backing up your pc

[ballibeg]

Out of interest - and I speak as a 56-year old with the relevant lack of knowledge - why wasn't your answer simply 'back up everything to the Cloud'?

 

Thanks,

 

Jon

 

Time and money.

 

2tb uploading is measured in days! Even with a decent 10Mbps up it would take three weeks. The cost to store even with Amazon Glacier is £80 a year.

 

I use a Synology NAS (NETWORK area Storage). All PCs back up daily automatically. It also streams my music and movies to me wherever I am in the world.

 

It's a £300 investment with 2 HDDs in it so if one fails the other has a copy.

 

Dave

[NFG]

Out of interest - and I speak as a 56-year old with the relevant lack of knowledge - why wasn't your answer simply 'back up everything to the Cloud'?

 

Thanks,

 

Jon

 

Thats fine, so long as you trust the cloud, I don't. Data, can & has vanished with no liability, there are a few cloud services that get it right - I wouldnt use anything MS based - Azure for example - Backblaze isnt bad, Amazon is probably one of the better comercial offerings.

 

If you trust the cloud, then its just part of the solution - not all of it, nothing beats having independant backups on independant platforms & software.

 

A disk in the hand is worth two in the bush?

 

 

N

Edited September 20, 2015 by NFG

[NFG]

Time and money.

 

2tb uploading is measured in days! Even with a decent 10Mbps up it would take three weeks. The cost to store even with Amazon Glacier is £80 a year.

 

I use a Synology NAS (NETWORK area Storage). All PCs back up daily automatically. It also streams my music and movies to me wherever I am in the world.

 

It's a £300 investment with 2 HDDs in it so if one fails the other has a copy.

 

Dave

 

A NAS is a fine investment they generally run Linux so more reliable & theres also some fairly nice disks available - WD Reds are excellent for NAS & the software generally caters for raid creation & management.

 

N

[nepia]

NFG thanks. You're the first person I've ever heard say 'I don't trust the cloud' but presumably you're referring to just The cloud, not necessarily other similar incarnations.

 

 

Cheers.

[Steve Bullman]

I don't trust the cloud either and don't use it. Everything of mine is backed up in my own possession.

[NFG]

NFG thanks. You're the first person I've ever heard say 'I don't trust the cloud' but presumably you're referring to just The cloud, not necessarily other similar incarnations.

 

 

Cheers.

 

OK, thanks

 

Cloud solutions (I mean 3rd party storage, docs, etc accessed by internet connection) are still kept at arms length by a fair amount of IT pros which I still consider myself although dont do anywhere near as much as I used to.

 

Things like drop box & so on work, but I wouldnt rely on them or trust with my data. Quite often cloud provision is under the auspices of 'all your data is mine' for example: if you sent an e-mail under what was Microsofts Hotmail (which would be daft, as Hotmail was simple to hack) with your latest business plans, under the agreement of provision of service they would have been property of Microsoft.

 

I suspect they will become more common place as MS Windows migrates to an entirely subscription based model - you wont get anything for free!, under Azure & Office365 with the ability to wring money out of every one & everything for it!

 

 

N

Edited September 20, 2015 by NFG

[harvey b davison]

Hi all, the guy that looked at my pc has tried running salvage software etc and got nothing. The pc refused to boot up for some reason. When he put some software on to try to get it to boot and then list problems, he said the hard drive had been failing for some time and in the end became so corrupted it just had a dicky fit so to speak and became so corrupted it couldnt operate. I'm going to get an external hard drive and back everything up to that. I have just started a college course and bought a new laptop for the course. I too dont trust cloud, hence going to invest in a external hard drive.

[Stubby]

Show me a cloud you think you can trust and i can show you 2 men without a rain coat Has this morphed over from the winter weather thread ?

[pycoed]

Hi all, the guy that looked at my pc has tried running salvage software etc and got nothing. The pc refused to boot up for some reason. When he put some software on to try to get it to boot and then list problems, he said the hard drive had been failing for some time and in the end became so corrupted it just had a dicky fit so to speak and became so corrupted it couldnt operate. I'm going to get an external hard drive and back everything up to that. I have just started a college course and bought a new laptop for the course. I too dont trust cloud, hence going to invest in a external hard drive.

 

Please please try a second opinion - you must NEVER "put some software" on a possibly corrupted disk - you compromise the ability to recover its data with every byte installed.

If this was a Windows pc, then try to find someone knowledgeable with a Linux boot disk who knows about the Testdisk utility. The pc may be bootable with a Linux utility CD & its amazing what Testdisk can recover. I have retrieved about 85% of the data from a disk which had actually been formatted!

If the disk is readable in some form or other then you should be able to peel off the data readily. If not then there's one last home resort - put the disk in a static free plastic bag & put in the freeze overnight. In the morning take it out & put it in an external disk caddy & see if its readable - this often works, but you have to copy the data quickly because the disk may fail again as it warms up, you can try the freeze again, but in my experience you are now pushing your luck.

If this fails, then try a data recovery specialist, but DO NOT allow anyone to install software or "repair "the disk until you've spoken to the specialists.

Good Luck - it's a hard lesson to learn, but hard disks are so cheap these days, backups are easy to sort out. STORE THE BACKUP DISK SOMEWHERE SAFE TOO & apart from the pc

As for the cloud - apart from the cost, lots of us would be weeks uploading data with the pitiful standards of broadband available in much of the country.

(Disclaimer:- Until I retired 5 years ago, I was an IT Manager for the previous 20 odd years)

[spudulike]

Please please try a second opinion - you must NEVER "put some software" on a possibly corrupted disk - you compromise the ability to recover its data with every byte installed.

If this was a Windows pc, then try to find someone knowledgeable with a Linux boot disk who knows about the Testdisk utility. The pc may be bootable with a Linux utility CD & its amazing what Testdisk can recover. I have retrieved about 85% of the data from a disk which had actually been formatted!

If the disk is readable in some form or other then you should be able to peel off the data readily. If not then there's one last home resort - put the disk in a static free plastic bag & put in the freeze overnight. In the morning take it out & put it in an external disk caddy & see if its readable - this often works, but you have to copy the data quickly because the disk may fail again as it warms up, you can try the freeze again, but in my experience you are now pushing your luck.

If this fails, then try a data recovery specialist, but DO NOT allow anyone to install software or "repair "the disk until you've spoken to the specialists.

Good Luck - it's a hard lesson to learn, but hard disks are so cheap these days, backups are easy to sort out. STORE THE BACKUP DISK SOMEWHERE SAFE TOO & apart from the pc

As for the cloud - apart from the cost, lots of us would be weeks uploading data with the pitiful standards of broadband available in much of the country.

(Disclaimer:- Until I retired 5 years ago, I was an IT Manager for the previous 20 odd years)

 

Sounds like some good advice, I had a HDD fail and noticed it got damn hot so tried putting it in the freezer and after three stints had most of the info off it.

 

Forget trying to boot it, take it out and run it as a slave disk on a working machine as I suggested earlier.

 

As this fella says, putting software n the disk will overwrite data and that isn't good as you will not be able to retrieve it again.

 

Don't give up until you really know it is toast!