Online Back-up and Another Computer Crash

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Kirstie

Kirstie

PFG, Picture Framing God
Joined
Jan 16, 2007
Posts
8,395
Loc
Berkeley, CA
Nothing like a little crash to galvanize one into action. My brand new iMac at the office at work crashed today. I can't believe it. I'm hauling it in to Apple tomorrow. It is backed up. This afternoon and tonight I have set up Time Machine (the new Apple back up utility) and the new home computer is now backed up. And I have directed the Back Up Apple program to backup my documents and desktop files every 24 hours to the online iDisk. And I sent the Acer Wizard files to the idisk from file sharing the other day and have them saved on my home computer. I'll update those Wizard files each weekend.

Not enough iDisk space for online photo or music back up, but maybe somewhere else. Two computer problems in 2 months is enough for me so I am getting serious about backing up online and on the hard drives. I'll set up a new Maxtor drive in the office when we get the new office computer back. I still can't believe that brand new computer crashed, or whatever it did.

Oh, I also set up Boot Camp and installed Windows XP at home on my new Mac here. Kind of cool to see Windows sitting there on my computer. I'm going to use to to install Wizard Mat Designer and practice Path Trace at home.

Question: We have talked about online storage before but I cant find the correct posts. I still have 20 GB or so of photos and music to back up online. Everything else is taken care of. What online back up sites do you like?
 
Kirstie, I'll be very interested to hear what your Apple Genius has to say about the crash. Please keep us posted.

I've had my imac for almost 2 years without one tiny problem. However, I did not opt for BootCamp/Windows deal.
 
jframe said:
Kirstie, I'll be very interested to hear what your Apple Genius has to say about the crash. Please keep us posted.

I've had my imac for almost 2 years without one tiny problem. However, I did not opt for BootCamp/Windows deal.
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I have had Macs for 20 years and I have never seen anything like this. The numbers under hard drive and the iDisk icons suddenly read 0 kb for the iDisk and 4kb for the hard drive, as if both were full. I did a get info on my home folder, and everywhere else I could think of. Nothing near full. Hmmm... I could not save anything to the drive or the iDisk because I got full messages. This is a brand new 350GB new computer with about 80 used, running Leopard like the one at home. I tried to restart and then it would not start again. Button dead, computer dead. The 24" at home here is humming along. This is the one that has Windows on the partition.

Only one folder lost--new work created yesterday--edits of our new staff photo, now online. I don't like it and wanted to tweak it a bit. Oh well, not a big deal. Funny, I had not gotten around to hooking up the Maxtor back up drive because the computer was so new. Goes to show. Not a problem because everything except that file is also here at home. I drop all new work onto the iDisk and retrieve it at home each night.

I too will be interested to say what Apple says because this is just plain weird.

Thanks for the online storage sites. Once I save the photos and music, everything will have an online home, a computer home, and an external hard drive home.

I'll figure out a plan for POS when we load it on next year. Leaning towards Frame Ready.
 
I'm not skittish about embracing technology, but I don;t trust online backups. I know of only one situation where the backups were not kept as promised, but what if...?

For less than $100 you can get a 250GB external harddrive, and for another small sum (maybe $60?) you can get software called "Acronis True Image Home" that will backup your entire hard drive in a short time. That way, you have it in your hand, not in some far-away, out of reach storage bank.

Most of my computers have 30 to 60 GB of data, and they all take less than 60 minutes to back up. I have three of those external drives, and I backup all of my hard drives once a month. If that seems paranoic, consider what the loss of one computer's data could cost in terms of time and frustration.
 
Jim Miller said:
I'm not skittish about embracing technology, but I don;t trust online backups. I know of only one situation where the backups were not kept as promised, but what if...?
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Online backups are not a substitute for local backups (to hard drives, thumb drives, or whatever). They are an incredibly valuable addition.

Using DataDepositBox I get immediate offsite backups at very affordable prices. Additionally my data from all my computers is stored under a single account and is accessible from anywhere.

If you rely solely on local backups, make sure you have an offsite rotation to guard against floods, fires, and the like!!!!
 
Jim Miller said:
I'm not skittish about embracing technology, but I don;t trust online backups. I know of only one situation where the backups were not kept as promised, but what if...?

For less than $100 you can get a 250GB external harddrive, and for another small sum (maybe $60?) you can get software called "Acronis True Image Home" that will backup your entire hard drive in a short time. That way, you have it in your hand, not in some far-away, out of reach storage bank.

Most of my computers have 30 to 60 GB of data, and they all take less than 60 minutes to back up. I have three of those external drives, and I backup all of my hard drives once a month. If that seems paranoic, consider what the loss of one computer's data could cost in terms of time and frustration.
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Nothing is paranoiac where computers are concerned. They are machines that can fail, and eventually do fail. But what if the house or store burn down? This actually happened to teachers at my kid's school in the Oakland fire. They lost files at work when the school burned down and thier offsite back ups were lost when their homes burnt down. Oh, and I do live in the hills, and we are in earthquake country about 50 yards from the Hayward Fault. I have instructed my family to grab the back up drive in such an emergency.

