Chromatography Forum

A short while ago my laptop and my external hdd back up both failed at the same time.

Luckily, since it turned out to be a motor failure in each case I was able to extract the drives , put them into new cases and recover most of the data.

The painful lesson that I have learnt is to keep at least 2 copies backed up. I now use 2 external drives to do this plus a couple of usb memory sticks of important photos of my children

It may be obvious to some but it wasn't to me at the time. I thought that I was doing well to keep one backup Lesson learnt!

Regards

Ralph

The other thing to consider is that if your backup drive is sitting on the desk next to your computer, or in a bag with the computer then a fire will cook both of them or a thief will grab both of them. they need to make like royalty and travel separately.

Peter

Using a RAID set-up, while not going to help with the fire scenario, does help with the disc-failure scenario.

We started getting all new instrument computers at work with the RAID 1 mirror setup, and it has already saved us from two HDD failures in the last couple years. RAID 5 on the server is also a good idea, but sometimes overkill for home.

No matter how you backup at home, it is a good idea if you refresh the data once or twice a year just so you don't lose something with the drives sitting idle for so long, if they are not constantly on.