World Backup Day: A reminder to protect against data loss

[Admin]

Monday, March 31st, 2025, is World Backup Day, a reminder to think about how your precious data is stored and protected. We also look at some of the biggest storage manufacturers' deals on SSDs and other storage products.

World Backup Day: A reminder to protect against data loss : Read more

 

[Geef]

I've always kept a HDD as a secondary to hold stuff I wanted to store. Then one day I saw a cheap price for a refurbished HDD that was similar size.
I made a RAID 1 Mirror setup, that way a HDD failure is not a problem anymore. Also a mirror setup increases read speed but not write speed. So it's perfect for storing stuff. (It is easy to setup a mirror RAID in bios settings.)

 

[kyzarvs]

As a customer I work for (who is a massive multi-national with manufacturing sites in over 20 countries) enters its 3rd month of recovery after a massive malware attack - I wholeheartedly agree that backups should be taken more seriously by everyone...

 

[MJS WARLORD]

I dont have a separate drive for backing up the entire contents back i think that if something bad happened to that drive the i am in trouble anyway. I have a slightly different approach , i put all vital stuff on a selection of flash drives.

I take print screen shots of desk , email address book and other layouts so i can remember how i had things set up.

I have photos , docs , vids , music and a folder with save game positions on them. I also have a flash drive of unrun utilities i use. To complete the back ups i have a pen drive with a copy of all of these things on it.

I do it this way because i think that if something goes wrong i might as well do a clean install of windows.

The number golden rule for windows is NEVER trust restore points they very rarely get you out of trouble in fact in 23 years of being a pc geek i can only think of a couple of occasions where it got me out of trouble.
I once had a pc get stuck in a restore loop and it kept going until my hard drive ran out of space .

 

[SomeoneElse23]

I've been using AOMEI Backupper for many years. It has some quirks (what doesn't?) but it does the job.

It's also important to note that you should have an offline backup of some sort. Otherwise anything that happens to your PC, such as ransomware, also takes out your backups.

I have two Unraids setup for this. One for online (which AOMEI backs up to), and one offline that I manually sync to every so often.

 

[bigdragon]

10TB for $200 seems very overpriced. I thought 14TB was going for that price. My current backup and storage solution (4TB HDDs in RAID 1) is running out of space so I'm starting to look at options for more storage.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

10TB for $200 seems very overpriced. I thought 14TB was going for that price. My current backup and storage solution (4TB HDDs in RAID 1) is running out of space so I'm starting to look at options for more storage.

Check out GoHardDrive.com for warrantied (up to 5 year) recertified drives for much more reasonable prices.

 

[USAFRet]

My procedure has changed a little since I wrote this, but...this:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Rob1C]

I remember a half century ago when I always backed up to cassette tape, and it took a couple of minutes to save a program barely 16kB in size. I always made backups because it would take a week's work to attempt to rewrite the program and type it in again.

Several years later came somewhat affordable hard drives (Seagate ST-412 10MB 5.25 inch MFM hard disk drive), and while backing up wasn't very convenient (since backup software was feature lacking) I backed up every few months or so; but I advised customers to make three backups stored in different locations at a frequency of what they could afford to lose, so likely more often than weekly.

As hard drives became more reliable and my ability to recover my data improved I was able to make yearly backups, sure I sometimes lost a bit but I saved so much time and stress from backup paranoia disease.

More recently I backup every few weeks or so, though I'd still advise others that they'd probably want to backup more often than that. With automatic backup software that runs in the background it's easy to schedule backups that are simple and effort free.

The greatest of all winning strategies is snapshots. A snapshot saves the whole shebang including exactly where you are in any running programs. If a virus pops up, and says some message to taunt you, laugh back; and hit the rollback button. Boom, instantly restored to what you were doing when you took the last snapshot.

 

[Dr3ams]

I use Directory Opus's Syncronize tool to backup my data. I do that about twice a month. I have a docking station and internal HDDs for external backups. The drives are stored in individual and insulated plastic cases. For local internal backups I have two 2 TB SSDs.

 

[DSzymborski]

My OS NVMe is imaged once every week late Sunday night, all my important files on my main PC are backed up every morning at 6:00 AM to my backup server at home, my file server (if applicable), and my backup server sends those file updates to the cloud backup. I also have longer-term stuff backed up in an encrypted hard drive, periodically burned to bluray, and a thumb drive over at my mom's house.

No RAIDs in the backup mix, since RAIDs are a good uptime solution but a bad backup solution. A backup solution that only protects against hard drive failure is like having brakes for your car that only work on weekdays.