Backup Your Data

July 6th, 2008 by Chris

The world recently conspired against me to make my hard drive on my primary computer fail, and fail big time.

Thankfully, I had backups… my backups weren’t as extensive as I would have liked and I did lose some stuff, but overall, my most important stuff was backed up and secure.

How horrible would it have been if I didn’t have the backups? I cringe to even think about it.

There is really no excuse to not run backups. External hard drives are really cheap now, you can get half a terabyte for around $100. The software to do the backup sometimes comes with the drive, or it isn’t expensive if you need to buy it.

I recommend doing both local and remote backups. A local backup will protect you if your hard drive fails, a remote backup will protect you if your house or office burns down.

I don’t yet do remote backups myself, not recently or automated anyways, I need to start. There are great services nowadays that allow you to easily do off site backups, for relatively little money. It is worthwhile to set these things up.

Additionally, be sure to backup your MySQL databases on your servers, as losing those would be equally or perhaps more catastrophic. I wrote a tutorial today on doing it, which you may find through the above link.

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Posted in: General »  by: Chris

3 Responses to “Backup Your Data”

  1. Ken Barbalace  Says:
    July 7th, 2008 at 5:22 am

    Funny enough, the hard drive on my laptop also failed recently. Fortunately I also had back ups of my data (most is stored on my server and sync’d to my laptop via the “make available offline” feature in Windows XP). As a result I did not lose any critical data, but it was a real pain in the ass rebuilding the system itself.

  2. Blue Cat Buxton  Says:
    July 8th, 2008 at 3:36 am

    I have been using Carbonite for about 6 months now on my main laptop. It backs up in the background and fairly much just gets on with its self. (I found it can mess up Skype calling, but you can temporarily disable it).

  3. Josh  Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 5:16 pm

    Glad to hear that you didn’t lose too much, Chris. Your post is a good reminder for all of us.

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