my MacBook and the files I must not lose I email them to my web-mail backup account… I also forward all my emails to that account (personal, work, registrations etc) tagging them properly.
I am also thinking buying some web storage, because you never know…
I had these WD273BA drives in my PC and I busted the connector while trying to hook one up when I got some other drives set up in a RAID 0 array. I was hooking up my old drive so I could move the data to the array. Later on, I was able to find a refurbished drive, identical to the WD273BA, and replace the top controller board…no luck. I basically have this dead drive with photos from my first two years of marriage on them…lost.
Now, I back up my photos on my PC with SyncBackSE. On my MacBook Pro, I basically import current photos before I import them onto my PC, so in essence, I have two backups of my photos.
I’m now starting to use Amazon S3, since PSTAM makes it sound so easy and exciting to you.
The Seagate Agent Go would be a nice addition to my MBP b/c of its Firewire 800 connectivity.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now ?
Ans :- A few times.My most important data on my notebook are my Emails & tons of Text files which i’m keeping with me for years & i would certainly be devastated if they get corrupted or lost by any chance.I get attacked by viruses sometimes even though i’m using pretty good security softwares.Few weeks ago i had to format two drives of my HDD because of two nasty viruses & i had to loose quite important official documents on those drives.
I’m now using a Seagate 40GB portable external HDD (ST940801U2-RK).I know it’s too small for backing up my main HDD’s data on it.So, i’m currently writing/backing up the data of my HDDs on blank DVD-Rs & the rest on this porable drive.
yes i’v lost data. back it up on an external drive every day
“Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?”
I lost photos once… pictures of my son growing up, pictures from my wedding, first anniversary spent at Niagara Falls etc.. lost a lot of collage work I had on there, but that nothing in comparison to a life time of memories. All lost because I was forced to reformat my computer, so before external drives became popular I bought a cd burner so I could burn pictures, word doc etc… to cd’s. This worked for a while, but the cheap external cd burner I bought a few years ago has since stopped working, so I am actually in the market for an external drive :)
wow
once my computer crashed and my itunes was totally compromised. so i had to go back through my hard drive and put the song files back into it manually, as well as album art. that really sucked. i’ve always wanted to get an external hard-drive of some sort for backups, but i can’t afford it. hope i win!
I used to have a Dell, it gave me nothing but grief and I lost data when the laptop died on me. Now I’m a mac man through and through and time machine is brilliant! Could always do with an external hdd though!
It happens to everybody, and usally when the data is highly important.
I swear at the computer to help relieve the tension, and immediately begin
entering the data again. At this point I save every paragraph as I proceed.
Never lost data. But I clone with SuperDuper (transfer offsite) and use Time Machine as well.
Fortunately I’ve never lost any important data on my computer…I regularly backup my data with Windows Backup along with an external drive!
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
One time a couple of years back I lost all my information on a old Compaq that I was using. As a result, all my pictures and documents were lost in the digital world forever (at least for me, because I wouldn’t know how to get it back). Now I have “upgraded” to copying all of my information to my email client. I just hope it doesn’t fail!
I lost my all of my computers data one day when I was carrying my laptop around in my bag, (I had left it on) and the hard drive apparently got scratch, the data was not recoverable.
Now I back up all my files on an external drive, using the mac’s “backup” application.
A while ago, using windows 98, i had to format the computer pretty much every two or three months. I’ll always make sure to set partitions so I don’t loose data but eventually some files would get lost and I would just realize that a couple days later when I needed them.
Now, i don’t really back up, but I’m planning on getting a big hard drive to connect to my Airport Extreme and back up via Time Machine.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer?
–> yes. :(
what happened and how do you backup your data now?
–> i make sure it takes all its vitamins every morning before it leaves the house.
…..and then hope it doesn’t die on me. :(
Haven’t ever lost anything but do get paranoid sometimes. I have a combination of time machine and superduper for my backup solution.
We losts alot of pictures and a friend told us that when her hard drive crashed she payed over 1000.00 to get her work related documents off. We found a device that helped us get the pictures from the old hard drive. Now we have a back-up.
I haven’t lost any important information off my computer before. I usually backup all the important files at least once a week.
I have yet to lose data but another drive would always help!
I have lost email archives before, so now I make backups locally and back them up to DVD-R.
Once about two years ago, lost all my data as my hard drive crashed. Still don’t back up but would definitely do so if I won either drive.
I had a mp3 player with a lot of storage and I had transferred a lot of my cds to it. Luckily I didn’t sell the cds. After several years of consistant use the player died. It was out of warrenty, of course, so getting it fixed would have cost $$ and I would have to put all my music in again! I really would like some place to back up my music!
back in 2002, i had the foolish thought that i could make a back up of my photos and delete the originals off of the hard drive. the disk got scratched and i lost a few months of photos.
I’ve being trying for past couple yrs to be completely on the cloud but b/c my bandwidth isn’t wide enough, I use an external hdd and time machine. I’m not really sure how it works though, so i suppose it could fail me. I’m hoping it keeps my itunes and iphoto backed up though. Moving docs to google docs is my next goal.
Sure, I’ve lost important data and had to spend hours reconstructing everything. I currently use thumb drives and burn CDs. This was be far superior.
Knock on wood, I’ve never lost data before. But that isn’t to say I don’t plan accordingly. I backup everything to an external hard drive and backup important documents to Amazon S3.
I completely lost my data once. It was a Quantum Fireball HD and due to a burned chip, I lost everything from my Imac G3 and I didnt had any backup. Now Im using regularly two computers at the same time and I keep in both the files most important to me.
I also burn in DVDs the files that I havent accesed regularly.
I had a hard drive failure many years ago, and I lost everything on that drive. Don’t want it to happen again!
I lost everything. Once. That is all it took. Worst was I was monkeying around with out a backup and hosed the drive, unrecoverable.
Now, multiple drives and one monthly I leave at work for the absolute worst (home and all gone).
My backup system is currently a spindle of dvds.
When I first got my MacBook about two years ago, after using the included HD for about 3 months, it completely died on me without any warning! I lost a ton of images from my digi cam and school documents.
That should have taught me to get a backup solution, but here I am still only backing up to cds every once in a while…
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
I did once lose a hard drive, worst computing day ever as it had all my kids photos. I was able to recover some through software programs but not all. I now sadly have not learned my lesson and do not backup still. Mainly due to there is no way for me to currently.
Over the years, I’ve hard hard drives die a few times, but the only things I couldn’t recover were documents and programs that I had written for classes that I had already finished. Now, I copy everything important between my desktop and laptop computers.
I lost a bunch of digital photos last year. Live and learn. Back up, back up, back up.
I rip my cd’s and listen to them on my computer. a while back I did not back up the convertedfiles and my computer crashed. I had to re-rip my collection all over again.
I recently had to run a recovery on this PC, which belongs to my roommate. He has tons of documents, music, and photos on it. It took forever to copy everything to CD and two 8gb flash drives. Now, if we discover something is missing, it’s easier to ignore it rather than load every stinkin’ CD and look for it. I don’t ever want to have to do it again.
I had 2 160gb hard drives on my desktop: C: and D:. D was supposed to be used as a backup for C, but I ended up storing videos and movies on it, and it crashed after a few years. Then C almost crashed, but I got it working about the same time I purchased a laptop to replace my 5 year-old desktop. I moved my important documents from my old C drive to the laptop, and now I back up with a measly 160gb gateway usb external hard drive every Sunday at 9pm. Two weeks ago I ran out of space on the external hard drive, so I wiped it, moved my videos out of my documents folder, and did a clean backup which currently fits on the external hd.
I’ve been lucky not to have lost anything important, but that’s just because I’ve ALWAYS had a backup method in place. Recently, however, I have found myself without a backup after my external finally gave up the ghost. So, here’s hoping that luck holds out, or I’m totally screwed :)
i just lost everything when I had to format my drive. Digging through old e-mails to retrieve some important documents.
The worst data-loss that has ever happended to me took place one year ago, while I was finishing my Master Thesis. I had been coding for the previous 7 months in 8:00 am – 9:00 pm sessions. One day, my MacBook’s hard drive died. I realized I hadn’t back-up last month’s new code, so I paniced ‘a little’ ;). Thankfuly, my girlfriend reminded me thata I had been using her laptop the previous weekend and that she kept a 2-days old copy. She e-mailed it to me and all I had to do was to redo two files.
Of course, that very day I started sending a copy to my GMail account each day before leaving the lab.
At home I use a simple external hard drive to keep a copy of my hard drive, previously via Carbon Copy, now via Time Machine.
yes ofcourse i lost my important data.. and important data in the sense 100+ seasons of series like friends, prison break, heroes etc which i managed to download secretly using my office bandwidth..frm many sites especially rapidshare..
some 100GB of data. which i managed to collect using a remote drive frm office laptop to my computer.. and suddenly a power fluctation made my cpu to smoke and my harddisk to use like paper weight..
i have no other choices… and to my surprise all my downloads and traces were easily recoverable frm my office computer.using an app
and that is the end of my story…lol
Unfortunately I have lost “important” files before. Due to a Hard Drive crash I lost about 6 months worth of family pictures. Obviously it is the memories that count and last, but it was still very unfortunate.
Ever since then I’ve been backing up my files regularly to an external drive, but I am also still searching for the best online backup solution.
Ive lost things before, but usually my fault, not because I don’t have proper backups. I currently backup to a NAS device, but its not very portable.
I am thankful for NEVER having lost any data to a failed drive. However, I do use Time Machine and love it. My internal drive is 160GB and I backup to a 320 GB drive in a reused WD external HDD case.
I had all my files on an external hard drive, backed up through Mozy. The HD died one day (it was cheap), but fortunately Mozy worked and I didn’t lose a single file. I’ve been using Mozy ever since.
I lost data after a drive died and was able to recover some of it with Ontrack Easy Recovery. I have since setup a pretty redundant back solution. I start by using Carbon Copy Cloner to create an exact bootable backup of my hard disk every 6 hours. I then use Synk Professional to backup my important files to a NAS on my LAN every 3 hours. Lastly, I use Jungle Disk to back up those same files to my S3 account every 3 hours
I’ve lost important data a number of times. Music is of my main importance as i have over 15k songs in my itunes. I have 2 external drives with backups of my machine. I back up at least twice a month and I just started using time machine. I wish time machine had more settings though. I wish it would only create two files and just continually update/replace the older of the two vs creating a new file every time.
one tip: dont slack on your back up routine because at one point or another you’ll learn the hard way.
