{"id":56,"date":"2007-03-02T19:31:49","date_gmt":"2007-03-03T00:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2007-03-02T22:19:58","modified_gmt":"2007-03-03T03:19:58","slug":"every-other-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/03\/02\/every-other-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Backups"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Schinker has a post<\/a> that talks about the reliability of hard drives. I read the study by the Google people, and I can vouch for their results. I may not have the thousands of drives that they have, but my percentages of failures is similar. I look at it this way. If it is a hard drive, it will eventually fail. If you are lucky, the failure will be in the distant future.<\/p>\n

I don’t chance things. I have one computer that does nothing but backups. During the night, it runs Cobain Backup<\/a> and gets all the important information from my machines, my wife’s machine and the servers. The backups are saved onto a USB drive which is swapped out once a week. I have three 250 GB USB drives. One is always connected to the backup computer, one is waiting on the shelf and one is at my office at UF. I am happy to report that in twenty years of using PCs, I have only lost a significant amount of data one time… in 1989. Almost twenty years ago, while I was in graduate school, my main hard drive died. I lost about a week’s worth of data. That’s when I started doing regular backups. Since then, I haven’t lost more an hour’s worth of work on the rare occasion that my computer locks up in the middle of a project.<\/p>\n

I have had some catastrophic drive fails, one of them being a few months ago over Christmas break. My web server which houses this blog, and many other important things, lost the main drive. Since the computer I was using was really old (vintage 1999), I decided to replace the whole thing. I was off line for a week or so while I scraped together some “not nearly as old as the last server” used parts to build a new (circa 2003) server. Once I had a working machine, I was back up and running in a couple of hours. Everything was just as I had it before.<\/p>\n

When I talk with my students about backups, I always get the same thing. “What is a backup?” Most of them have USB flash drives. Anything from the lab usually gets saved to those portable drives. Beyond that, I haven’t had one student with a plan in place to backup important files.<\/p>\n

Considering that a blank DVD costs less than 50 cents, everything created by a student during a four-year degree could be backed up many times for a few dollars. The media costs almost nothing. The data saved on it could be priceless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Schinker has a post that talks about the reliability of hard drives. I read the study by the Google people, and I can vouch for their results. I may not have the thousands of drives that they have, but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[336],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","tag-edtech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}