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[JordanN]

I follow a good artist on twitter and recently he had a 1 in 1000 nightmare scenario.
His Ipad got caught in some bizarre booting loop which made it impossible for him to recover his data. Since he didn't have cloud backup, all his art saved on his Ipad was permanently lost.

I still take time to back up any important files I have, but damn, it's scary when you're caught in a situation like that where you're forced to lose everything because technology just decided to screw up randomly on you.

PSA: Don't wait around or save it for the last minute. If you got important files that don't have a backup anywhere, start doing it now.

 

[just_some_nut]

I spent like 9 months working on some L4D2 level/mod some years back and lost it to a failed hard drive. Got learnt real good

 

[JordanN]

I spent like 9 months working on some L4D2 level/mod some years back and lost it to a failed hard drive. Got learnt real good

I only started doing backups in 2010.

Before then, I use to have a huge collection of Starcraft maps I made as a kid. As well as a bunch of stories and other cool ideas I had saved on an old computer.
I'll never get to remember what they were like since they're gone forever.

 

[just_some_nut]

I only started doing backups in 2010.

Before then, I use to have a huge collection of Starcraft maps I made a kid. As well as a bunch of stories and other cool ideas I had saved on an old computer.
I'll never get to remember what they were like since they're gone forever.

Yeah that sucks. Feels especially dumb given how easy it is to back up.

I lost a few other things with sentimental value as well that I would love to look back on, like recordings of moments and achievements on Runescape as a kid (lol). Might seem rudimentary until years down the line, kind of like photos of otherwise mundane events. Can't imagine how the artist feels

 

[Bwesh]

Where do you guys leave your backups? Cloud or external drives?

 

[Rentahamster]

Where do you guys leave your backups? Cloud or external drives?

Best practice is to do both.

 

[JordanN]

Where do you guys leave your backups? Cloud or external drives?

I have a 500GB external hard drive from 2013. Still going strong.

But I also bought a 1 Terabyte HDD this year and it's even faster.
Will eventually upgrade to a SSD.

 

[eddie4]

There are two types of people:
Those who have lost data.
Those who will lose data.


I have important files backed up to NAS and also a private cloud. So I have still yet to lose data.

Something simple you can do (in Windows 10) if you don't have NAS, or external drive that you want to keep copying to. Get google drive, onedrive, whatever, set up the client, set the folders, create a Documents folder and Pictures folder, and any other folder you want to back up. Then in windows file explorer, right click on Documents, click properties, click on the location tab, then on the Move button. This will move your library to the drive folder that is setup to sync to the cloud. That way the default data location for documents and pictures, etc, is set to the cloud. This way you don't have to think about it, it just uploads to the cloud, and your documents are safe, to a degree.

 

[Cunth]

back up what? my gaf logs?

 

[JordanN]

Here is the power of backing your stuff up.
I still have some files from 2003!

Turns out it's an old photo of my PC.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

This past weekend I had a new client corrupt their web database when a series of RAID drives failed at the hardware level in one server at their premises, 80+ sites gone in a flash. They had only been backing up the VMs and not the DB offsite/cloud. Lucky I had a backup from 2 days prior in my dev environment, which saved their asses completely. It resulted in a new contract signed this week and cloud migration effective immediately.

Back up your shit but more importantly if it's critical practice restoring it on a schedule as well to prove your backups work.

 

[V4skunk]

Zero fucks are given. I don't back up anything.

 

[Falcs]

Why waste money on cloud backups when you can get these from Aliexpress for like $50 for 10 512GB USB sticks.
Got a heap of these and backed up all my documents, photos, videos and all my private stuff. Then just threw them in a drawer in case my hard drive ever dies.

Only downside is the transfer is pretty slow.

 

[Dargor]

I follow a good artist on twitter and recently he had a 1 in 1000 nightmare scenario.
His Ipad got caught in some bizarre booting loop which made it impossible for him to recover his data. Since he didn't have cloud backup, all his art saved on his Ipad was permanently lost.