PC got infected by malware. It wiped out my system restore history. I had to do a system recovery, and re-install and/or update all software. Oh yes, I definitely bought a Seagate Free Agent!
Thankfully I haven’t lost anything yet. Knock on wood.
Right now I backup using Mozy as well as Time Machine. Mozy gets the critical stuff, and TM gets everything else. Worse case senario, I loose my TM drive and I have to re-rip my cd’s and movies. Not a bad deal.
If the Time Machine comment wasn’t enough, I use a Mac.
I lost my ENTIRE THESIS my last year of college. So distressing. I had to OCR scan my last hard copy.
Now we have a small back-up drive to keep the most important stuff, which is not everything, but better than nothing.
Annoyingly enough, the only time I actually lost data was when a WD MyBook external drive (which I bought as a backup device) crashed 1 week after I bought it. I ended up losing about 2 weeks worth of digital photos that I had not yet backed up to dvd including some of my favorite shots of my girlfriend outside on an autumn walk. I still don’t know if I can trust WD…
I have lost some important data in my time, mostly due to hardware malfunction (hdd dying).
Now I use a Synology NAS (DS408) which runs Raid1, so that I effectively have two copies of everything – furthermore I have an external USB hdd which I sync with the Synology every now and then.
Only thing missing: a remote backup in case my house burns down or if burglars decide they like my stuff.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Yep, had an internal Maxtor HD just plain, ol’ give up the ghost. I backup now to a Western Digital external HD + really critical stuff burned to CD-R/DVD-R.
Never have, but I backup a few things to an old crummy external, not even big enough for time machine backups.
Yup, last year around Christmas time, I lost all my data on 2 machines. First OS X wouldn’t boot on my 1.5 year old first gen macbook. Took it to the shop, hard drive had kicked the bucket. Probably because I overworked those little components all the time and dug into virtual memory too much. I got a new HD with leopard and tripled my RAM which was mad awesome. I take much better care of my macbook now.
But the day before I got it back I plugged my iPod into my old PC that I’d used throughout high school and there was a Pop! and the comp was totally dead. Not responding to anything. Took it in. Motherboard crapped out. The stuff on that HD should be fine though. When I build my next PC I’ll stick ‘er in and get all my stuff back! :-)
I’m a big collector or music, and a few years ago, I used to store all my music on my computer, and not back it up (90+ GB). So once I was trying to reorganize my music library via iTunes, and reimport everything. So I cleared out my itunes to start fresh, only, I didn’t realize that iTunes would delete the physical files as well. Years and years of music I’ve collected gone within seconds. One of the most disappointing times ever.
Whoops, forgot to say in my first comment, despite losing 2 hard drives full of stuff very close together I’m still not much for backing up. I try to store my favourite photos online someplace. Same thing goes for bookmarks. 95% of my music is on my old iPod which I could hook up any time and use Senuti to get my songs back. A lot of my school papers are on gmail because I print everything off at the library. So if my HD died again now I’d basically just lose some notes from this semester which is now pretty well over. No biggie!
Also trying to get into the habit of using Dropbox and Evernote!
I’ve lost lots of data. One time, had a hard drive crash right before the end of a semester – thank god I printed out my papers. I heard clicks, tried putting the hard drive in the freezer – nothing worked.
These days, I have media on one hard drive (right now a 500 gig, but thinking of moving to 1TB) and one small backup drive (250 gig, but that’s a bit small). I don’t have a backup for my media – I should. I use Time Machine. It works alright.
I have a nine year stack of backup cds and dvds piled on top of my computer. I need help. Please accept my entry. Thank you.
One simple advice from me: Don’t drink and code! 1 glass of mineral water was more than enough for my MacBook Pro’s HD. I wonder if the new solid state HDs are more water resistant. Still not switched to Leopard, so no Time Machine goodness for me. I backup my most important stuff to DVDs one a while and drop them at my parents house (physical security is way to often overlooked), and I have some automated backups online. I also backup all my email (my gmail account forwards all incoming mail to an account hosted by MediaTemple).
Funny that I stumbled across this since just a week ago I lost EVERYTHING. After my western digital drive failed, I never replaced it and therefore never backed up. Now, I’m using mozy.
I tried to “upgrade” my laptop from XP to Vista. It was a disaster! I lost everything and eventually had to revert back to XP anyway. Now, I back up to DVD.
Cheers!
I had lost my MacBook Pro and my old desktop system (Apple/Digital Audio) blew its logic board within days of each other. Talk about some some bad mojo going on!
Anyway, between my Time Machine backups and the 2 hard drives from the desktop computer (I had to switch them in and out of the same enclosure) I was able to get back up and running.
I never thought of using Amazon S3 as a personal backup solution – I’ll look into it (and you’re articles on it as well).
Take care.
I’m know I’ve lost something (or many somethings) important, but time has healed the wound(s). I’ve become more regular in my backups, but certainly need a better plan and better discipline. Hopefully I don’t need a wakeup call before I get in gear.
I have never lost important data (besides accidentally deleting something) however I do make continuous backups using NTI Shadow just in case.
Luckily I never lost anything that valuable, and I hope it never happens. I have some of my pics backed up on DVDs, but I have so many thousands more pics now…
Have you ever lost important data on your computer? Yep several times. Each time I said “I’ll never do that again.” And then do that again.
What happened and how do you backup your data now? I now do a monthly auto-backup using Acronis Tru-Image program but only for the essentials. I do an image of my OS drive always as well as a few of my very important ones. Others I just live on the edge ;)
I have lost Photo ref and art scans. All important. On 3 separate drives! Oh, well.
I bought more drives and already need more.
Yes, I have lost my information! I literally had to start from scratch and just lost my data. I was mostly upset about my Ipod (that is sad huh!). Now I have a small passport drive that holds 160G that I use to backup my data. I keep my iphone/itunes section backed up, as well as my documents folders and my settings. I have my Norton do the backup weekly and about once a month I use XP to back up the computer as well. It was a total pain in the butt! I had to turn in my old Mac 3G at work, and I literally just pulled my setting for my web browser, my photos and music folders (itunes) and my documents folder and saved them on my passport. I need something bigger, but keep waiting for them to come down, because they seem to get bigger and bigger and cheaper and cheaper, never sure when the right time to buy is!
I was sitting on the couch with my MacBook as I heard grinding and clicking sounds as the computer ground to a halt. I did have a Time Machine backup from about a week ago, so quickly tried another – an agonising couple of hours later, the backup finished, and the drive died.
Never. Once I hear the crackling sound of the hard-drive, I just replace it. I always use IMAGING more than replacing a hard-drive. =)
Never had a hard disk fail, but I accidentally formatted a Compact Flash card before copying photos off it. I used PhotoRec to recover them thankfully.
I have lost data and guess what I STILL don’t backup my data. I really haven’t learned anything. I guess inertia is against me. I just cannot get myself motivated to secure my data. I just recently sprang for a virus program after 5 yrs on the same computer.
I had to take my HD to Best buy one time after it crashed. i should be backingup my stuff….plesae pick me!!!
It so happens that my wife’s Macbook hard drive just died last week. With it went many pictures, songs, documents and our special wedding slideshow. We currently own an external hard drive but it has been too full the last few years for us to have properly backed things up. Unfortunatly this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. I once lost over 25 gigs of music two years ago due to foolish file management. We’re in the proccess of finding a second external hard drive for future backup.
Over the years, I’ve hard hard drives die a few times. The only files I couldn’t recover were documents and programs that I had written for classes that I had already finished, so it wasn’t anything that I couldn’t do without, though it was annoying to lose them. Now, I copy everything important between my desktop and laptop computers.
We have lost photos and had to pay a lot of money to get them back. Now we try to put things on discs and flash drives, but there is too much to keep up with.
I haven’t lost any data. I use my hard drive to back up.
I lost a ton of data to a hard drive failure once, and I simply had to move on without it. Granted, this was about 10 years ago, and it was as pervasive to keep backups at the time. I keep at least one duplicate copy of important documents now. Often one on a thumb drive and one in a Gmail/Docs/Spreadsheets location.
Yes! Now I use Time Machine to back up my computer and also use SuperDuper! to create a bootable backup.
I’ve lost too much stuff because I haven’t backed up… research papers, homework, movies, the works.
I want this badly.
I once lost all my data before I got my FreeAgent drive.
All pictures, videos, documents, assignments….everything. The drive in my Macbook was defective, and luckily Apple replaced it, but I lost everything (including the use of my computer for a week, when it was needed most).
That pretty much scared me silly into using Time Machine and my good ‘ol FreeAgent Desktop, but I do like the mobile FreeAgents, as I frequently go between the library, my house, and my labs.
I lost my iMac hard drive after only about 5 months of usage. I was pissed. Since then, I’ve had 3-4 computers, backed them up on various external drives and backed up more photos to SmugMug and important data and website backups to S3.
I just bought a Drobo for local mass storage and consolidation. I will then use S3 to backup more data, and use two hard drives (hopefully the ones I win – Mac versions, please) with SuperDuper, taking one every week to swap out at the safety deposit box.
My lappy died at the post office–I knocked it off a table while filling out a form, oops. I did lose a lot of data, but I was able to recover it by booting linux on a CD then SCPing the files to another computer. I currently back up files between a couple home computers, but most of my work is done on servers which are backed up for me :-D.
I accidently formatted my backup drive with like 2 years of footage on it. Horrible idea. Now I use multiple externals (hint) and try to backup my media onto DVDs as well just to be safe.
Keep up the good work Stammy.
I have lost a full hard drive. Lost it last year and lost a good amount of data. So I have been looking for a good external hard drive to begin backing things up.
Probably the last time a hard drive died on me was early this year, on my family’s Jurassic desktop computer. It had simply endured too many unnecessary reboots and power outages, and decided to retire forever.
I had pictures from a semi-vacation on that drive, and since I hadn’t stored them anywhere else, I lost them along with the drive. My laptop seems to be sluggish lately, and I can just feel an imminent crash (although it hasn’t BSOD’d yet, thankfully), which is why I need that Seagate drive. :)
I’ve never lost anything due to hard drive failure. I currently use a D-Link DNS-323 in RAID1 to backup important files via network share.