I have about 80-100gb of total data because of all of the PSD work for the web site and newsletter. I figure if one has both an external drive and online storage one is covered.
 
Jim Miller said:
I backup all of my hard drives once a month. If that seems paranoic...
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Maybe I'm a pessimist, but what I see is the potential to lose the last 30 days worth of data.

Online solutions like DataDeposit Box allow you to specify backups as often as every time the file changes (which could be hundreds of times a day in an accounting or POS application and not recommended) or as little as once a day, and keep as many as the last 28 versions.

However, I would not use an online provide as my only solution any more than I would use any one other solution. Kirstie has the right idea - one online that is far from harm and one you can put your hands on at any time.

For me, paranoia would look more like this:
1. Real time protection against disk failure with RAID 1,5 or 10 with hot swap spares installed (and a spare on the shelf)
1a. if you're really paranoid you should have two RAID controllers with a duplicate set of drives in case the controller fails.
2. Daily backup to local networked drive.
3. Daily Backup to removable media (as needed by capacity - solid state USB, removable HDD, external HHD, tape, etc.) At least once a year make an archival copy for posterity.
4. Daily Online

Ayuh, I'm paranoid.
 
Yes David, and the only reason I am so calm (well, almost) about having had two computer crashes in the last two months is because of the back-up system. I see a crash as a hassle, but not disaster. Just something you have to deal with.
 
Sorry to hear about an Apple crashing.

I also don't trust online backups, for a variety of reasons:
  • Speed: Try downloading and restoring 100 GB of data when you're in a hurry.
  • Web companies go belly up, shutdown, get bought, their servers crash, get hacked into, and if your data is not encrypted (all of you who encrypt data raise your hands......), their employees could easily access customer data, etc
On the other hand: An external hard disk (and they're not bigger than a book) can be taken / stored anywhere, are VERY fast to transfer data / backup, etc and ridiculously cheap.

Not to mention those tiny and cheap USB thumb drives, the new ones can store 16 GB and could easily gulp down all your vital data.

There is no substitute to daily, weekly and monthly backup and off site storage (in a fire proof safe if you really want peace of mind).
 
David N Waldmann said:
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but what I see is the potential to lose the last 30 days worth of data.
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Sorry David -- I didn't mean to be vague. We backup our FrameReady and QuickBooksPro data on CF and thumb drives daily, which go home in the briefcases. We have a separate drive for each day of the week, so if Monday's backup device didn't work for any reason, we still have Saturday's, Friday's, Thursday's, Wednesday's, and Tuesday's backups.

The monthly backups are "mirror mages" of the computers' complete hard drives. That is, we could recover all of the files, programs, configurations -- everything plops right into the new hard drive. My understanding is the when we buy a new computer and they put all of our old files on the new hard drive, that's generally the way they do it.

Back in the dark ages, when we used Colorado 5GB back-up tape drives, I learned the hard way that backups don't always work. So, now I have backups, backups, and more backups. Redundant redundancy? You bet.
 
Well, after looking at the online sources, it seems that none support Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Maybe in the future. The Mac iDisk automated Back Up program seems to stall part way through. Grumble Grumble.

Oh well, back to just using the back up drives and dropping important stuff onto the iDisk, a form of online storage, albeit limited in capacity.

The new Time Machine program for backing up to an external drive is very cool.

I will consult with the Mac store today.
 
Mac fixed

For those interested in Macs, here's what happened to my new Mac and why it crashed. Before it went black and would not open, the hard drive was indicating that it was completely full. The Genius Bar guy started the computer up from an external drive and determined through trail and error that one of my managers had his iDisk on and mounted to his desktop. Somehow it was holding almost 300BG of data, which overloaded my computer. Once we turned his sync off, the computer righted itself. We still don't how how this happened because my manager doesn't have a lot in the iDisk.

I also learned that if the iDisk sync is on, it mounts copies of all its files on your desktop. If dync is off, you can use it virtually on the mac server without storing the files on your computer. So we set his and my sync to be turned off. He has a password protected desktop on my office computer so that he can work on my web site.

Problem solved, but it sure was weird.
 
Kirstie said:
Yes David, and the only reason I am so calm (well, almost) about having had two computer crashing the last two months is because of the back-up system.
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Kirstie,
I guess online backups have their place, but according to the above statement, there are problems. Personally I don't have any use for online backups.

As some others have said, external hard drives are great for backing up large amounts of data. You could backup on two of them once a week and keep one at work and one at home to prevent loss due to disasters like floods, fire and earthquakes! That is unless your home is attached to your work, in which case you could leave one backup hard drive at friend or relative's home!
 
And, the beauty of an external USB drive, is that when it's backed up and ready, it can act like regular hard drive if the regular hard drive dies on you.

Many backup programs (aka mirroring / imaging software, Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, etc) can even copy the operating system (make an image of the whole hard drive).

When that fateful crashy day arrives, you boot up the external hard drive and carry on with your business.
 
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