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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."
Don't worry, mate, It will be backed up very solid quite soon :)
You will never lose it again. It will be as safe as it could be.
(Unless you'll decide to purchase it and keep it private, of course)
Why is this news? Someone somewhere didn't back up their data and the hdd was stolen. Happens a lot people, next thing you know we're going to be hearing about how Paris Hilton bought an iPhone and an iGasm.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
The backup device was taken and in its place was a severed horse's head....
Another person who learn the hard way that making backups is not enough, but that you have to store the backups in more than one physical location. I wonder if the thieves will even hear his request, let alone consider to listen to it. Nowadays you can get a 2.5 inch 80 Gbyte harddisk for less than 100 USD. You can easily store this at a location that won't be found by thieves looking for computers. Thieves almost never search children bedrooms or kitchens for these kind of items.
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
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
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.
Put a Vista sticker on it.
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...
tesla coils and an rfid system to deactive them for friendly people
I read it elsewhere: it was armed robbery, and it sounds like they took the originals too.
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
Not very professional.
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.
...which was a transistor wrapped up in a newspaper, along with a note that said, "Maxtor sleeps with the fishes".
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
Know Canada's army? That's right. You don't. Because they're at my house. Both of them. Protecting my data. Highly recommended. They go well with vodka.
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
A safe would be a good investment, most are fire proof which is important too.
For a USB back-up unit, get one with a K-slot on it and bolt it to your desk or wall. It will prevent theft in a robbery, a cable lock (the kind with the hoop that bonds permanently is the way to go, stronger than a K-slot). Using a lock on your home system is especially important if you use a laptop, all laptops have a K-slot.
I love my old Powermac, it has a loop for a cable lock and when the loop is in use it prevents the case from being opened too. Some PC cases have that as well, rarely as fancy, but sufficient.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Slashdot story quality is often low; apparently Slasdot editors don't even Google the stories. This is the real story; it was an armed robbery: Coppola Says Robbery Cost Years of Data (AP). This poorly edited story has even more detail: Thieves Steal Francis Ford Coppola's Everything.
I suspect that there is more to the story than we know. I suspect that he is more worried about release of information than loss of information. The AP article says he had a backup copy of a screenplay on which he is working.
The moral of the story is: Have proprietary data? Use TrueCrypt. Supports Windows and Linux. As all encryption software must be, it is open source, very mature, and supports both Windows and Linux. Supports encrypted devices and encrypted folders, including hidden folders.
To encrypt a file, use the free open source Gnu Privacy Guard.
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.
Several years ago, I had a break in. The computer was stolen.
Luckily, I have been using a tape backup, and the robber did not take those. So, I was able to go back one month with everything intact.
In those days, everything I had fit in the 2.5GB tape. I then bought a 10GB tape, and it lasted for a few years. Backups were simply a cron job and an email to tell me that the backup is done and to change the tape. I kept one tape offsite as a precaution.
However, life changed. I got a digital camera and started taking a lot of pictures. Then I got another one with more megapixels and started taking more pictures which are larger in size. All of a sudden, tapes were not enough. The largest Travan tape is 20GB native capacity.
Getting tapes for a home setup is a real chore, specially with the rate the capacity of hard disks is growing. Tapes cannot keep up, specially at price points that home users can afford for both drives and media. Finding the media can be a challenge, let alone finding them at reasonable prices.
To this day, my page on Linux tape backup comes up first on Google, despite moving on from tapes.
Because tapes are no longer enough for the size of data that I have, I now use external disk drives in USB enclosures, two of them to be sure, and a cron job to do daily incremental dumps, and weekly full dumps. See setting up a hard disk USB 2.0 enclosure for backup under Linux and Ubuntu Linux backup of a laptop using a USB enclosure and the dump utility (I use a similar approach for the server).
Although drive enclosures can be theoretically kept offsite, they have to be unmounted, unplugged and are bulkier than tape. So it is inconvenient. Using 2.5" drives may make this more convenient, but their price vs. capacity still makes them more costly.
What are others using for a home setup for tape and offsite backup? DLT? DAT? What?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I haven't seen any comments about online backup solutions.
They're quite cheap (~ $50-$100 per year with unlimited storage) now and they make for the (almost) perfect off-site backup solution.
I've tried Mozy.com and Amazon S3.
While not technically a dedicated backup solution, Amazon is quite cost-effective for me and has amazing bandwidth -- I can upload or download through my 24/1.2 mbit connection at full speed 99% of the time. Yes, it's not very user-friendly at first, but after setting up JungleDisk (or your choice of WebDAV interface) and any backup application the first time, you just let the scheduler work its way through your data.
Mozy is cheap at $60/year/computer with unlimited storage, but I get modest connection speeds to their servers. Yet, their Windows client is extremely simple to set up. The Mac client (still a beta) is also good, although not ready for "production" work, yet. Linux is a no-go, though.
Of course it's always best to also keep a local device for quick backups/restores of large amounts of data, but the peace of mind and convenience afforded by online solutions... It's priceless to me...
Didn't you watch that episode of MythBusters?
Sure you can get it open, but you'll most likely toast the contents.
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 ----