I accidentally deleted all 100 gb of my music in the confusion of transferring to a new computer.
Currently I use Time Machine, Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk, and make periodic copies of my drive with SuperDuper.
Last year I had bad sectors on my WD passport, Lost 120GB of music. I had most of it backed up at home. I keep at least 2 complete copies of my media library at all times now.
I’m feeling lucky :)
I have lost data, but only due to human error accidentally deleting files I had not backed up as I had hoped. I keep a bootable external with a SuperDuper image and frequently let Time Machine do it’s thing. I also keep 3 copies of my music library on site and one offsite.
Thought I’d throw in my ramble as I’m a backup advocate these days! everyone should have a backup drive of some sort.
About 3 and a half years ago, I was taking my PC to get it a “health check” at a local independent PC shop and on the way back I dropped it. The case shell snapped and a small bit of it wedged between the top of the HD and the bay. I didn’t know this and when I switched it on a while later, the drive spun, the plastic melted slightly and fried the interface. The HD was rendered useless, the actual interface on the drive was gone and the only way to solve it was a new interface for the exact model of the exact same drive. not a hope in hell.
So I, well we (it was a shared PC with my brother), lost music (about 50% downloaded and some tracks I still can’t find these days, rare demos etc), photos – about 4 years worth and course work etc, about 80GB worth, and this was when I was just getting into web geekery etc.
Nowadays we rock a 250GB My Book, a 80 GB portable DIY drive as well as the HDs on the laptop and desktop.
We backup mainly just through move and copying files but I keep meaning to get into a proper back up system at some point.
I’m actually in the middle of recovering a drive right now. For some reason my 500GB Samsung drive started crapping out (for the second time, I fixed it once), and now I’m in the middle of recovering the data onto a new 500GB drive.
I don’t really have any solution other than several backups across multiple drives. The nature of my work is I have lots of large files, so I can’t use clouds and optical media isn’t really reliable either. I’m currently switching all of my drives to more stable, sturdy enclosures and replacing my old IDE hard drives with SATA ones. I’ll probably end up doing the same switch again in 5 years or so to SSDs but, desperate times I suppose.
I’ve never had a hard drive fail on me that had anything important on it but I am horrified of losing my pictures. I have a S3 account I use for everything along with jungle disk.
I lost most of my 1st kid’s first five years photos. I had a 29 cd Norton Ghost backup but the corruption was copied over in the backup. I spend about 30 hrs per year trying to recover the data from the corrupted Norton Ghost backup (which I believe is one of the worst products ever foisted on the public). I now use. external hard drives with Super Duper. Then another back up is kept on another TB ext drive. I really would like to get Drooby with a Drobo.
I don’t ever remember losing any important data. Occasionally I’ve deleted something I shouldn’t have, but never lost data.
I back up my data to a number of online places, between my 2 computers and a nice fat 500 Gig external hard drive which I share between my 2 computers.
I done a format once, and thought that I had backed up all my photos, but as it turned out, I hadn’t. I noticed when I went looking for photos of my nephews 1st birthday. There were heaps, and my family was pretty disappointed with me. I haven’t really learn’t my lesson yet, but my web host (Dreamhost), have a 50GB backup account for every user, so I’m thinking of starting to use that. I’ve also been playing around with Microsoft Live Mesh, which seems pretty cool for syncing data between multiple computers.
I lost a hard drive TWICE on a Sony desktop. The second time we had had the computer for awhile and had also had a baby. You can guess what’s coming. Lots of photos down the tubes. I still have that hard drive in my closet. Apparently it needs to go to a clean room for several thousands of dollars to retrieve the lost files. I got most back b/c at that time I was obsessive about uploading to kodak gallery. Now I have two drives that I backup to – one seagate, one maxtor! But I want another!
I do a lot of video editing and 3D animation on my computer, and I’ve lost some big projects to drive failure. Now I regularly back up all my projects and files to DVD-Rom. Thank you for the great give-away.
I had a CD with some data from it, where part of it was unreadable. I had to use some software to get back what I could, I take better care of these discs now. I keep important files on my laptop and on another drive, in case something happens to either.
I backup to DVDs and I have lost files because the DVDs were corrupt. Now I make 2 copies of each DVD but don’t do it as often as I should.
Luckily I’ve never lost anything too terribly significant. There was a point where I had lots of duplication. I lost a lot of music once but didn’t mind.
Now I just have one machine (Macbook Air) and I need something portable like this so I can keep my important stuff protected (in addition to being in the cloud).
Physical accessibility is still huge compared to down/up speeds.
yes, i had a 4 drive raid fail on me… that is 2 drives kicked it. miraculously after weeks of troubleshooting, getting data recovery quotes, and tinkering around i was able to find a long way around backdoor to recover a majority of the data. it took days to recover once i figured it out. now i prep all of my hard drives and am in the process of organizing a ton of data and freeing up some drives to setup a good backup system.
Not yet.
Multiple external hard drives right now.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
My family and have lost a whole collection of photos before. It was our first family digital camera and dad’s first laptop. The laptop suddenly crashed after the trip, and we had not backed up the data. Fortunately, we also brought a camera that used eh, regular film, so we had some pictures and memories of the trip. That was a sad day in the household.
Now we back most of our data on to a usb external harddrive, and it’s getting full. I would love to back up the data in two separate location and put the extra one elsewhere, like a safety deposit box or something just in case. That would be just wonderful.
Thanks for the opportunity. Peace.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer?what happened and how do you backup your data now?
It happened once before six months, one of my friend accidentally formatted my laptop hard drive, I lost huge amount of my personal photo albums, movies etc.
Immediately I bought a sea gate 500 GB external hard disk and doing back up task every night before my sleep.Now its almost filled (95%).Need to buy another.
Data is very important to me. I have all my important data/documents/media backed up since 2001. I have a few different solutions. One is a raid 0 setup of 640gb where I store my media files (movies, music and pictures). Movies, music and pictures are also backed up online using jungle disk, I do Syncs once in few months. My leopard HD has active time machine backup. I have a 500GB external attached and just sitting in the back of my computer. Its filling up soon so I need to find a better solution. 1.5 TB would be nice ;)
Have you ever lost important data on your computer?
{SOB!} Yes
What happened?
Like a scene straight out of a Laurel and Hardy. On attempting to boot one merry morning presented with a perpelexing error to the effect of hard disk not readable or not found. I can’t remember the exact error. After an initial panic I decided to remove the hard disk and try it on another PC. Murphy and his laws kicked in at this point. In the first PC I connected it OK and hit the power button. A puff of smoke came from the case and nothing happened. So i did the ony reasonable thing which is to remvoe the hard disk and try yet another PC that happened to be downstairs.
Words cannot express my feelings (or language) when I somehow stumbled en route and the hard disk slipped through my grasp clattered and rolled and bounced down a flight of stone stairs well ahead of me. The sound is one I am yet to forget. Needless to say some 6 years or so worth of data went to that place in heaven for data.
And how do you backup your data now?
I have 2 main strategies. For code I use subversion running off another PC on my network. For photos and multimedia I use an external backup which is again backed up to my office PC
I lost my MacBook Hard Drive this year when it just died. Thru a long story I also lost my back up on the school network the day before so I completely lost all my life work from May to September this year.
Now I use time machine and i am fast shifting as much as i can to cloud computing- especially through Google Apps.
Comp crashed during backup, ironically. Lost a lot of pictures.
The last time a hard drive died on me was probably earlier this year. My family’s desktop computer had simply been rebooted or suddenly lost power one too many times, and it decided to retire forevermore. I had many pictures from a recent quasi-vacation in there, and since I hadn’t uploaded them to the cloud, I lost ‘em forever.
My laptop’s also been acting very weird lately, and sad to say I feel like it’s about ready to crash on me… which is why I need a Seagate hard drive to backup my files to ;)
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened?
I’ve lost information 2 times.
First was 6-7 years ago when my old 8,4 Quantum Fireball died. With his last breaths I’ve managed to transfer part of the files on new HDD.
Second time was when I tried to install Linux on my PC and the Windows partition bacame fuc*ed up. Fortunately I barrow an almost empty 200gb HDD form a friend and save a lot of my files via GetDataBack for NTFS (God bless the programmers of that product :))!
How do you backup your data now?
I write some of the important data on DVD’s and DVDDL’s.
But if I saw that my HDD is getting weird and it’s near to death, I go to the nearest computer parts shop and buy a new one.
lost some important stuff of mine. I’m 18 but I’m into music (remixing). Lost some important samples when my macbook crashed and some more stuff i’d been working on for a while… :(
Think I pushed the drive too hard… :(
also crashed some stuff my g/f made for me… she had it on her laptop, but try explaining it wasn’t your fault…
Still don’t have a backup system so I save important stuff onto another computer at home. Manually copy files to and fro. Tried a freeware, but it was rubbish… copied over files without asking…
When I was younger, I was learning programming at school (high-school). Worst case scenario at the time: no consumer backup solutions, just FDD and crap drives 40MB HDDs. Lost an entire year’s work in the blink of an eye, HDD crashed and one of the 20 or so ARJ volumes was corrupted by a faulty sector on one of the FDD. My teacher was cool though, he’d been overseeing the programme with me so he knew just what I could do and how far I’d been with it. He gave me full credit and a decent grade for the work.
Also lost a lot of personal stuff, including a translation I was “attempting” with the Poetic Edda. Those of you who know what it is, know just how bad that can be.
That was a long time ago. Right now I use a 500GB USB 2.0 drive to store all my stuff (songs, pics, vids, professional work), using Microsoft’s SyncToy to do the scheduling and backing-up. It works well enough.
When I got a new MacPro, I took everything off of my old one and put it on an external drive. I figured when I had time, I would transfer it over and sort it all out. I ended up dropping my external drive and i would never launch. I took it apart and tried connecting the drive but it wouldn’t read. I ended up buying a new case to make it an external firewire drive but it still wouldn’t work. I ended up borrowing a friend’s PC and seeing if I could transfer it on there as an additional drive and it was making the strangest sound. I called Drive Savers, I mean they have rescued stuff from drives that were on fire, so it would be fine. They quoted me $2000 which I didn’t have but this drive was important to me. Drivesavers called me 2 days later and said there was nothing they could do.
