My Computer Data is Vulnerable

[rlkeeney]

I am a Linux/Unix Systems administrator with nearly forty years of working with computers. Thirty-five of those professionally. For the last ten years I have work primarily in disaster recovery. What do you do if the building burns to the ground and all of your date with it kind of thing. I thought i might be interesting to you to know what I do for my personal backups. I don't usually jump in to help with computer stuff because I don't do Windows.

I use external USB connected hard drives. I backup to one of them and if that is successful I backup to the other one. Using the rule that one is the same as none and two is one. This is all don with scripts I wrote that only copy changes so it is pretty quick. My hard drives can be mounted on any Linux computer and the files read directly from them. I will not use anything that requires software be installed in order to recover my data.

These are unmounted and powered off when not in use. It's way to easy to get confused and delete you backup. Drives that are not powered up are safe from anything that you do on the computer.

I don't think that you are backed up until you have copies off site. For this I have yet another hard drive that gets synced manually and only comes home to get updated. This drive is encrypted. If you don't have the pass phrase your not getting in. The encryption makes me feel comfortable leaving at work. If it gets stolen. They will get a hard drive that they can't mount.

I have two other external hard drives that I do point in time copies and special backups to. These are some that got to small to hold everything and were replaced by larger drives.

My photos are the most important data I have. The digital camera photos can't be replaced and I sure would not want to go through all the scanning again. For these I do a little extra. Each of the five hard drives have a copy. I have a Google account that I pay abot $6.00 a year for and I also have a web site with a photo album. As part of my routine I use when retrieving my photos they get copied to both of these sites. Not only does this allow me to easily share them with family and friends but it's two more backups that are off site. If you do this be sure that you can upload photos to the site with out them being modified.

I have lots of music files. Google Music lets you store 20,000 tracks online for free. Uploading is very slow but you don't have to watch it. I've been sending files to Google music for awhile. It's free and it's another backup. I think that anything you upload in any audio format other than MP3 gets converted to MP3.

If you want to keep your data you need multiple copies.
If it's not off site it isn't backed up.
If you haven't recovered it you haven't got a backup. You don't know if it works.

I have a fire safe. I'm planning to put a hard drive in the safe and attach to it over my net work.

OK, I'm sure some of you think this is over kill. However, when I have a hard drive fail it's only anoying not a disaster. I had one fail a few weeks ago.

I never ever use thumb/flash drives for a backup. They are to small, slow, fragile, and easy to loose.

You can buy a Western Digital 1TB Passport external hard drive for way less than $100. $68 on Amazon right now. It will hold a lot of data and fit in you shirt pocket. It gets it's power from the USB port and doesn't have one of those annoying wall wort powersupplies.

[keakap]

no matter what I do.

A while back, I lost the hard drives in my computer. After recovery, I implemented what I thought would be a reliable and safe backup system.
...I knocked, yes knocked, the memory stick out of the front of my computer. This was the storage point for nearly all of the work that I have done using Sketchup.

[Nothing here is meant to imply that you personally do not do everything mentioned here. It's a generic list. For me as much as for anyone, since I know that I cannot remember every detail every time.]

Two things: put some energy into determining, if possible, the likely cause of the hard disc failures. Two: search for backups.

How hard is it to recover lost files = how much money etc. one should "lavish" on one's hardware etc., incl. air conditioning, surge protectors and UPS. If hard drives etc. are not lasting a decade or more, something's wrong with the environment or the quality of the devices.

Search: many if not most if nor all graphics or drawing or photo programs have built-in "Save" features. Some are automatic. Some save to 'hidden' places and may be called odd things not normally recognized by programs that could open them. (Generally...) When you Start a program and it axes you (in your case it axed your hard drive) or asks you what file to open it will present a Directory and a file Type to open. If your prog had saved a backup copy to a unique Dir with a unique File Extension you wouldn't see it. Even if you go to the "Files of Type" and click- if it is available- "All Files *.*" it may be in a Dir that does not contain the Backup files, so you wouldn't see 'em. Either manually select each Sub Dir or do a general search.
Search the "C:/" drive for any and All Sketchup files. You be lookin for Dirs like "Save", "Backup", "Autosave", "Back", "Autoback", etc.
If you find a Dir "Autosave", say, open it and note File Ext's. There might be a file named "243utyz.abu" or some such. Note the Ext. Open Sketchup and try to open that file or any ".abu" file. If it is what you are looking for the prog (only!) can open it. Search the entire C:/ drive for ".abu" files.

I've found these things in the most amazing places. Point is they don'e Want you to find them (and mess them up), unless the situation is dire.

If you find some, probably the onliest way to restore 'em to useable Sketchup files will be to open 'em and "Save As" the normal Sk File Ext.

There's a lot more to it, but if any of this exists you should find traces of it.

Don fergit to include "Hidden Files" in your search.

[JPG]

Or get out of 'windows' and use a dos based substitute(one that can read ntfs disks) and see what is actually out there. Direct reading of the file structure can be quite enlightening.

BTW doing that gets more difficult with each new windows version.