BACK UP YOUR WORK!!!!

[urthegman]

However you may do it, just a friendly reminder to back up all your laborious sequencing work!!!!! 

[sirloinofbeef001]

Yep!!!!! I lost everything last year a month before the show and had to throw a show together. Albeit the ppl didnt know any difference, i sure did. Now my thumb drive is backed up.

[MrChristmas2000]

You sound like the voice of experience. 

You do realize that it goes in one ear and out the other and dosen't stop at all for most people until it hits them up the side of the head.

Not only should you back up locally but you should use off site backup such as Carbonite, Mozy, or a similar automatic backup service. External hard drives and thumb drives can fail as well as thumb drives get lost ( happend to a friend of mine, it drove him nuts until he found it). The more backup locations the better.

[sirloinofbeef001]

I know all to well about thumb drives walking.  If you ask my daughters where my thumb drives are, they have no clue. So i hid them in my underwear drawer. They are safe now. Lol ..

[tbone321]

The downside to multiple backups is keeping them all up to date. 

[jnealand]

I backup all my sequences to my home server and on the home server I backup to a portable 750gb hard drive on a daily basis into folders by day (mon, tue, wed, etc).  I keep two portable hard drives and swap them every Sunday.  That gives me 14 unique days of backup. The swapped out unit is kept in my car which is not kept in the garage.  I have done this since I had a very good friend have his house hit by lightning and get destroyed.  Once bitten twice shy and forewarned is forearmed.  It may be a bit overkill, but I have had customers lose a lot of data, by not being well backed up.  I do not use online backups, but even if I did, I would still have a local backup in my own hands / control.

[hbomb341]

My professional life I do Computer Forensics and electronic discovery, so I deal with a TON of data.  I can not preach enough to BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!!!!  I get a call at less weekly from friends and family who has lost data and want to try to recover it.  80% of the time it isn't recoverable or will cost $3,000+.  Think about how much kid photos, that perfect presentation you made, or even just that one awesome wallpaper - how much are they worth to you.  When I had my first kid is when I personally went nuts on my backup.  100% of my kids photos are electronic and it would be heart breaking to loose.

My 2 cents - I follow a 3-2-1 backup strategy.  I have 3 Copy's, on 2 different media, and 1 is offsite.  I also live on the edge of crazy, I also have high redundant data on local RIAD setup for a little extra but remember RAID DOES NOT EQUAL BACKUP.  All my data live on my local server (Copy 1 - Media: Hard Drive) and I have a NAS that backup (Copy 2 - Media: Hard Drive), and then offsite using a mix of Backblaze (Most things - Pictures, Sequences, Home Videos, etc ... no sensitive data) and Amazon S3 (High sensitive data - Documents, credit cards, birth certificates) (Copy 3 - Offsite  - Media: 'Cloud').  I have this all scripted and at MOST will be 15 min out of sync.  Also protected agains theft, lost, failure, or natural disaster (Something to keep in mind - what if an area like Dallas had 1 thing is you data geographically somewhere else).

Few things to keep in mind ... Cost, what does it backup (Check each services has different specifications), security (If this was to get in the public does it need to be encrypted), How much work to keep in sync, what is the expected life of the data and the device, also will I be able to read this in X number of years (Think of ZIP discs here). 

Some App / service Recommendations:
Good Sync (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login)
ARQ (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login)
Dropbox (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login)
Backblaze (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login)

Good Articles / Podcasts:
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I admit I live on the edge of crazy but when you see it every day.  Thumb drives die, Hard drives crash, data is deleted, house burns down, devices are lost.  So my final word - BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!!!!!!!!!

Harrison

[JonB256]

Sequences and music files duplicated on two computers. Check!

Nightly backup of changed files to a Windows Home Server. Check!

Backup of files in an off site. Nope. Maybe a copy to a flash drive would be in line.

[Mickpat]

I just setup File History on my Windows 8 machine.  Pretty cool.

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I also plan to setup Storage Spaces and pool my hard drives with mirroring.

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[chrisatpsu]

most people backup their pictures by posting them on facebook....  every....  stinkin....  one....