I still take time to back up any important files I have, but damn, it's scary when you're caught in a situation like that where you're forced to lose everything because technology just decided to screw up randomly on you.

PSA: Don't wait around or save it for the last minute. If you got important files that don't have a backup anywhere, start doing it now.

Humm, Ipad? Sounds like some bs some apple employe made up so he could push a whole new ipad upon an ignorant person.

 

[JordanN]

Humm, Ipad? Sounds like some bs some apple employe made up so he could push a whole new ipad upon an ignorant person.

Apparently he took it to a specialist but they couldn't recover the data.

You can read the thread for yourself. He still uses the Ipad now but only after the boot error wiped everything out.

 

[Dargor]

Apparently he took it to a specialist but they couldn't recover the data.

You can read the thread for yourself.

Was that specialist an employe of apple? Cuz apples been known to screw their customesr with shit like this all the time. Like no joke. If it was a third party, then I might believe it to be true (that it was impossible to get the data back).

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

OP, the only thing that should be backed up is DAT ASS

 

[FemdomFilmFan]

When I first got this computer, I installed some questionable software on it that I thought would be OK; the computer went into an endless loop of turn on, blue screen, turn off, turn on, blue screen, turn off... Had to wipe the fuckin' thing from the BIOS and reinstall Windows. Lucky I'd only just bought it. If that had happened 6 months down the line with nothing backed up,

 

[Stiflers Mom]

Yep, get an external hard disk and back up your work every few days.

 

[Sebastian Suola]

Why waste money on cloud backups when you can get these from Aliexpress for like $50 for 10 512GB USB sticks.
Got a heap of these and backed up all my documents, photos, videos and all my private stuff. Then just threw them in a drawer in case my hard drive ever dies.

Only downside is the transfer is pretty slow.

Your files are not static. Are you gonna repeat this process every week or what? And are you actually gonna trust some aliexpress usb sticks for years to come?
Seems very inefficent and unreliable.

The best backup systems are those that just work without human effort and keep everything backed up automatically.

 

[notseqi]

I back up on a NAS but I am running out of space, HDD prices be damned.

 

[Garibaldi]

I backup any important stuff to my NAS, then it has a twice weekly scheduled backup to my cloud account. Got a a git server setup on my NAS too for little projects. That gets backed up to my main github. The amount of little tools I built and lost in the early 2000s due to failures, it's not worth the hassle of not having a few backup routines.

 

[Darko]

all my tech has a the cloud, except my pc.. I need to buy an extra external and do regular backups

 

[-Arcadia-]

I take the initiative and don’t do anything important in the first place.

 

[Mahadev]

I follow a good artist on twitter and recently he had a 1 in 1000 nightmare scenario.
His Ipad got caught in some bizarre booting loop which made it impossible for him to recover his data. Since he didn't have cloud backup, all his art saved on his Ipad was permanently lost.

I still take time to back up any important files I have, but damn, it's scary when you're caught in a situation like that where you're forced to lose everything because technology just decided to screw up randomly on you.

PSA: Don't wait around or save it for the last minute. If you got important files that don't have a backup anywhere, start doing it now.

Tell him that the fraud company called Apple often doesn't bother to even try to recover and just tells customers it's unrecoverable. He should try an independent repair shop just to be sure.

 

[Falcs]

Your files are not static. Are you gonna repeat this process every week or what? And are you actually gonna trust some aliexpress usb sticks for years to come?
Seems very inefficent and unreliable.

The best backup systems are those that just work without human effort and keep everything backed up automatically.

It was a bad joke. I just came up with the worst backup method I could think of.

 

[Rat Rage]

I'm doing it right now with certain stuff I haven't backed up in years actually.

 

[JordanN]

I'm doing it right now with certain stuff I haven't backed up in years actually.

Better safe than sorry.

Even with the best virus protection or avoiding shady websites you might never know when your computer just decides to randomly fail on you. Or you might get a bad update that requires reformatting everything.

