Backup

[Matti]

And I really don't see why I should back up my entire harddisk. I've never had a situation where I suddenly lost it all.

No-one has a hard disk die... until they do

Exactly. I never thought that my hard disc would die and that's why I didn't make backups. Yeah, and now I've lost everything and suddenly can't understand why I never made backups.

[Ghost]

Since that unfortunate crash in 2002, I started with regular backups. It was the first time ever I lost really important stuff, and I learned my lessons.

And today backups're easy; I regularly make CD backups, and I also keep larger files on three colour coded USB sticks.

[Vince Twelve]

I have a bad history with backups.  I haven't had a lot of trouble with losing data from my main hard drive, my problems always seem to be my backup drives.

My backup USB thumb drives always seem to find their way into the laundry and die.  My backup CDs always seem to get into the hands of my daughter or thrown out by my wife.  The huge external HDD that I was using for backup even died and refused to read or write again after a year and a half.

I always thought that the point of the backups was to outlive your main HDD, but it always seems to be the other way around for me.

[Raider]

I am currently on a Mac and I am running off a partition with XP. Back up is not needed as my mac is VERY stable. It's a good idea to back up to external drives anyway though.

Most of my friends put their entire computers on TB drives.

I happen to work for an IT maintenance/store company, and I can tell you that even if the MAC is stable, once it plays a trick on you, you are just as screwed as anyone else. If the hard-disk breaks, it will cost you a LOT to get anything recovered from it. If the MAC goes unresponsive, it will take AGES and cost you a LOT to get it back up and running again.

Do yourself a favor and start doing backups! Just buy yourself a 4 Gb USB memory stick and use that, if nothing else.

I do indeed back all of my editing work on drives (I have several external 1TB drives) but I suppose I should heed your advice and back up my AGS stuff. The windows partition side of my Mac is playing up a little bit, and monsoon season is soon to arrive, (damn those lightning storms!). Needless to say the only reason I am running windows on my Mac is to run AGS.  8)

[zabnat]

You do know that you've doubled the chances of having to restore by having RAID0, right? If either drive fails, you lose all your data.

Yeah, double the gain, double the risk. But if one disk fails I don't lose all my data! Only half of it. Another thing is what would I do with only every other block of my files (if I could somehow read them from the disk that is).

[SSH]

Yeah, double the gain, double the risk. But if one disk fails I don't lose all my data! Only half of it.

Well, I can see you understand the problem, but others might not appreciate what you mean: effectively, you've lost it all