So, I am a graphic designer and I lost EVERY project I have ever worked on (10 years worth), all my pictures (I don’t have the negatives or prints for), all sorts of documents, basically everything.
Now I keep it all on an external drive again but I keep the drive super secure. However I do a lot of video work and the drive is filling up fast. I need the hookup.
Lost an awful lot of my Dissertation late into my degree, not a fun experience which in part finally convinced me to ditch Windows and buy a Mac. Now protected with Time Machine and weekly uploads of key files to Amazon S3.
I didn’t have all of my stuff backed up when I tried to flash a new bios on my HP laptop. It failed and corrupted the bios. Sent it to HP for repair and the hard drive came back with clean install. Everything…gone. I now back up everything.
I used to keep copies of important stuff on multiple drives but I recently moved everything to S3 using JungleDisk. This was a nice change as it gave me an opportunity to consolidate and clean up as well. I like this solution as it is fire proof as in if my house burned down. The last hard drive fail I had was a 2.5in notebook 100g notebook drive I bought to swap into my old Macbook.
I have yet to have a currently-used hard drive crash on me, but plenty of my backups have died. Moral of the story: backup your backups.
Photos, music, and since I’m a graduate student data from research and a multitude of papers.
When I started college my parents crashed the computer before I was able to get everything off of it. We had a limited amount of time to get information off of it before all data was wiped permanently. Unfortunately the CD-writer was down and USB was not readily available at that time. Everything that fit was put onto hard disks, many hard disks. Everything that didn’t (including a sizable MP3 and video collection for the time) was lost.
I lost data only once. My flash 2GB drive failed, but luckily I didn’t have any important data on it or most of the data was backed up on other places. I currently backup to a 2nd internal harddrive, but that is fast reaching it limits. Plus there is some data that I can’t place on this hard drive because the data is too big. Winning the Seagate drive would help me store this data.
I’ve been fortunate enough to not lose any major data yet. I’m currently connected to an external hard drive, but I haven’t got it set up yet with automatic backups.
I have experienced data loss, but it was due to my being a dumbass, not any hardware failure I could blame on my Mac. I was being OC about cleaning up what I thought were redundant files. Days later when I went to retrieve what turned out to be the only versions of some files on my Mac, I realized my mistake. I had done multiple restarts and other uses of the drive, so my attempts at restoration were fruitless.
Today I use the belt-and-suspenders approach of a full-time Time Machine drive and offsite (S3) backups for irreplaceable files such as digital photos, scans of important documents and music (not that the music can’t be replaced, but the ripping takes a looooong time).
Thanks for your cloud articles. I have gleaned some really useful tips from them and have incorporated them into my workflow.
I have a backup drive I just don’t use it for Backups. At the moment my backup drive is used for storage. Maybe when I lose data I will backup. But that’s Kind of stupid!!! I blame it on Vista
Haven’t lost any files yet…..(knocks on wood, throws salt over shoulder and clicks heels three times). I try to burn to cd my most important files. This prize would really help save me from future loss.
I have not lost anything of importance… so far.
I’m no stranger to losing important files. About a year ago, I was transferring items from one of my external hard drives to a larger hard drive when I received an error. For whatever reason, data on both disks were not readable and I spent the next 2 days trying to recover the data on the original hard drive. In the end, I was able to painstakingly restore everything except for a couple of home movies that I just shot for a Christmas present (this was about 2 weeks before Christmas last year). I was devastated, but relieved that I was able to restore all of my music and photographs from the past 7 years. I now keep my data on 2 external hard drives and use time machine to backup my macbook pro (i only have my applications and a working directory for my business on there).
I’d love to get a large travel-sized drive to take more with me when I’m on the go (this is where you come in!) ;)
never lost data and dont do backups right now
I was transferring all of my data from both my school laptop and my home laptop to my new macbook pro. There wasn’t a huge amount of data to transfer so I loaded it of a few CD’s and began reformatting my computer for my sisters use, it was apart of the terms for me being able to get a macbook. Once I got my macbook pro I realized that the data on the CD’s had somehow been corrupted. Luckily the music was not just on those laptops but on my mom’s desktop, so I was able to recover that, but everything else was gone. It sucked.
I lost crucial data several times. Photos, documents that I was just working on, etc. I used some free data recovery software, but some came back corrupted. I try to save a copy onto the local disk, and another to a portable drive. I back up as much as I could.
Lost data just last week when my partition on my 500gb drive was corrupted during a unexpected system crash. I couldn’t even run checkdisk :(
Thank goodness I’ve never had a really catastrophic data loss (knock on wood). I try to keep my data backed up on discs, but having an external hard drive would be so much easier.
Great giveaway — thanks!
I have not lost anything.
I’ve been inconvenienced by not having good backup; having to backup to too many floppies (in the old days), an Iomega 100MB Zip drive, and now I have most of my stuff on CDs and DVDs. I’ve started using on-line storage for pictures, and have all my recent stuff on line at two different sites.
I think my biggest concern is not having something with enough space that is external and can back up files from the internal drives. I only copy things to CDs or DVDs periodically. (I think I back up some stuff tonight!)
over the years, i have lost ALL of my creative writing projects, 100s of GB in music and the like from either crappy old hard drives or my own stupidity. now, i use my linux server as both a file repository and a safe haven for backing up images of my laptops, and for all my writing and family videos. however with space become scarce i am looking for other solutions. i happened upon this contest from my news feeds so here is my bid.
I’m lucky not to have lost data, but then again, I buy expensive hard disks!
Currently, I’m backing up important files to my iPod.
We take a lot of digital photos of our family and although we havent lost any of them yet, we wouldnt want to take the chance of our computers crashing and having all those precious memories lost.
Throughout the years, I have personally experienced a number of data loss incidents such as hard drive failure, corruption, and even hackers.
As such, I now use a variety of reduntant backup solutions for our mission critical data. Our file server backs up almost 200 gigs worth of data to Carbonite (an online service). That exact same data is also being redundantly backed up using CrashPlan (another online service) to an off-site location, as well as being backed up using a program called LazyMirror (freeware) on a weekly cycle to two different portable hard drives (one of which is always kept physically off-site).
Our linux server is being backed up regularly to a separate hard drive (as well as to Amazon S3).
When it comes to data recovery (when there is no backup available), I’ve had a lot of luck with a program called “File Scavenger”
I lost my data long time back when I was in Middle School. Back then I just upgraded from 10 GB Seagate HDD to 20 GB Samsung HDD. Some how that Samsung HDD died in an unexpected power failure (I didn’t have UPS). The data lost was not really important (if I see now), but it really taught me the importance of backups.
I lost my data long time back when I was in Middle School. Back then I just upgraded from 10 GB Seagate HDD to 20 GB Samsung HDD. Some how that Samsung HDD died in an unexpected power failure (I didn’t have UPS). The data lost was not really important (if I see now), but it really taught me the importance of backups.
Now I have my HDD cloned into external disc using Acronis True Image. I keep a copy of important files on a 8 GB pen Kingston flash drive and personal files are encrypted using True Crypt.
I lost my DVD-R media that has my backup files I learn my lesson so i backup my files in USB Flash drive
Back in college, I lost some important documents that I needed for a paper I was writing by keeping them all in one location (my thumbdrive) and accidentally dropping it in some water.
I currently have a couple of ext HDs that I use, but they are not big enough to hold a computer image of my setup, so I am forced to pick and choose what “deserves” a backup. This extra space will ensure that I am properly protected.
I lost some client files once because I was too quick to empty the trash and didn’t backup the night before.
I currently use a small external 160GB drive with Time Machine.
Well… I have an old external that I usually use. The case is very beat up and ugly so I bought a Maddog casing for it. The drive has not worked since I changed it. I’m sure the data is still there, just temporarily unreachable.
The first time we lost our harddrive it wasn’t all that important, the comp was used primarily as a game computer and all we had to do was reload the games and fix up email. The second time nearly caused a divorce as Erick reformmated the drive for some reason and failed to back up my partition, ( he did back up his own).
Now that I am disabled, and unable to work a full time job, its become critical that I have reliable back up. I would like to develop a home based business when I finish my studies.
I lost two years worth of photos and paid about $700 to recover the hard drive info. Now I back up on DVDs which is slow and a pain. This would really help.
my computer crashed a few years ago so i did end up losing precious photos and programs. i think it got messed up b/c of a virus or something.
There was this one time where I lost all of my photos. I accidentally deleted them from my computer when I was clearing of my Zune. Once I realized a few days later that my photos were gone, I looked in the recycling bin and luckily they were there. It took a little while for my heart to slow down though
We currently back up our website on our share drive but we need to back everything up in a different way. This would help uur not for proffit website!!
Relaying a horrid data-lose story from a close friend:
She spent sleepless nights working on a comp-sci project, shuttling the files back and forth from home to Lab computers in a thumb drive.. and lacking a proper backup solution, those thumb drive files were the Only up to date copies.
On the night before due date, she spent extra time in the lab, printing off images and the proper presentation materials, but in heading home for the night.. tssk tskkk.. she Left the thumb-drive stuck into the lab computer.
She was able to beg the Prof’ for partial credit, on the basis of her early version incomplete work and the generated images and printouts, but despite checking with lost and found and begging the lab monitors, the priceless original drive was never seen again, taking a good pile of personal music (working music) along with them.
Were I to win, not only would my own backup and storage be a bit more safeguarded, but I could give the spare as a gift to a dedicated (if sometimes forgetful) friend.
I have lost data so many times. I remember the first one: My drive died in a 8-hour bus trip returning from a LAN Party 6 years ago.
Last one died suddenly in September when i restarted the computer.
I use primarily RAID 1 for backups.
Of course I’ve lost everything ! Had to have the computer cleaned and re install XP pro , thus start all over …. haven’t any back up yet it has only been a couple weeks.
I would love this. I work from home as a freelance writer. I once lost some important documents. I now use a flash drive, but it is very small in size.
I almost lost all my drawings, writings, and old radioshows I did when my motherboard crashed, and I had a super old scsi drive. I could not find an enclosure for my old mac’s hard drive. I was near tears when I finally found one. Now instead of just backing up when I remember, I have software that automatically backs up my hard drive for me.
I’d be sad if my lost my pictures.
