16 Responses so far

1. 1. bellatrys on Jul 15th, 2008 at 6:24 am

   Oh man, that’s awful – I had a backup copy of something get eaten by the autobackup feature recently losing two days’ work and had to put it aside for a bit. Good luck with your repairs and thanks for the reminder.

2. 2. Al Bogdan on Jul 15th, 2008 at 6:41 am

   It’s nice when the drive warns you first! Had the same thing happen not long ago. Pick up a low cost NAS (Linkstation 500GB) and setup an auto-backup, which saved me when the drive finally died. Of course, after the reload I forgot to setup the auto backup again… better go do that.

   These laptop drives do seem to crash more often.

3. 3. Scott Marlowe on Jul 15th, 2008 at 7:17 am

   External USB drives are fairly inexpensive and large enough for most backup situations. I do fairly regular backups of all my files onto our home server. With my writing I actually name the doc with the date in the filename itself, then make a copy of it each day (or each day I work on it) with the new date. That way I have a running history (think of it as version control) and backup as well.

   My off-site solution used to be to burn my backups to DVD and drop them off at our safe deposit box at the bank, but we don’t have that box anymore so my plan has a bit of a hole in it presently.

4. 4. Matt Ruff on Jul 15th, 2008 at 9:03 am

   Thank you for the timely reminder.

5. 5. Laurel Amberdine on Jul 15th, 2008 at 10:58 am

   What, no Time Machine?

   (Actually, I don’t use it either, but it would be ideal for that kind of problem.)

6. 6. D. Robert Pease on Jul 15th, 2008 at 1:27 pm

   I have an HP MediaSmart server (running Window’s Home server). It backs up everything on the network each night. (which is nice) but even better, I actually work right off of the server. All my files are on the server, which has dual hard drives, that mirror each other. So if one hard drive fails, the other has a copy of it. I still make backup copies of my most important info to other media periodically (even just saving a copy to your local machine is a nice backup), but overall this is a pretty good, “don’t have to think about it”, setup.

7. 7. Tobias Buckell on Jul 15th, 2008 at 1:57 pm

   Laurel: my mac pro has time machine chugging, the laptop, since I don’t have a wireless hard drive set up, doesn’t. I’ll be rectifying that tonight.

   D. Robert: yeah, that’s about what I need to be getting to LOL.

8. 8. Steve Thorn on Jul 15th, 2008 at 6:23 pm

   I love Time Machine. Wish I had such an option for my PC side of things.

9. 9. jm on Jul 15th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

   The unalterable destiny of a computer hard drive, like that of mortal man, is to die. Therefore back up your data now, while it is day, before the Night comes wherein there is weeping, gnashing of teeth, and no flash drives.

10. 10. Michael Canfield on Jul 15th, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    That sucks. I’ve only lost 1500 words, about half a chapter, in my entire Mac life. Even though that was a couple years ago, it still bugs me. Lots.

11. 11. Tobias Buckell on Jul 15th, 2008 at 11:38 pm

    For a you’ll-get-my-macbook-out-of-my-cold-dead-hands kind of mac fan, I have to admit, I’ve had no luck with their laptop hard drives (I think they’re matsushitas? Either way, in the desktop I’ve yanked out the default and put in seagates, which I’ve always had good luck with, but I don’t like tinkering with laptop enclosures to install my own hard drives).

    It could be just that I really take my laptop on a lot of travel.

    Either way, the first iBook from 2000, a graduation gift is still okay. The used Lombard powerbook I purchased in 2003 to replace the iBook was great, but it was an old few hundred dollars purchase, it eventually in 2005 had a motherboard failure.

    I decided to get a new iBook and move the data over rather than nurse it along, 2 years for a cheap old used laptop is a good run. The iBook I got in 2005 suffered hard drive failure twice before I installed a third party seagate HDD and sold it to my sister for a hundred bucks or something with the warning to ‘back up often’. I purchased a powerbook aluminum in 2006 and the hard drive failed on that three times! But three’s a charm, it’s been tooling along well for Emily (except the one time we dropped it and had to have it fixed, but that was all us). The MacBook I got last year in 2007 suffered hard drive failure this week. It won’t cost me anything, they covered it. Still, I would prefer it last another couple years LOL.

