not sure how relevant.
but it must be said theres nothing quite like taking for granted a healthy PC, not backing up the hard drive, and then the hard drive going bang.

The panic that ensues is unreal, Photos, Music, Games, Passwords.... all lost.

its happened to me a few times, i never learn.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 9:41, 11 replies)

Many, many times.
This has happened to me on more occassions than I care to remember.

Hence I now have an external backup drive!

I learned that lesson the hard, hard way.
(dchurch bah, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:00, closed)

i have one of those too,
trouble is - you can garuntee the hard drive will pack up the day after your wedding photos have been added, but not to your back up harddrive :(
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:03, closed)

I always found
that the biggest pain in the arse was bookmarks, I know passwords, and share my photos liberally, and have my pr0n spread over two seperate hard drives. (The missus knows about one, and because it's not too much (about 2gb) she is fine with it, I will be rather dead if she looks in my other hard drive and finds the other 30gb, I'm dead)

My advice is either share things with your friends, or buy an external hard drive, and set it to automatically back up.

I recommend scan's today only - www.scan.co.uk/TodayOnly/Index.aspx - for example, they've got a 1Tb external HDD for only £97.40, which makes me do a little sex wee.
( Agnostic Antichrist Baltimora, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:13, closed)

Yup its happened to the best of us.
And as an IT Techy ive had to console a number of sobbing users when their data has gone and theres bugger all I can do about it. Though despite the hard drive sounding like a lawnmower they think I can? Then blame me.

*loves being a punchbag for other peoples stupidity and lazyness for not backing up*
(Miggyman, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:20, closed)

Yep
I have many IT related stories to backups etc...

I use a cron job to backup everything overnight now, or I can run it manually if I think it needs backing up straight away.

I also use del.icio.us for bookmarks now rather than the built in 'favourites' or whatever.

Bloody useful site that it.
(dchurch bah, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:29, closed)

I'm a geek also
And I have my data backed up in 3 places due to previous experience.

My backup drive died while restoring data once, hence the need for another place...
(Ethelred is watching cheese grow, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:32, closed)

I suppose I suddenly
became all anal about it after the first few 'near misses'.

The music, films, software, etc... can be found again. The pictures cannot.

Hence they are backed up to my Mythbox, my xbox HDD and my laptop AS WELL as the external drive.

At periodical times throughout the year I will burn the pics onto about 3 DVDs (yes, I have thousands of the bastards) and take them to my parents house, so even if my place burned to the ground, I would still have the pictures at least.
(dchurch bah, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:35, closed)

to make you feel better
i moved everything to an external HDD, and whilst backing up i managed to dink the HDD as i gently moved it to make sure it wasn't going to fall of the table. The HDD stopped. It was 2 weeks old at most and had 7 years of photos - wedding onwards - plus about 60Gb of music, the majority of it was genuine and i had spent about 3 weeks ripping my CD's ...

I was inconsolable.

I went to bed after not speaking for about 5 hours - then at 2am remembered "the old digital photo frame - i copied a Gb onto an SD card"

I wept with joy. I missed about 6 months of new piccies (new camera) and the old cam was 2.1Mpixels so had everything old.

I tried everything on the drive - my IT people here, freezing it, everything. It was such a small knock to the HDD.

i am over it now, but i have about 3 back ups of everything. external network drive with 500gb mirrored drives, external HDD and DVDs with it on stashed at my mates house in case of fire - and my parents house(password protected of course)in thair safe.

still no guarantees it won't happen again - always looking for new ways........
( bazza van der trance , ooh baby baby, baby baby. Get up on this., Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:36, closed)

back ups
External hdds are cheap as chips these days but I am mindful of how much data they hold... and therefore how much data you can lose in one hit. So do we back up our back ups...
( enoughblueskyforsailorstrousers, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:39, closed)

@Mime
I'm seriously considering it...

I've only recently bought an external hard drive (as a direct result of the "My most treasured possession" QOTW, thanks B3ta), and finally backed up 10 years of music that I've written & recordings of my band. 100s of Cubase & Reason files that I could quite easily have lost.

However, I now feel as though I should get another back up and store it elsewhere, just in case. I don't think I'm being overly paranoid, either.
( Moey, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:45, closed)

I don't think you're being paranoid either.
The external drive I had had 2 WD (I find anything from Hitachi/IBM will fail, especially those bloody 'desk(death)star' drives.

I set up mirroring each of the 520gb drives to each other too, so if one goes, I can still get to everything and move it off somewhere else.

Wow - reading this back, I DO sound paranoid.

The first time I had a major disaster was using Win2k and I got that bloody nimda virus. Luckily my MAME box was running linux, so I managed to copy all the pics over to that and of course it was immune to the nimda crap.
(dchurch bah, Thu 21 Aug 2008, 10:49, closed)