Yes. I had some photos on a hard drive that I felt was going off. It went off and I lost all my new photos between that and my last backup. I try to backup my files more often to avoid losses
My new mother board died a sudden death. My quicken book and e-mail address were the hardest to replace. I back up quicken more often and have another computer with addresses.
Over the years, I’ve had hard drives die a few times. Fortunately, the only things I couldn’t recover were documents and programs that I had written for classes that I had already finished. Now, I copy everything important between my desktop and laptop computers.
I have not lost any real important data. I have lost mp3s before because of a hard drive dying. I was able to recover some of my data before it completely died. I now backup my data to DVDs but only my real important stuff because the DVDs will not hold all of my data. This FreeAgent bundle would be great for backing up my data because is has plenty of space to backup my data.
I haven’t lost any important data …. yet. If it is small files, I burn them to CD or DVD. I have a 250 GB external drive that I store my home video files on, but it’s hard to know how much I should trust that it won’t stop working on me. It would be great to have enough space to double back up what I consider the most important files, the irreplaceable, which are memories. Thank you.
Haven’t lost anything important and currently don’t have any backup.
I haven’t lose any data yet :)
I have a habit of storing all the songs and movies which i get. I love hearing songs. I collects it from various sources spending lots of time and money. Once I lost a huge collection of songs due to hdd failure. And after that it was bit difficult for me to get all that songs again. But still i can’t afford to backup all my data due to lack of hardware. If i win the seagate HDD, it would be of great help to me.
May God bless you and me
Luckily I’ve never lost data. My important documents are all stored on my thumbdrive.
I lost my resume (just finished updating it, and hadn’t sent it out yet) along with a bunch of photos of my best friends wedding after a power outage fried my power supply, which then took out my hard drive. It was a little disappointing. Now, I keep all of my pictures and important documents on my hard drive as well as thumb drives. This would go a long ways toward solving the problem of trying to figure out what files are on what thumb drive. I could put it all in one place.
I lost school projects on the Iomega Jaz about 10 years ago. Ah, good times. These days I probably make a few too many copies for added confusion.
I’ve been lucky enough to never actually lose anything for good, but I have been inconvenienced.
First, my old laptop’s 20GB drive began making strange clicking sounds a few years ago, and I panicked. I quit using the computer until the drive was replaced (with a 60GB model, though that is now my mother’s laptop).
Second, late this past summer my current laptop reached a critical point in its DC jack problems and became unusable, as I can’t get steady power to the battery for charging. I’m too cheap to pay Geek Squad $200+ to replace the power input jack, so it’s been sitting inert on my desk for a few months. I’m awaiting the discovery of a cheaper solution; if any of you know of one, please @ me on Twitter — I have a Gateway M275.
Fortunately, I learned from that first scare (the clicking), and began looking for decentralized solutions. By the beginning of this school year, when my Gateway finally became unworkable, I’d already been using webmail, online office suites, and services like Dropbox. I work mostly from public and school (high school and college libraries) computers, with an 8GB U3-enabled flash drive for critical files and programs. Everything important (and many things I might waste less time without) has already been offloaded to the cloud.
Files I hadn’t already copied to my external hard drive (including many gigabytes of photos, videos, and music) are safe on my inactive laptop until I can get it repaired and finish moving things. The only inconvenience is not having a place to dump the 7GB or so of photos and video clips still sitting on SD cards.
So, my current backup solution is to use online services that do it for me. :D
I’ve never actually lost truly important data but it’s by PURE LUCK because I’m too lazy to implement a back-up plan. Help me!
I would be devastated if I lost the family photos, as most of them were NEVER printed. I had this happen before. My computer crashed & to this day I have not been able to get back those precious memories.
I lost quite a bit of work when my computer crashed, over two years worth. I back up now with a portable hard drive, plus I use Microsoft Offices file sharing and storage so that I don’t lose my work again.
Hard drive died lost everthing, use external hard drive to back-up now.
I haven’t really lost data or had my hard drive fail, but I back up a lot of things using web services or emailing them to myself.
As a developer, I should be better about backing stuff up, but I’m not. Totally not a “practice what you preach” type.
Thus, I lost an entire work computer worth of stuff. Code and related stuff was in a repository and Trac system, but I lost some important SQL queries and Photoshop templates. Whoops.
Lesson learned. Maybe.
Actually, the method that I use to backup my data creates occasional data loss. In order to make space available on my pc, I will burn the data onto a disc and then delete the original data from my hard drive. Sometimes, I’ve realized only after deleting the data that the burn didn’t work so well. Whoops!
I am doing MS now …I had to crawl the web as a part of my research. I ran the crawl for almost 6-7 days and then suddenly my hard disk was crashed :(….That was a devastating situation….I had no other option than to crawl again…
The crawled data will be huge..so I will take the backup everyday using the drive and make sure that I won’t lose the data….
I’ve lost important data – my hard drive crashed all of sudden. In order for me to prevent such tragedy to happened again, I frequently burned important data to DVD disc.
Lost over 600GB of data because I had too many of the same drives laying around. I thought I had picked up one that wasn’t be used and reformatted it for use as a Nintendo Wii backup.
Little did I know, I had just reformatted over 600GB of photos/music/movies gathered over the years.
Tried to do a recovery using Data Rescue II but it came up with nothing (useful). Now I keep everything on separate drives and label them with big black writing using sharpies!
Sad as it sounds, I have a safe deposit box full of DVD’s with all of our photos on them. I have only had to retrieve them once when my machine got so jacked that it was inoperable. Thinking of trying Amazon based on your recommendation.
This weekend I lost the media drive in my home server. This is the drive that contained every one of my CDs which I had meticulously ripped to perfection. Unfortunately I hadn’t been backing up my music due to the sheer volume. I’ve ordered a Netgear Readynas DUO which I’ll be outfitting with dual 1TB drives (mirrored, of course) which will take the place of my now-dead music server. It sucks losing data, but at least in this case it’s all replaceable.
My non-replaceable data (personal photos, important documents, etc) are all backed up to a webserver every day.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
yes, of course I ever lost important data on my computer.
since that time I always backup regularly to optical disc, to external hard disk and to online storage in the internet.
On the drobo—
The drobo is a great device, but no network connectivity!?!? (Unless you buy an overpriced add-on) That’s why I went with the netgear. It’s got USB ports on it so I can add a drobo to it once I run out of room.
Never lost anything truly important. Now I backup using TimeMachine and ChronoSync to external drives, and JungleDisk to S3 for off site.
I have been lucky in that I have not lost any important information yet. I use a flash drive to back up some of my important information.
Hard disk crashed… gone everything … just a day I bought new hard drive … everything gone a second I was going to back up GoSH!
I lost my collected files when i was 13 and my computer used scandisk on my harddrive and corrupted a good portion of the files….
I keep important information in my mail account, but otherwise no backup….
A few years ago I set up a Raid 0 array in order to get some faster hard drive performance. One of the drives died suddenly and I lost over 100gb of irreplaceable data. I now keep important stuff baked up on either a second hard drive or a USB flash drive.
OH yeah I have lost a whole years worth of saved up music and pictures. I got to say I learned my lesson I back up things now.
I actually lost 2 hard drives in 2 days. Back on Sept. 9th, 2001, my girlfriend dropped my Compaq (ugh!) – which busted the screen and some internal stuff. Had to be sent back to Best buy for repair (came back 1.5 months later with a refurbed motherboard). Then 2 days later… well, I worked in NY adjacent to the WTC at the time and, needless to say, my work computer (which had some personal stuff) was destroyed. Lost a ton of pictures, music, emails – all the good stuff.
Now I have a Mac and have 2 external hard drives – one with Time Machine and another for just pictures and iTunes media.
I lost about 100gb of music when my cheap external drive crashed last year. I didn’t lose any photos because I archive those to DVD and to the cloud (twice: flickr and zips-per-dvd on a server), but I slack off on that process sometimes.
My current external is making bad noises lately, so this replacement would really hit the spot.
Thanks,
Nate
I lost everything on my secondary computer a couple of years ago. Photos and a list of all the marathons I have done were on that drive. I still haven’t put together that list of races again. I still don’t back up but I put photos on dvd’s now.
I’ve been lucky enought to not have any data lost in my 20 years as a computer user :)
My current backup is using Microsoft Mesh to do two things.
1- Synchronize my files (mainly school related) between my Tablet and my Desktop.
2- At the same time all those files are been synchronized with my online desktop on Mesh as well.
I don’t backup any other type of files since every school year I perform a fresh install of both my Desktop and Tablet. The reason is that I probably spend less time doing a fresh install than trying to clean up all the programs that gets added (for fun, school, or just to try them) throughout the year.
My wife is technology challenged. She is trying to start a bookkeeping business from home. I think that I could save her a lot of heart ache with a good back up system.
I lost everything just a few months ago when the liquid cooling in my pc managed to fry my processor. Pictures of my kids, school papers I had written, customer infortmation. Other than blank dvd’s which i have very few of I have no way of backing ym things up so I could certainly put this to great use
I have lost data on an old PC 6 months ago and still haven’t tried to recover it yet.
I backed up my data with DVD then, and still do so.
We lost everything about a year ago, but luckily we could piece it together from CDs we had.
I’ve lost data too many times to mention
I back up with dvd’s about every 2 months.. this would make that job much easier!
I lost everything once, years ago… now I back up my music and photos on my ipod
Desperately need backup stuff
My last year of college is when my computer finally died. it had had to be restored a few times, but with warning so I had been able to back everything up. It died during finals week unexpectedly. So I had all my important advertising / design- basically my limited portfolio files stored on my jump drive for safe keeping- and my jump drive some how had blown up and “nothing” was stored on it anymore. So, i’m currently storing on various jump drives, but would LOVE a central point to store everything, as I am terrifed of something like this happening again. I hope I win!
I had an 80GB samsung laptop hard drive go bad on me, but I threw it in the freezer and was able to backup my data before samsung replaced the drive (with a 100GB one too). Now I keep most of my stuff backed up on a bunch of external drives, I have maybe 5, and most are only 160GB, and my laptop has a 500GB hard drive, so it’s rather annoying to back up that way.
I haven’t lost any important data because I create backup DVDs and the data I use every day I create backups on USB drives.
