Forum :: Lounge :: Who Backs Up?

In my daily use computers, I run a super-fast type of hard drive called the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive. It basically combines 4GB of SLC NAND Flash memory with the rotational hard drive platters to call up repeatedly accessed files instantaneously, while still grabbing lesser used data off the platter surface. It's one step below a Solid State Drive, but the capacity is much higher.

Well, Seagate issued a firmware update for this drive. It's not a big deal, other than the fact it's a DOS bootable CDROM and my computer doesn't even have a BIOS (Macintosh witn Intel Extensible Firmware Interface replaced it long ago). The firmware has to be applied through the BIOS Abstraction Layer, which is a little worrying, but i've done it before to my other Seagate drives without any issues.

It did get me wondering though.

I'm a professional at closed-drive data recovery (recovering lost data without opening a drive), which is costly. I charge about $120 per hour to scan and seek out fragments of data on failing drives, with varying degrees of success. I managed to recover 90% of someone's data (everything except their OS) just last week, but i've more often than not had to tell customers to expect the worst.

Even so, it's only recently i've actually begun to back up my own drives again. Crazy.

Does anyone else here back up their hard drive, or do you just risk it? Maybe you don't have a lot of data worth backing up, and I certainly don't have anything that couldn't be reproduced later, but if I had to redownload and recreate the data on my drives from scratch, i'd be here for years.

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)

I usually make backups, but since a month or so my pendrive is a bit fucked up and I ran out of DVD discs. If my hdd would fail now all projects I've made would be gone for good.

Since I run OS X I have a three way backup setup currently. My desktop (hackintosh) runs from my primary 640GB WD drive, which uses time machine to constantly backup to my secondary 750GB WD drive. With the backup drive being bigger I can keep many backups on this drive for constant use since time machine is simple to use in that way. Because the 750 is older (Sata II from like 3 years ago), I have that constantly backing up to my Airport's 2TB drive, keeping two consecutive backups (1 per month) via action scripts. Beings as the Airport's drive is by seagate, and I have had to many seagates fail, that drive does constant backups with the windows server in my basement via auto run batch scripts on the server. Everything runs gigabit speeds so it's relatively fast, and since everything but my desktop and iPhone use the netgear router no one noticed any bandwidth troubles on the internal wired/wireless network.

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Eat shit, bro.

I support Ephixa [http://ephixa.com/]. Fuck Skrillex, Sonny Moore is no more.

I run Mac OS X Snow Leopard as well (on an Apple MacBook 2008). Has to be said, Time Machine is incredible for this. I don't have any network attached storage for backup, but I run a 500GB external drive connected directly to the computer that stores backups. I have an additional 1TB drive for my other computer to back up to. Due to the relatively simple configuration of my network, I wouldn't even dare feeding several gigabytes of data at a time through it.

Does sound like you have a very comprehensive backup solution in place though.

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)

sblord posted: (25th Oct 2011, 04:34 pm)

I run Mac OS X Snow Leopard as well (on an Apple MacBook 2008). Has to be said, Time Machine is incredible for this. I don't have any network attached storage for backup, but I run a 500GB external drive connected directly to the computer that stores backups. I have an additional 1TB drive formy other computer to back up to. Due to the relatively simple configuration of my network, I wouldn't even dare feeding several gigabytes of data at a time through it.

Does sound like you have a very comprehensive backup solution in place though.

I used to do things the same way but with little siblings, and so many of them, I can't use external drives because they end up destroyed and I refuse to fork over hundreds of dollars for a very mall SSD. My network is well, complex. Currently there are 2 ISP connections backed with 3 firewalls, sub firewall for each outside connection -> main which is my networks backbone being a sonicwall switch, which has three routers connected to it (airport w/ wireless disabled & two wireless routers). So much security because we are constantly port scanned and attacked by places like china and other large outside countries :\.

It definitely does the job, quite well. But I do wish it was simpler.

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Eat shit, bro.

I support Ephixa [http://ephixa.com/]. Fuck Skrillex, Sonny Moore is no more.

Myself I own a one 1TB HD, the hardrive in my computer is only 80, anything I have (research, projects, schoolwork), is all nicely taken off the computer and placed there... It's pretty much natural.

This computer has under 1GB of ram, and it's CPU is bad, tends to hook on to those virus & crash once n' a blue moon.

xIFearlessIxx posted: (25th Oct 2011, 10:22 pm)

Myself I own a one 1TB HD, the hardrive in my computer is only 80, anything I have (research, projects, schoolwork), is all nicely taken off the computer and placed there... It's pretty much natural.

This computer has under 1GB of ram, and it's CPU is bad, tends to hook on to those virus & crash once n' a blue moon.

Your computer needs a visit from Extreme Makeover.

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Eat shit, bro.

I support Ephixa [http://ephixa.com/]. Fuck Skrillex, Sonny Moore is no more.