 

[Newly Vacant]

A good backup strategy seems like a prerequisite at this point. Hardware failure is bound to happen to everyone at some point. It doesn’t really matter what device you have, both major platforms have built-in cloud syncing. Even if you do nothing else, at least there’s a mirror of your pictures, and documents folders on OneDrive or iCloud.

 

[GeorgPrime]

Lost 300 pages of a novel i wrote when i was kid. Even making extra copies on discs.

 

[Valonquar]

Working in IT, the amount of people/companies that have no idea of a backup plan is ridiculous. I once had a manager come in my office with his work laptop with a failed HDD. He said the HDD contained the only copies of his wedding photos, baby photos (including first steps) ,and other irreplaceable stuff. He got mad lucky I was able to recover everything by wrapping the drive in foil, putting in a few ziplocs and putting it in a freezer overnight. The drive worked for about 30 minutes after pulling it out of the freezer before heating up enough to start failing again.

 

[AeonGaidenRaiden]

So my backup plan goes like this:

1. Everything is stored correctly on my iMac
2. I have 2 external HDD that both have the same picture and music folder and are updated over time.
3. I did end up losing a few photo sessions because sometimes I leave the pictures to marinate on my desktop in a folder until I plug in the externals....and then the mac just dies and pufff its gone forever. If I lost all the photos I had, I would probably just move to a deserted island and never talk to anyone.

 

[diffusionx]

In my experience, people only start backing their stuff up after they learn the hard way.

These days though, it is easier than ever. iCloud and other services do all of that with the flip of a switch. No reason not to.

 

[teezzy]

back up what? my gaf logs?

You know - all those old digital photos you can't be bothered to ever look at!

 

[Yoshi]

For the very few things that are important (basically, may game dev projects) I use the following procedure: Different tasks are done on different computers, and I therefore regularly copy and paste the project from one PC to another. It may not seem efficient to do it like this, but if I don't I forget to make backups for months.

 

[RavenSan]

Oof yeah. I work in IT for a living and I can't tell you how many times I've had people who didn't back things up who then were miserable when it eventually happened.

I look it like riding a motorcycle. it's not 'if' you crash it, it's when.

Your data, it isn't 'if' a drive fails. It's when.

For a suggestion, I've been using Backblaze for years, and it's been great.

 

[Happosai]

I follow a good artist on twitter and recently he had a 1 in 1000 nightmare scenario.
His Ipad got caught in some bizarre booting loop which made it impossible for him to recover his data. Since he didn't have cloud backup, all his art saved on his Ipad was permanently lost.

I still take time to back up any important files I have, but damn, it's scary when you're caught in a situation like that where you're forced to lose everything because technology just decided to screw up randomly on you.

PSA: Don't wait around or save it for the last minute. If you got important files that don't have a backup anywhere, start doing it now.

I pull out my external hard drive every 2-3 months to back-up all of my newer files (older duplicates gets deleted or stay in place). In early May, my computer got a virus from using a downloading software which I had been using for about 10-years but I forgot to renew my cyber security. The virus got in and wiped out the whole computer and it took until late last month for me to get the system back to my old settings and running again. On a positive note, all passwords and files were backed up either on the external or a flash drive. On the downside, I'm using an older Lenovo ThinkPad Edge and I had an expensive sound editor, Flight Simulator X Gold (disc version but lost the disc years ago), Microsoft Office 2010 (disc based and I also tossed that a long time ago, too), and a number of other programs which were complete total loss.

Yes, back up everything and don't throw out activation codes or product keys.

 

[Tesseract]

i rule of thirds everything with cloud backs as well

 

[Deleted member 1159]

A few of my hard drives are now over a decade old...I recently just perused their SMART stats...thousands of power cycles, 10s of thousands of hours powered on...I should really think about replacing them

 

[Squirrel Killer]

Here is the power of backing your stuff up.
I still have some files from 2003!

Turns out it's an old photo of my PC.