I currently create backup DVDs.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Fortunately ive been very lucky not to have lost any data, i am taking a massive risk because i have no main backup. i am a DJ so losing my audio collection would be devistating. It’s quite large on random cd’s and partitions… something of this size would be amazing :)
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Fortunately ive been very lucky not to have lost any data, i am taking a massive risk because i have no main backup. i am a DJ so losing my audio collection would be devistating. It’s quite large on random cd’s and partitions… something of this size would be amazing :)
(PS, this maybe a double post, its not intentional, i thought the first may have not worked.. please delete if so. this is not an attempt to enter twice, thanks)
I did have a hard drive hiccup. I didn’t know (newbie 1995) that a compressed drive is fragile and thought it would be a great way to store more. Luckily I knew someone who was able to recover my data.
I’ve been really lucky. Haven’t lost anything devastating, just time consuming to recreate. I know I have to get better at backing up. Right now I just use CDs to back up photos, music and data.
My current backup plan is this:
Firstly, a prayer to merciful Minerva that nothing will ever go wrong with my laptop and that it will never get stolen or damaged, despite the amount of travelling I do.
Secondly, if anything should ever go wrong, God forbid, I would check that all my music and photos are still on A-drive, where I deposited them for free several months ago and then completely forgot about. I would, of course, lose anything added to my laptop since I uploaded them, but there you go.
Thirdly, I would root out the DVDs to which I copied the same music and photos, just in case. I’m pretty sure I backed them up properly…Once again, anything added in the past half year would be lost.
So, I think I have most of the things that I would hate to lose backed up, even if it is in a rather half-arsed fashion. Whether I still have the registration numbers for various software I’m running, I couldn’t say for sure. Either way, it would be annoying to have to search out and download the relevant software that it has taken me a while to put together from various free offers. (I wonder where those registration numbers are?)
If I had a genuinely safe backup I would, for the first time in my life, do a Dell System Restore. I think I have accumulated so much trash over the years, both in the registry and everywhere else, that the thought of having my laptop back to its pristine condition is really very attractive. This time I would know how to look after it from the get-go, not like when I first got it. Until now I have never dared try a system restore, just in case something goes horribly wrong, A-Drive goes bust on the same day and my backup DVDs turn out to contain only error messages.
More than anything, having an external drive big enough to take not only a copy of the contents of my own laptop, but also perhaps a copy of my mum’s and girlfriend’s computers as well, would make me feel less nervous about my amateurish attempts to make either of them load in less than 20 minutes on startup.
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
I have lost data. Mostly music, so it wasn’t a big deal. Currently, I use a Windows Home Server for my primary backup. I made sure to use the “Duplication” feature to prevent data loss from a single disk failure. I also encrypt and backup that to an external USB drive for offsite storage. I would love to use one of the many online services, but I’m too paranoid. Even encrypted, do I want all of my data sitting on some server somewhere? Not so much.
I lost a lot of data in the past when my hard drive crashed due to mechanical failure. I would like an external so I could run Time Machine to back up all of my data
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
I have been very lucky not to lose anything, but I had a very close near miss. I was using my laptop, and it started to make an odd noise. Not long after that, I got a critical hard drive error that warned me to back-up my data. The computer was only about 2 months old, so I didn’t have a plan. Now I back-up my data via Norton 360 using a 250gig drive.
I just got a new macbook, never had one before so just learning the ins and outs of using one. I have also never stored anything on an external harddrive and learned the hardway, when my desktop crashed and I lost everything. I could really use one as I don’t want to lose my precious pictures again. Documents can be redone, but you can never recapture the moment of the picture.
Video and Photos. I lost some of them due to hard disk crash. Luckily I did some backup prior to the crash.
I backup my data monthly using DVD.
I was transfering my parents collection of 78 rpm records to CD when the hard drive quit. I now back everything up on Dell DataSafe.
Yes I’ve been in the middle of writing an essay and lost it completely. I had to start from scratch.
I haven’t lost anything yet but always worry that the day will come I have 1000’s of photos and music stored on my computor and really need this
Bonnie in FL
blday50@yahoo.com
oh my gosh I just had a catastrophic crash and cost me $2000 to retrieve it all – my back up failed!!!!!!!
Lost 60gb worth of data last month, and havent gotten a backup plan going yet
Have not lost anything crucial or important so far in 5 years of my computing use *touch wood.
But this Seagate solution would surely prevent it, if ever…
I would hate to lose all of my important documents the most. I once had a hard drive crash that cost me years of photo’s that i was never able to recover, so i back-up regularly to dvd;s, Winning this would make backing up much faster and simpler.
I have never lost anything important as such.
I backup the most valuable data on cds
I usually back up important files and folders, “mozilla bookmarks and settings, emails, pictures, etc.” on my external harddrive. However, it being already 2-3 years old, it’s time I start living in the cloud to backup important documents and files.
The worst was when I formatted my dads computer when upgrading to a new desktop, over this past summer. I completely formatted his old pc’s driver w/o backing up his important emails! OH what a week it was, trying to recover as much as I could, downloading different recovery software, to absolutely no avail. Now, I make him use Evernote to save important documents or email he wants to access from anywhere, since he is a pilot and bought him a apple timecapsule where he has scheduled backups now from his MBP. He also has a external 500GB seagate hdd to backup media.
Lesson learnt: Ask parents where their important files are, “bookmarks, outlook email, vital documents,” before formatting their computer.
I am losing my job January 1st and I have a lot of files I need backed up. Plain and simple. Merry Christmas everybody! Congrats to whoever wins!
I once lost a year’s worth of columns I had written (and was using to submit to syndicates), and all my resume and acting experience-related files! I had to go groveling to some publishers that had rejected my submissions recently enough that they still had them – one was kind enough to return my submission, but some writings were lost forever . . .
I took my backup (tape) copy of my voice reel back into a studio for a new transfer.
NOW all my stuff is on my PC Hard drive, on CD-ROM, AND on my (rapidly running out of room) Western Digital Hard Drive (250 GB seemed so large when I got it . . .)
I have lost somewhat important data while experimenting with different linux installations (I only bothered to backup the most important data). I use Mozy Home to backup the most important data daily, but 2GB is not enough to backup all the data I want to.
I lost everything on my computer because of a power surge that messed my computer up.Now I just save pics and music on discs.
I’m lucky that I haven’t suffered any data losses. I use Foldershare to keep my Tablet PC and my desktop in sync as my first level of protection. But I also use a USB hard drive as my second level of protection for the really important stuff. So of course the FreeAgent would certainly be a great boon!
I’ve been lucky so far with not losing any crucial data, and I admit I don’t back up like I should. But I did find out that formatting wipes ALL the data when I was a wee little lad.
I’ve lost a lot of important data/pictures when my fairly new hard drive failed. I still don’t have a backup system and could really use this.
I lost a bunch of pictures before, still don’t have a viable backup scheme help!
i dont think i have ever had a major loss of data – therefore, i seem to not care (that is to say, do anything about) backing up my data in a vigilant manner – knocking on wood right now (seems to be my plan, lol). thx
I have been lucky enough to not lose anything thus far. I currently don’t have a back up plan, so I would love to win this.
txhottie_86 at yahoo dot com
I’ve lost data before. I now back up my data on flash drives.
Last January I was moving to a new apartment, and on the way to the new place, I literally DROPPED my computer on to the floor. I hadn’t backed ANY of my files up. It was awful.
So far so good losing data. An occasional save to a USB drive.
My last computer repeatedly crashed and I lost documents, photos and music. I have not learned from those experiences and have yet to backup anything that is on my new computer.
depends on the definition of important i consider the 400gb of media on my computer all somewhat important.
my old 160gb drive went crazy and i had to restore everything from dvd backups only a partial restore because not everything was backed up…
i know better now.
I have lost important data and when it happens you have a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach! I try to backup stuff on CDs. Wish I did it more often!
ardy22 at earthlink.net
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
Actually I just lost important data only a few weeks ago. My laptop fell from my desk and the usb flash drive suffered a direct hit and broke in half. I tried to do some poor soldering to at least make a temporary connection to my computer to retrieve the data, but it was of no use. :( Lost some good files and haven’t backed up the drive for just over a month.
Now, well, I don’t use a flash drive. I’m actually in the market for a flash drive, but haven’t found one I liked yet…cheap, rugged, fast, and small.
I really have to start backing up more. When I did do a (poor) job of backing up, it was to my hosted ftp site…though it was slow & error-prone.
I have lost important documents when our tech guy decided to upgrade without letting me know ahead of time. I had most of my documents backed up on my personal computer. I keep all my documents on my personal computer now but it needs a backup system.
A few years ago my computer completely died while i was writing a report. When i tried to recover the data, my harddrive was dead. Now i always back up my important papers on a thumb drive.
Mine has all my pictures from graduation and of my 6 week trip to Japan over the summer, which I don’t think I would be able to replace if they were lost. The only data I’ve ever lost that mattered to me was my college application essays. They mysteriously disappeared from my computer about a month before they needed to be submitted…needless to say I spent quite a few weeks very grumpy from lack of sleep…
And still not learning my lesson, I haven’t really got a back-up plan for my computer yet.
Once I lost all of my documents in the progress of making them, including a 10 page term paper. Very frustrating. Now Periodically I make hard copies, just in case!
While at college, our department used to let us download recorded lectures. I faithfully saved them in my HD, assuming it would be useful someday. Owing to an unexpected hard-disk crash, I lost every single file. Though it broke my heart, it didn’t kill me as I still hadn’t entered the teaching profession. Years later, when I started out as a lecturer, I realized how much of a difference it would have made to my teaching if I had those original lectures with me. We all learn at some point, don’t we?
Now, as a lecturer of finance, the most important data for me are the lecture slides, problem sets, quiz questions and their solutions, grades of my former students (in case they request me for a recommendation later). Equally critical for me are video recordings of lectures offered both by me and the faculty that I invite for guest lectures. After the earlier lesson, I now have a backup plan – just that it is neither centralized nor streamlined. My lecture slides, problem sets and grade-sheets are archived at the end of every course and mailed to my gmail account (and labeled appropriately for quick retrieval). Since uploading video lectures takes time (plus, web-storage isn’t cheap!) and since they occupy too much of my precious disk space, I just cut CDs and hope that they don’t get scratched from multiple readings.
I didn’t back up my data. Fortunately all of the pictures that I scanned were saved to a tiny usb device. I need something like this to backup everything.
