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Coppola Loses All His Data
Colin Smith writes in with an object lesson in backup methodology — once you have backed everything up, take it somewhere else. "Film director Francis Ford Coppola has appealed for the return of his computer backup device following a robbery at his house in Argentina on Wednesday. He told Argentine broadcaster Todo Noticias he had lost 15 years' worth of data, including writing and photographs of his family."
Oops. Someone missed the 3rd step in the Tao of Backup : separation
That list again in full:
Backup all your data
Backup frequently
Take some backups off-site
Keep some old backups
Test your backups
Secure your backups
Perform integrity checking
And note that it's not necessary to purchase anything to achieve backup enlightenment.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
This still doesn't help in the event of catastrophe: fire, flood, etc. The backup has to go off-site. Some suggestions: parents' house, the office, a friend's.
I keep an up-to-date backup in my office, and drop a DVD or two in a drawer at my parents' every year or so.
Safe deposit boxes are a really good deal. Mine costs something like $20 per year, and every time I'm going to the bank anyway I just bring an optical disk with all my vital stuff and swap it with the one that's there. Now the trick is not losing the key to the deposit box in the fire/flood/etc. that presumably destroyed all my other backups at home.
The data is a zillion times more valuable than the PC. Figure out the most painless way to backup the data and hide the backup disk somewhere.
And... look! We're back on topic!
I've been thinking of getting one of those hard disks with the network connector on the back. If you combine this with one of those "network across power lines" adapters you could put the hard disk anywhere in the house (attic, basement...) and still access it from your main PC.
For a "high crime area" this seems ideal.
PS: Yes, the chances of him getting his data back is zero. It's a pity he had to learn the hard way....
I go around telling all my friends to back up their data, how important this is, how they could lose 100% their baby/wedding photos in a millisecond, etc. but I know none of them ever do.
No sig today...
One should always have at least the bare minimum of three copies of their data whenever possible with at least one of the copies *always* located off-site ...
... in essance leaving *no* valid backup at all.
... this shuld be obvious to folks in IT ... yet often this basic precaution is neglected, especially by laypeople, due to ignorance, economy, laziness, etc.
1. The HD in the computer
2. Backup device #1 that's intended for the next backup stored locally or off-site
3. Backup device #2 that's intended for the backup *after the next one* stored off-site
If one only has two copies, which is common, the problem is if the backup fails for whatever reason, then one can suddenly end up with messed up data on their HD *and* on the backup device too
The key to avoiding that problem is doing backups in rotation where at least one copy (ideally even more than one) is always off-site during the actual backup operation
Ron
I can't believe this was tagged with haha. Why is it funny when non-techsavvy people lose all their valuable data? It's not funny. It's terrible. As techies, we should be educating & empowering people, not isolating them.
When losing the sole copy of data, everyone always laughs and says you should have backed up. People, shut up please. That is a fair criticism to an IT or development professional, but not to an average computer user. While average users do know that data loss can occur and will often backup important files to a CD or DVD, there is no standard and easy way for users to backup ALL their important data, do it at regular intervals, test it, an distribute it geographically. Much of this process must be automated. Also, either the quality of media needs to go up, or specifically designed backup-grade hard drives and media need to be developed and released, because the current crop of equipment is pretty unreliable.
Are people expected to keep a second car around if their main one fails? Are people expected to perform regular scheduled maintenance on their cars themselves? No, because it is too complex and troublesome for the average users.
I've reviewed several backup applications and services, and none of them would pass the "mom" easy of use test. I believe there is a potential market for a robust comprehensive backup system...
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Memory sticks have gotten to be large enough that I can keep a backup of my most important and changeable data in my pocket. They aren't large enough for audio and image files, but they hold a fantastic amount of compressed text. Burglars won't get it because it isn't at home, and it isn't very likely to be damaged in a natural disaster either.
Off-site is an important part of any backup plan.
Unless some fanatical group is hunting down your data backups, you should be able to lose a house (fire), lose a building (9/11), lose an entire city (Hurricane Katrina) and your data should be fine. There's practically no excuse for it in 2007, with storage as cheap as it is, and with that new-fangled Interweb technology everyone's talking about.
agreed, yet some bastard still tagged it as haha. seriously, what the hell is wrong with some jerks?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - Carl Sagan
I used to do that kind of work for a living and I still do similar work on a higher level (moving data across servers, among other responsibilities). The usual case was that they'd bring in their old drive and I would give back the hard drive and tell them to hold on to it for backup. If they brought in their old computer and gave us authorization to trash the computer, I'd still give back the hard drive. If they didn't want it back, I'd put it in an anti-static bag, label it, and I'd hold on to it for at least a week after the customer picked up the drive.
Giving the drive back put the responsibility back in to the customer's hands and holding on to the drive kept the customer from coming back screaming if the HD in his new computer happened to fail. Either solution made me look like a hero for planning ahead if the customer accidentally deleted something on the new computer. In all cases, it was just good customer service. Even if a customer handed me a hard drive and said, "I don't need anything on the drive, throw it out," I'd either tell him to do it himself (thus absolving myself of responsibility) or I would hold on to the drive for a while.
No matter what the situation was that caused someone to throw out the hard drive before the data was transferred, it was the store's fault. They simply didn't do what they were asked to do. If they had transferred the data and something happened to the data on the new computer, then it would no longer be their fault, although it's still poor customer service.
Although slightly more expensive (don't waste your time on the "free unlimited storage" media sites), a digital safe-deposit box in the form of an offsite backup service is a lot easier than driving to the bank.
I have a cron job that fires off an rsync command every night - destination is my rsync.net offsite filesystem where I keep 7 days of snapshots of all of my data.
Easy, cheap.
Ya, that works great since we havent invented battery powered reciprocating saws yet. Makes mincemeat of cables and wall studs in seconds.
Offsite storage is the only way to go. As you point out, even a simple fire would have wiped him out. With all the talk of 'movie vaults' in his industry you would think that off site storage would have at least crossed his mind once.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think we eventually concluded that a fireproof safe doesn't really gain you much in the real world.
In the real world?? What, do you work in the twin towers? Fires in office buildings don't generally proceed far enough to make the whole building collapse. Passing on a safe just because there is some wildly unlikely sequence of events that would still destroy your documents isn't very logical.
A safe would be a good investment, most are fire proof which is important too.
Yes, but let's not forget that what we're dealing with here is a forced entry into a place where the robbers were waiving knives in the staff's faces. Nothing makes a knife waive faster than when it's accompanied by the phrase (how ever you say it in Spanish), "I know you know how to open this safe, so get to it..."
If Coppola can't afford the bandwith to push to an off-site storage service, I don't know who can.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"I use encrypted RAR archives, their encryption is quite strong and uncracked as far as I know."
The key phrase here is 'as far as I know' since RAR is closed source. If your primary concern is encryption, why not use 7z instead?