Running and Passing.


Exhibit Caution. Backup.

Dan Saelinger reminds us why we should backup. Preferably off-site.

We should also remember Google’s study of hard drive failure trends and the fact that about half of all failures occur with no warning. S.M.A.R.T. is a good start and SSDs (Solid-state drives) are considerably less fragile than traditional hard disks, but in the end all devices will fail.  I have about a terabyte of data that I would hate to lose. From old school work to current assignments and projects, I try to keep everything reasonably managed and properly archived.

I have been using the Cobain Backup software, but have had past success with GFI backup. I recently switched to Cobain because it seems to offer a lower memory footprint and does no attempt to run as a service or hook itself into the OS.

May 12th, 2010 at 7:28 pm : Posted in Uncategorized ------ with 3 comments

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  • http://ryanmerrill.net Ryan Merrill

    I totally need to get better at this myself. I have most of my important files on a 300GB external harddrive that I know is just waiting to go down at the worst possible moment. Granted, I have a few important files on the “cloud” in my Dropbox account, but not nearly enough stored off site.

    Here are a couple of great articles about setting up a reliable backup system:
    http://www.43folders.com/2010/03/15/yes-another-backup-lecture
    http://daringfireball.net/2010/03/ode_to_diskwarrior_superduper_dropbox
    http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/murphys_law

  • http://www.system7.org system7

    cron and rsync are your friends! Any experience with other SaaS providers? Does dropbox encrypt your data before sending it into the sky?

  • http://www.kowalabearhugs.com Matt K

    Merrill thanks for the links.

    Apart from my physical backups, I use TrueCrypt to create secure storage containers and upload some my most important files onto my hosted server space.

    I have never used Dropbox and thus cannot attest to it security or ease of use.