Some years back I tried to set up my own PC and had mediocre knowledge of hard drives, installation etc. My new PC did not have a diskette slot and I couldn’t install my SATA drive to get windows running. I had an IDE drive but it was full of data and I didn’t want to take the risk of deleting everything. I did the noob thing: went back to the computer shop and bought another 40Gb IDE drive :-( .
I have lost lots of family photos due to lack of backup. Currently, I don’t do anything other than the auto function that came with my laptop.
“Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?”
Sadly, I have – a few years ago, I had a hard drive that was on the fritz. So I purchased a new one, and transferred all of my data over without a hitch. But in a cruel twist of fate, the brand new hard drive which I had purchased turned out to be corrupt, and it immediately crashed, ruining all my data. Luckily my significant other is very skilled at recovering mangled, corrupted data, but not all of it was salvageable.
You would think I would have learned from this, but my backup methods are still woefully inadequate. I’m still storing my data on CDs (am I the only one nowadays?), and I can’t remember the last time I burned one of those discs. So this giveaway is perfect timing, because I actually have been planning to buy a drive just like this one, because I obviously need one!! Thank you for offering this very generous giveaway. I would be absolutely thrilled to win this piece of equipment that I really need, and it would benefit my boyfriend as well – he’s got a much, much better backup system than I do, but he could use more space as well. Thank you for the chance!
I haven’t lost anything yet. I backup my pics, vids, and documents on multiple CDs.
I’ve lost data when my computers have died on me, but I was so disorganized I don’t even know what I missed. (Ah, to be a teenybopper again!) These days, I don’t have a backup plan and I’m starting to get an inkling of how important it is to get one in place. If I win this bundle, I’m definitely going to have to back up all my music and audio files, as well as my personal, business, and school documents. And let’s not forget my family photos. Those are priceless!
My son just lost his college stuff yesterday on his laptop; luckily, he has an external HD. I also use mine to back up photos and documents about once a month.
Yes, I once lost my hard drive. It just up and died on me with all my client’s art on it for the last 6 months. I tried taking it to a data recovery place, but I just couldn’t afford what they wanted. I ended up recreating every piece of work from scratch on my own dime. It totally sucked. Luckily my customers were patient with me. Now I own a small printing company, and I do a lot of typsetting and graphic design work for local businesses. For a few years now I’ve been relying on a back-up system my friend set up for me. I have three computers on a network and he set it up so PC1 dumps to PC2, PC2 dumps to PC3, and PC3 dumps to PC1. It’s a lot better than nothing, but the problem is, it’s so cumbersome. All of my hard drives are full and I have a million back-up CD’s that I have to dig through every time we need to make revisions to an older job. I’m sure you get the picture. This would make life so much easier!
Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
I had a 250gb HD die, and I lost almost everything on it. I was able to recover only about 20gb of it, so it really wasn’t a pleasant experience. I do backup now, but only of my operating system. I would need more space to be able to do a “real” backup.
I have lost data in the past, due to not backing up like I should have been doing. I have learned my lesson. I would like to have a new portable backup device.
I repurpose old laptop drives into backup systems. Unfortunately, my old iBook G4 drive gave out this past week. My computer went off, and I smelled burnt plastic. Not good.
I’ve never lost important data (knock on wood)
I backup everything online
We have had a computer crash more than once. It was a pain trying to retrieve everything, luckily we were able to retrieve most everything important. Right now we backup everything on dvds. It would be wonderful to win this so we would have some peace of mind that everything is safe!
Back when I was in college i lost a few papers i was writing…but now all i work on is a Mac and dont ahve as many problems…but I have a 500G hard drive…but its already getting full! eek!
I have been lucky so far and have not lost data.
so far I haven’t lost anything, but would be devastated to lose my pictures and music.
My hard disk got burn so i loss all my info. Actually i make cd/dvd backups when i have 700 mb of new information. I also have a backup on my home computer and important stuff i send it to my gmail acount….
Due to an incorrect setting, and in incorrect action of the computer professionals who should know better, I once lost my entire work e-mail
database. Retrieval from their backup tapes was slow and in fact
left me with a several week gap in the database, since the incorrect
setting had been applied. Was the most painful computer experience
I’ve ever had. Since then, I never trust computer techs to know
what they are doing (they blew away my local replica, which in fact
was the only copy that was good, and since it was too big for the
recycle bin, it went away permanently – they should have backed it
up first), and keep my own backups.
Oops, wrong address on that last post. Sorry
A little less than a month ago, my hard drive failed. We went everywhere looking for a fix, My family was willing to fork out hundreds of dollars to get it fixed. We had so much data on their. 5 years of pictures, all gone. 40,000 songs, all gone. School work from 4 people, wiped out. It was terrible, every picture that we took on a digital camera that didnt get printed (which is a lot) were all gone. We lost everything on that computer that we had for about 5 years.
We don’t have an external hard drive. So I desperately need one for my family of 6. Another crash and we are 100% screwed. My brother is on his 4th year of college and has some massive projects stored on here.
The worst thing I ever lost was a book I was writing, one night the hard drive just gave up, was apparently a catastrophic hardware failure, never saw one byte of data off it again. Needless to say I’m a backup freak now, but I’m out of space (several 1000 photos do eat up HD space) and have to pick and choose what I can backup, 1.5 Tb would sure help….
I once lost a ton of data when my laptop was stolen from my car… I know, I know you asking why would you leave a laptop in your car!? Well at the time I was kind of living out of my car so you can imagine the amount of other things that were in my car that were also stolen. I was also parked 2 blocks from a police station… how about them apples?
I try not to think about all the photos and school work I lost. It still makes me sad. Now I back everything up on CD… old school!.
I lost lots of data. Am currently using dvd and cd’s until I can get the money for an external drive. NTDRL on bootup got corrupt.
I have a robocopy script that copies deltas of my important files to an external drive.
Q: Have you ever lost important data on your computer – what happened and how do you backup your data now?
A: Once my main hard drive gave up on me and I lost my studies info as well as my music.. However I cannot afford a separate drive so currently only try copying important data either to online storage or other computer.
I haven’t lost anything important yeat (keeping fingers crossed). I currently back up by burning onto cd’s
I once lost all the pictures i had stored on my computer. Luckily I had an old dvd where I backed up some of them. So I didn’t lose all, but some of them. Now I try to backup more often using two old computers I have at home, and eventually burning some dvd
One time we were working on registration for a big convention. After we had logged in all the information somehow we lost everything and had to put it in all over again!
cjnedrow@gmail.com
Sorry to say after my computer crashed. I haven’t done anything different
My current backup plan to my computer is inefficient at best. I do it manually but I do it usually when there’s some kind of computer scare or malfunction and then I remember I had better back some things up. I do it manually and usually put it on my desktop and then copy it to a disc. See what I mean about inefficient?
It would completely break my heart if I lost my photos. Everything else would make me mad but not hurt me. The sentimental memories get me every time.
I’ve lost everything once but it was before I used digital photography so it was annoying and maddening but not heartbreaking and I could recover.
The funny part is that I actually made a backup folder… but forgot to BACK that folder up when I formatted the pc.. yeah.. real smart. Now I make SURE it’s copied to my VERY OLD backup drive..
Clay
claytaylor@gmail.com
I’ve lost everything on my computer twice. Once I pawned a computer and didn’t have the money to get it back, another time an ex roommate “accidentally” wiped my computer. You’d think that I’d have some sort of backup now, but I don’t because I’m poor. So, winning this would be absolutely amazing. Please count me in and thanks for the contest!
codisweepstakes at gmail dot com
Once, I accidentally deleted the latest version of my online portfolio (bypassing the Recycle Bin) and had to use a recovery tool to restore it – almost thought I had lost it for good!).
I currently use a Seagate 250GB external hard drive to back up my data, however, space is becoming limited on it. :p
Thanks for the opportunity to win this awesome prize!
Steven
Fortunately I don’t keep a lot of important info on my hard drive. I usually save important documents to external media right away.
I have never lost data thankfully. I usually just backup my photos and music to dvds.
Knock on wood, I’ve never lost important data. I back up
over my home network to an external drive.
I got a brand new computer. I transfered all the data. Came home and I heard this terrible grinding noise. The hard drive failed. Thank goodness I still had my old computer.
I haven’t lost anything yet… keeping my fingers crossed as I don’t really have a backup system currently.
I run a 1/2 terabyte buffalo drive connected to a win2000 server. It is mapped to my other w2000, xp, and vista machines via my combo wired/wireless net. I schedule backups from the other 3 nightly, and then do my Mac and Mandriva laptops once a week manually. Works well, but I could always use more space.
I’ve been fairly lucky and havent’ lost anything crucial. Right now, I’ve got to back everything up on DVDs, and that a pain, so this would really be great to have much more data in one place. Thanks for the great giveaway.
“Have you ever lost important data on your computer-what happened and how do you backup your data now?”
Yes, it’s gone, life went on!
XP Restore
I back up my photos on CD’s now. I learned the hard way!
I lost everything a couple of months ago due to a bug I picked up on a website. I have always just backed up to disks, but I forget to do it, as it is kind of a pain the butt. The sad part is that I apparently did learn much, because I still don’t do a backup like I should.
About six years ago, I had my HDD completely die on me. I tried to get the data retrieved, but it was too far gone. Since then, all I can afford to do is to back-up via DVDs. Bad way to do this, but it’s all I have.
yes, my hard drive was corupted and crashed lost everything files, pictures. now I back up to external drive and dvd’s
Lost a bunch of pictures once. Now, I copy over pictures over to an external hard drive every month or so.
Yes, who hasn’t lost info. I once had a laptop that overheated and I hadn’t backed anything up externally so all was lost. Now I use a drobo to save my data :)
bloggerprofilepage@michmedia.com
I once lost a ton of pictures and it was very upsetting. I’m not even sure what backup we use now (hubby is the techie in the family), but he mentioned a freeagent would be great.
I lost my music once. I was able to restore from my Dell MP3 player, but had to rebuild a lot of updates – hours on iTunes. I now back up to external drives.
I’ve lost files before, usually when a hard drive crashed, but the most recent instance was a bad OS patch, and my latest backup to an external HD was bad. I recovered some of my files from an earlier backup, but lost a lot of historical copies of content from websites I had built, and a lot of word processing documents.