Rookie. I have shit from 1993. Of course they're in an unreadable early Mac version of Word format, but I still have the files damnit!

I'm actually pretty bad about backups. My photo directory is pretty well backed up, but for my personal day to day files, I just "backup" by not getting rid of my old computers. I keep thinking I'm going to get a NAS, set it to read only (to protect against crypto,) have it auto pull backups from my networked shares, and then back up to a cloud service like Backblaze, but I never get around to it.

 

[eddie4]

just open the file you want to backup in notepad, print it out, then when you lose it, just type all the stuff back into notepad and save it as the original file. duh, so easy.

 

[Happosai]

Rookie. I have shit from 1993. Of course they're in an unreadable early Mac version of Word format, but I still have the files damnit!

I'm actually pretty bad about backups. My photo directory is pretty well backed up, but for my personal day to day files, I just "backup" by not getting rid of my old computers. I keep thinking I'm going to get a NAS, set it to read only (to protect against crypto,) have it auto pull backups from my networked shares, and then back up to a cloud service like Backblaze, but I never get around to it.

Clarisworks? I had a Mac Powerbook as one of my first laptops and that was their word processor.

I think the key is if everything is back-up on clouds...save the passwords to something external. Security is heavy on some of those sites and the least one can do is make sure the passwords are backed up.

 

[eddie4]

i'm still mad about my bitcoin wallet. i used to mine bitcoin not too long ago after it was created, I believe it was about $0.08 a bitcoin. Had about 200-250 coins on a hard drive. which died and everything was lost.

 

[Old Retro]

I always have multiple backups of important things like books I'm writing and pics I have taken. Recently, my piece of shit 2TB Seagate PS4 extended storage kept wigging out on me. Replaced it with a good WD and made the Seagate Windowz "backup" location. Also had to replace my 512gb SSD from 2013 as it reached its life span.

 

[synchronicity]

Oh, I have redundancies for my redundancies.

 

[Squirrel Killer]

Clarisworks? I had a Mac Powerbook as one of my first laptops and that was their word processor.

No, it was definitely Word, my school had a site license for it. It was just in the System 7 days so the transfer to a Windows machine (via floppy) was messy and probably dropped the resource fork.

 

[Happosai]

No, it was definitely Word, my school had a site license for it. It was just in the System 7 days so the transfer to a Windows machine (via floppy) was messy and probably dropped the resource fork.

Yeah, but in a way it was possible with the more archaic operating systems. I had Clarisworks and it came with a fat booklet which was a bit unnecessary as word processors were already around for about 10-years at that time. USB floppy drives do work but you'll need a codec to read and convert all your old files. I imagine if the old floppies are still working as long as you stored them well and you might be able to salvage something.

 

[John Mullins]

Booting loop can be fixed, doesn't mean data is lost.

 

[HeadsUp7Up]

I have a 500GB external hard drive from 2013. Still going strong.

But I also bought a 1 Terabyte HDD this year and it's even faster.
Will eventually upgrade to a SSD.

If anyone else hasn't told you make sure you have copies on that one from 2013 asap. Old mechanical HDDs scare me. Most don't have any issues but better safe than sorry; we all think it won't happen to us.

 

[Squirrel Killer]

Yeah, but in a way it was possible with the more archaic operating systems. I had Clarisworks and it came with a fat booklet which was a bit unnecessary as word processors were already around for about 10-years at that time. USB floppy drives do work but you'll need a codec to read and convert all your old files. I imagine if the old floppies are still working as long as you stored them well and you might be able to salvage something.

So I just double checked and it's a mix of old Word files (probably Word 5 or 6) that do still open and have timestamps from 2002-03 (probably when I transferred them off the floppies, and files with unrecognized/no extensions and accurate timestamps:

I think these were all created on the school's Macs (earlier stuff I did on my C-128,) so it might be that I did these in Works. I don't think I would've used Clarisworks even if it was an option since it was clear even then that MS was going to win the office suite wars.