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."

Comments

Step 3 in The Tao of Backup

[Vainglorious Coward]

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.

Re:More than one physical location

[gregbaker]

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.

Make it so it's no big deal....

[Joce640k]

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.

nothing funny about it

[CranberryKing]

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.

There is not a good backup solution

[LS]

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

Re:use a safe & lock

[pherthyl]

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.

Re:use a safe & lock

[ScentCone]

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.