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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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@Ren – ugh, that sucks! If my sisters had done that I would be pretty pissed off.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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!!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ohh, forgot to say I’ve got a Mac! ;)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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I am thankful for the wealth of information shared, the variety, and… oh! That hard drive I need to keep all my baby photos and videos on. Thanks to Macenstein and Seagate.
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
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.
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I am htankful for the random chick of the month, awesomeness, mac + hot girls.
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
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.
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I am thankful for Macenstein’s information and opinions on all things Mac related in addition to the chance at winning free stuff!
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
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).
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macenstein is for mac fanatics the best comfort on the web in any universe
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
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.
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I am thankful that Macenstein is so giving to people that are only writing thanks in order to win this Hard Drive
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
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
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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.
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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 :)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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!
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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. :)
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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.
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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.
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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 :)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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 :-).
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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)
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 ;)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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!
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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/
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 :)
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
Free Stuff from the Macenstein
goes with
Free Stuff from thefreemac.com
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
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I’m thankful for macenstein because of all the sarcastic comedy. Seriously, it’s the only feed i subscribe to that I know I’m going to open up the full page for every item, not just look at the teaser.
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
It’s the Top Gear of mac websites! No facts, just entertainment.
This comment was originally posted on http://macenstein.com/default)“>Macenstein
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…
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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
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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. :)
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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
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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
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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.
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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!
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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!)
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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…
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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 :-)
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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.
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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.
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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. :-)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 :(
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
I like Macenstein for the reviews and the comedic take on the Mac world.
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Yes, I had a hard drive crash recently. When I suspected it was failin