Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Poof! 20 Years of Work Vanishes

Shaman:

I'm too lazy to read this entire thread. But I guess the gist is that you lost 20 years of work and that you were able to recover it eventually. I'm glad that you got it back. I've enjoyed your posts over the years.

KC

KC: That's the nut of it.

Yes! Not in the business, but the wife and I physically do our own triple backups with spatially separated storage with no faith in the cloud. Presently, it's mostly the thousands of images Cookie generates with her cameras. For me it was mountains of data coming from other electronic sources.

Another deal, our passwords are also date related. Give me a a specific date 15 or 20 years back and I can have the password in seconds. Been retired since 2008, but was recently asked to come in to the office and retrieve some 2005 data and documents with some generated by no longer supported software. Took about 5 minutes and the need to fire up a long retired 2004 Dell workstation.

For me that lesson was harshly learned back in 1990. Those were real floppy disk days, and a power bleep fried both my original and copy in my mid-backup process. It was only a month's worth of key punching, but significant when one is in a publish or perish position. Was starting to develop some carpal tunnel symptoms on that run.

Good luck,

Having read this thread up to this point, I’ll happily admit that most of it is pure gibberish to me. Believe I’ll go daydream about flintlocks now…..

BTW: If you're looking for what a retired TSM of 40 years work experience does for backups on his home machines, I'll lay out the plan.

First off, I have USB drives. I used to have 1 TB and went to 2TB and finally purchased 4 TB Seagate drives. Size is wholly determined by how much data I want to hold.

For backup software, I use Syncback by Two Bright Sparks. I use the free version, but I used to have a pro license that would do network shares. That's not needed now.

I make my user folder shareable-- Windows, Linux, whatever. That way I can backup of all the machines in the house over the local LAN.

I create jobs on Syncback to back up the folders to one of the USB drives. I then have a job that copies that USB drive to another. I use straight one-way backups . You'll see all sorts of other ways to use Syncback, but I don't go there for this type of work.

I work these USB drives for maybe 5 years and then stop backing up to them. They'll hold data for a long time, but constant use will kill them.

I rotate the USB drives so one copy goes to the basement. Another goes to the farm.

When one of the USB drives goes tits-up, I copy from one of the remaining drives and move on. Usually, the USB drives are just corrupted. They can be reformatted and reused. I've had one sincere hardware failure in a decade. It's more likely to get corruption. It's going to happen. That's why I maintain at least two backups of everything.

I also have Google Drive. Any cloud service will work. I just picked Google, because it was cheap. All my must-have documents are stored out there. I regularly back those up to one of my local machines and then those files get sucked up by SyncBack. I edit the online version and keep what's on my local machine as an ace-in-the-hole.

With the Linux boxes, it's so easy to start over fresh that I don't worry about repairing the Operating System. Windows? I am generally inclined to do the same. Blow it away and start fresh. I blow up a system about once every 6 months or so. However, these are old systems that had it coming. The system I'm working on right now was mfd in 2012 and was thrown in the garbage at work in 2017. I put a new solid-state drive in it 3 years ago, and it runs like it has turpentine on its ass.

I started doing Youtubes and recording video. I also got a drone. Video eats disk space. I can fill up a drive just by blinking. Therefore, I've learned to just delete old projects and rely on what's on the backups. The same goes for pics. Once I'm sure the pics are backed up on several USB drives, I delete what is not current and go to my backup when I need it.

What's really lacking in my plan is versioning. That is, I update the USB drives with the latest version of the file. If I discover the file is corrupt later, so is the version on the backup. However, I keep an old set of USB drives for that purpose. I also don't rotate the set that goes to the farm all that often, so I haven't gotten bit yet. Also, because I have about 5 GB of my most important files on Google Drive, those files have automatic versioning, and you can see pretty far back. That's one reason I save to the cloud.

None of this has anything to do with the current OOOPS. I had about 10 backups of the site downloaded to this local machine, so I never had to hit the USB drives that were across the room.

Every single day myself and my assistant left the job with a 100GB hard drive. Not necessarily a lot of data but A LOT work contained within.

We simply did not trust our “IT” dept who were constantly moving shît, deleting by ooopsie, etc.

ALWAYS HAVE YOUR SHÎT BACKED UP

The reason why I keep hard copies of investments and bank statements.

+1

My wife had her recipes on a website owned by a guy who died.
Her backup is hundreds of faded recipe cards.

I keep everything. Probably overkill. Very little in cloud/offsite storage. 2 home built NAS boxes and one store bought box.

Rsync is my friend.

One of the NAS boxes is out in the shop. Maybe the both won't burn down at the same time.....

Don't matter how you do it just make sure it works on retrieval/reinstall. I don't save machine images just set them all up with separate /home partitions and back that up.

Oh yeah, piss on Micro$$$oft.

One of Cookie's photo buddies thought he was formatting his camera memory card on his PC today. Turns out he did his hard drive. Had not backed up and lost about a year's worth of images.