My current backup plan is that I keep a word processing document with the activation codes for any software that requires them. This file, files with settings for my e-mail accounts, my browser bookmarks, and my Roboform identities and passcards are all backed up in real time to two thumb drives using NTI Shadow. I use Goodsync to automatically back up these same items, as well as my e-mail files, music, pictures, downloads, word processing documents, and other data too to two external Hard Drives (I don’t have one big enough for everything).
no back up yet – have lost a lot of pics
I am a self-employed photographer. My old computer crashed before I was able to back up 5 clients photos plus some personal photos. I was just sick about it. I still get upset thinking about it! Now I download the photos and copy to cd’s immediately (which is VERY time consuming to say the least). I really must get an external hard drive to back up to save myself time and trouble. This is an awesome contest. Thanks!
I have been lucky and never lost data. Currently I just write to a DVD and have some stuff on a jump drive. Not a great system and this prize would be great. Thanks for the contest.
With the job I had in the military I learned the importance of backing up data. I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve never lost anything. It would be great to have a back-up system of this capacity.
My tecnnological expertise is limited. I have lost important information before and I have been considering the available options. The Seagate systems sound like a strong solution, so make a winner!!!
Right now I get by with prayer and a fewer dvd’s for back-up. This would be awesome to have.
Yes, unfortunately about a month ago I lost ALL of our family pictures and ALL of the graphics I have made for my business in the last ten years. Devastation is the only way to describe what I feel. The real tragedy is that I have a little back-up hard drive AND a 4 gig jump stick and had everything backed up on those. The little hard drive died on the same day as my laptop (no virus, just old age and natural causes I think)and the jump stick has disappeared into the abyss. Very sad. Needless to say, I know so well the value of back of my data and don’t ever want to do it again! Right now on my computer, I have a few of our family pics that I have been able to get from my blog as well as a few graphics. The most important info I have right now though is my first novel that I have been slaving away at–there’s no way I want to lose that. I’m hoping that Santa brings me a new jump stick or maybe I’ll even win this prize (!!) because at the moment I am back-upless. I have been emailing myself things to store them in my mail because I don’t have any good means to do it myself here.
Thanks for the giveaway…Luckily I have never had a major “incident” losing any important data on the various Macs I’ve owned over the years, but as I start to collect more family photos, docs, etc., I realize that my current backup solution, burning onto CD/DVD’s, is not very efficient…I guess I’ll be shopping around for an external hard drive in the near future, time to join the 21st Century.
I’ve never really lost many things. So far I haven’t had a hard drive or anything fail, and I haven’t done much to back anything up. I know that if I had something to backup to I would make an automatic backup file for that purpose.
Sure I’ve lost important things when back in Windows. And never really used a backup systematically until Time Machine… Now, it’s always on. Once a month I connect an external disk to get another backup that will stay at another place. And some docs (mainly pdfs) are on MobileMe just in case I need them, when the laptop is home.
I once lost a paper for school that I was moving around on a thumb
drive. My dad found a copy on our computer, saving the day.
I back up to an external hard drive now, and could really use some
more storage
I haven’t but I don’t backup, so it would be great if I had an easy way to do that
Once our computer crashed, I didn’t totally lose the photos, but there are some that I can look at but I can’t print or send or do anything like that with them. My computer “whiz” daughter copied everything important onto cd’s and now I have a stack of cd’s with what I don’t know on them. I wanna do things like you, the smart way.
Yes, I have had computers crash. Back in the old days, wow, gone. Now, I use an external hard drive.
I once had my laptop crash and I lost everything. The worst thing was that I lost a ton of pictures that I only had stored on my hard drive. Now I back up by burning a DVD every few months. Still not the greatest process, but at least, if my system crashes, it would only be a setback, not a disaster.
Winning this would be fantastic! Thanks for a great giveaway!
I’ve been lucky so far and I haven’t lost any important info, but if I’m lucky enough to win this prize, I will make sure to store my info on it, and I will stop pressing my luck.
I lost it all after lightning struck the house. I now use dvdrs
After the birth of my first child, we were taking pictures everyday. I had backed up to a CD but I got to overwelmed on making them. My computer crashed a year later and we lost maybe 6 months of photos. I got a little better on backing up after that, still to CD and now to a 4GB thumbdrive. Hopefully it will make it through our third kid!
I am in grade 12 at the moment and just recently, I was working on a really big project at school. We have to make a fake newspaper with a group of three friends, around 5-10 articles each. After many days of gruesome work, I finished. I had a total of 8 articles (1-3 pages each article) and dozens of pictures drawn, photoshopped and found.
I call my friends and we decide to meet at one of their homes.
So I put all of my work onto my very old, somewhat glitchy portable hard drive. Now, this wouldn’t have been any risk whatsoever had I copied my documents onto it. However, when I selected all of the files to copy them, I must have slipped or missed and hit CTRL-X, rather than CTRL-C.
Little did I know, all of my hard work was on that hard drive and nowhere else. So I go to my friends house, plug in my HDD and guess what happened. Absolutely nothing.
Imagine my frustration, one day until the due date and over one weeks worth of pages upon pages of writing is gone. Well, at that moment I wasn’t exactly frustrated, considering I thought that it was still on my PC.
This is getting sort of long so I will finish up quickly.
I went home, looked for the documents and saw nothing.
It is getting really late so I figure I will just tell my teacher what happened.
Anyways, he says something like, “Yeah, like I am going to believe that.” It is understandable, I wouldn’t believe it either.
So I failed, my friends’ marks, however were not affected.
Well I learned 3 lessons from this.
Do not wait until the last minute for something that requires that much work.
Make more backups!
Remove the ‘x’ button from my keyboard so this can’t happen again.
Oh yeah, I also had hundreds of pictures and home videos were on there, but almost 80% of them were on my PC.
If I win this contest, then I will definitely use the hard drives as backups.
If not, I will buy a 1TB HDD and use amazon S3 like you suggested.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about my loss.
My current backup is a 250 Sandisk USB drive which includes all top 250 imdb movies. I haven’t lost my data yet and keeping fingers crossed.
A second drive would help so I could have one for both my computers.
I’ve never really lost anything important. Perhaps a work file or two which I simply had to start over on. But because my current backup strategy is pedestrian at best, I fell like I’m taking a big gamble with my really important files. These drives would go a long way to help ensure that I don’t lose anything I want to hold on to.
my hard drive died freshmen year of college just months after getting my new computer. i was able to backup my pictures just in time, but i ended up losing all music. luckily some friends of mine have similar music taste and i was more or less able to recover my old library by getting their music
I get alot of old pc s give to me with seagate drive s,most of the time the drive s are still working great!! I would recommend these drive s to anyone!!!
I had a total HDD failure and lost all my files except for my 2 month old genealogy research and sweepstakes hobby files. Now I back up weekly to a USB flash drive … limited but it’s better than nothing.
As the Tech Support Manager for a State government agency on any given day my co-workers could lose critical files and information because they did not follow IT guidelines.
The most recent incident had me working overtime to retrieve gigabytes of budget dept spreadsheets that was suppose to be backed up to our iFolder server. After setting up a replacement laptop that could not download from their iFolder my only hope was to restore the broken budget department laptop. After some clever hacking I was able to restore the missing files on the laptop and backed up the files to 3 different places.
I haven’t lost any valuable information. I don’t have any backup.
I ended up losing all my pictures and stuff on my computer.
Memories I could never get back which sucked so badly.
Now I am just sending things to my email…but you can only guess how that is ha.
This would be a perfect prize for me.
Right now the only “backup” plan I use is to email critical files to myself to a web-based email account, and I just leave them there. So far I’ve only had one disaster doing this, when the email provider closed down. I really, really need an off-computer backup system. I’m a writer and have years’ worth of manuscripts in p;rogress as well as research materials from sources that are no longer available. I’d be devastated to lose all this data!!
When i have lost important data in the past, I have basically had to recreate it to the best of my ability. Having this would backup would certainly put me in a better position.
i havent lost anything yet but i sure as heck dont want to either i need some kind of backup plan but i dont have one yet :(
I once deleted my iPhotot library, as I had moved it to Aperture. Little did I know, Aperture didn’t take any of the videos, and I had no backup. Bye bye, videos. Now I currently have 2 Externals, a 320 GB for Time Machine and Aperture Vault, and a 250 for current projects. I need a 1 TB for Finished Projects, though.
1997–after I lost my C drive I found I could put a copy of my pics on my D drive and if C crashed, D was always there. I’ve come a long way since then, but even my saved dvd’s all went up in smoke when my house burned down. Luckily my computer wasn’t there at the time.
My hard drive crashed a few months ago and I lost everything! I had so many photos that I didn’t have saved anywhere else and they are now gone forever! I actually don’t have any means of backup for my computer currently, but I do keep all my photos on my camera’s memory card.
In college I lost several papers of a very important term paper. After that I made sure to back-up to disk and e-mail myself a copy of important documents. However, now that I have graduated I seldom remember to back-up my important pictures, files, etc. This would be such a fantastic prize to win!
I have lost my history of pictures and personal information every time I get a new computer since I have never owned a backup drive. I am totally disabled so usually someone gives me a newer computer and my old pics and stuff get junked with the old one. It would be very nice to have an external backup drive to keep all the time. Thanks for the chance to win one!
Yours in Christ, friendship and love…
Hipster
Recently, when I went to turn on my laptop, I received an error that Windows wouldn’t load and failed to operate/start up. I’ve had my laptop for quite sometime and had a lot of things saved on it, but now it doesn’t work and everything is lost. I have a few important things saved to my flash drive, but that’s about it as far as back up goes. I would love to win this so that I would have a way to properly back up all my files. Thanks!
Luckily, I haven’t yet lost any important data, but I have known quite a few people who have and I would like to be prepared! I would love to win this so that I can backup all my important files, photos, and videos! Thank you for this wonderful giveaway!
I lost all the data on my computer three years ago when my hard drive failed. I invested in a 250GB Seagate external drive and use SyncToy to periodically backup important files, projects, as well as music and pictures. It’s worked wonders so far, though I’m planning to invest in a bigger storage drive since I’m running out of room on the 250GB.
I have never lost data (so far). But I back up daily to an external
hard drive
i’ve never lost any of my data, but when my laptop got juice spilled on it and i knew i would have to send it in to be either fixed or replaced i did a back up of all my files onto disks, so i was glad for that because they