    The iMac I got in 2002 trucked all the way to 2007 before the screen started to give out a bit and I let it give up the ghost. That was a super machine.

    The Mac Mini I got Emily to replace it in 2005 is still trucking along fine.

    The used iMac I got in 2007 for bill paying household stuff is trucking along, and it’s 4 years old.

12. 12. Joyce Reynolds-Ward on Jul 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am

    All this makes me nervous. My MacBook made some scary noises when I was working on it while it was charging, and it’s just gone off of warranty (I think, I bought it last June). That said, I was in Europe at the time, using a power converter. So I pulled out the flash drive, did backups, and shut it down. No problems since.

    However, I now religiously pull out the flash drive and do backups after each session. I had it along in Europe as a “just in case” provision should TSA suddenly decide once again that laptops couldn’t be carry-ons. I’m glad I did.

13. 13. Catherine on Jul 16th, 2008 at 12:20 pm

    I just wanted to share some backup strategies you might like. Of course, nothing is going to save us from losing the occasional 1000 words, but I’ve found some methods that work well for me. Do you use OpenOffice? If so, there’s an add-on you can get that will let you upload your document to a google doc with one mouse click. It’s just an arrow. You click it and it goes. Very easy. For shorter pieces, I often compose directly in google docs. Either way, I believe you get some kind of version control, which is nice to have as a writer.

    Another resource I use is Jungle Disk, through Amazon. The storage space is on Amazon, but Jungle Disk is the application you use to backup to it. It costs 15 cents/gigabyte/month, and the nice part is you only pay for what you use. The Jungle disk application can be set up to back up at whatever frequency you want (there is a tiny fee you pay also for uploading data so if you backed up your whole system every five minutes it could add up). For us writers, a gigabyte is almost infinite space for storing drafts. You almost couldn’t fill a whole gigabyte with words! Of course I am using mine to back up family photos and other things I want to save. I believe the “experts” recommend doing local backups and also web-based backups, so you are covered in case of fire at home, or some great cataclysm that wipes out the whole internet.

14. 14. Tobias Buckell on Jul 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

    I have lots of strategies, but they all require me to ‘click’ something, which honestly, means that there is a weak spot in the equation: my memory.

    The Time Machine thing, should be pretty useful.

15. 15. Saladin on Jul 21st, 2008 at 9:31 am

    I owe you thanks, man! I was looking at this post when I was almost out the door to Readercon. “That reminds me,” I sez to myself, “There’s some files on my flash drive that aren’t copied anywhere else. I ought to copy all of them to my desktop, just in case.” I did so. Then I managed to lose my flash drive at (or perhaps on the trek home from) Readercon. Your timely reminder saved me from losing half a dissertation chapter and a short story…if we ever meet in person I owe you a drink, at least!

16. 16. Catherine on Jul 24th, 2008 at 9:46 am

    I’m not familiar with Time Machine, but it sounds like it is an application that does automatic backups to a location of your choice. Jungle disk does that, too. It gives you a virtual drive on your desktop, so theoretically I think you could use time machine with it, but it would probably be redundant, since jungle disk gives you an automated backup function. And I agree completely that anything you have to remember to click is a problem. With jungle disk, all of my data backs up every night while I sleep, and I can force a backup any time I need to. I don’t mean to sound like a commercial for this particular service. There are a number of online backup options. I think .mac has one. Quite a few others. It makes a lot of sense. My husband is a computer nerd, so for a long time he was promising to set up a server in the basement, yadda yadda. Finally, I decided to go ahead and subscribe to an online storage service, and I’m very glad I did. It’s effortless, saves space in our small house, and my hubby didn’t have to take a saturday to get it set up, and he is not the one to deal with a problem. (Such as, Amazon S3 went down a couple of days ago. Argh!)