• Welcome to ZD Forums! You must create an account and log in to see and participate in the Shoutbox chat on this main index page.

How Often Do You Backup Your Devices?

How often?

  • Multiple Times Daily

    Votes: 2 18.2%
  • Daily

    Votes: 2 18.2%
  • Weekly

    Votes: 1 9.1%
  • Monthly

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Half-Yearly

    Votes: 1 9.1%
  • Yearly

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Less than Yearly/Never

    Votes: 5 45.5%

  • Total voters
    11

Jimmu

Administrator
Staff member
Administrator
How often do you backup the data on your phones, computers, or other devices?


I generally back up my phone and my laptop once a week at the least. I've never had to use it so far but it is nice to have the piece of mind that I have a second copy if I'll need it.
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2018
Daily. Every night 1am computer checks its data’s integrity and if corrupted files or data rot are detected, parity data is used to rebuild corrupted files. Computer tolerates simultaneous failure of two disks.
If a disk suddenly breaks down, I lose data I have stored after last night in case the data is saved in that particular disk. If I have stored something very critical, then I manually execute backup procedure to be sure not to lose anything
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jan 1, 2019
Location
Netherlands
important stuff is automatically being backed up every 10 minutes by File History and cloud services. Especially photos are being stored on multiple devices in different locations.
 

Castle

Ch!ld0fV!si0n
Joined
Oct 24, 2012
Location
Crisis? What Crisis?
Gender
Pan-decepticon-transdeliberate-selfidentifying-sodiumbased-extraexistential-temporal anomaly
The answer for most people is almost always "Not enough." The best method is of course to automatically back up your devices either on to backup hardware, partitions, external devices or servers.

I do not do such a thing, however. If my data was crucial to my work or if I've invested untold hours into a serious personal project or something, I would. But as it is I only stand to lose bookmarks, hundreds of accumulated image files, hundreds of hours of saved games the latter of which are backed up to cloud storage via their digital distribution platform services (Steam and GoG).

Also, I don't trust cloud storage services. I will simply never entrust my data to a third party or anyone else who could have access to that third party. I want my data to fit in my lap, so to speak, in a device I can hold in my hand, not some random anonymous server lost in some warehouse in Timbuktu.

But every once in a while I will manually copy image files and word documents to external thumb drives. It's not the most elegant solution and it doesn't work if there's a failure before I bother to get around to it.

My laptop is getting long in the tooth and I keep expecting a failure any day now but it keeps holding out so far.
 
Joined
Mar 9, 2017
I backup important files regularly across multiple devices using something called Syncthing. The devices sync with each other as long as the devices are connected to the internet.

Every night 1am computer checks its data’s integrity and if corrupted files or data rot are detected, parity data is used to rebuild corrupted files. Computer tolerates simultaneous failure of two disks.
RAID 6?
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2018
Correct if I'm wrong but in raid 6 data is distributed across the disks. My data isn't. I wanted an option to expand my setup later so I chose not to stripe data. I was afraid of hardware failure causing to lose all the data in case I couldn't find similar hardware to replace the failed ones. I'm not sure which level raid my setup is. It has two disks that hosts the parity data. If one of them fails and one data drive unit fails, the other parity data unit one can be used to rebuild data . Also, if both parity disks fail, the parity data can be rebuild from data disks.

Currently I'm using flexraid but sooner or later I need to find another solution (e.g. DrivePool by StableBit and Snapraid) as the developer of flexraid is somewhat unpredictable. He's been absent for a while now and some customers are totally without support. For instance, some cannot activate their licenses they have bought because developer is away. My setup is running just fine but say I wanted to change the hardware, I would have to reactivate my license through the developer.

I backup important files regularly across multiple devices using something called Syncthing. The devices sync with each other as long as the devices are connected to the internet.
That Syncthing seems to be a smart solution. From their website:

"Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it's transmitted over the Internet."

I like their vision.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Jun 7, 2016
Location
England
Gender
Female
I've never backed up a device. I haven't the slightest clue how to and I've never needed to so far.
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2018
I have 23 TB of data. Losing all that would be horrible

Edit. 22TB actually when I checked
 
Last edited:
Joined
Mar 9, 2017
Correct if I'm wrong but in raid 6 data is distributed across the disks. My data isn't. I wanted an option to expand my setup later so I chose not to stripe data. I was afraid of hardware failure causing to lose all the data in case I couldn't find similar hardware to replace the failed ones. I'm not sure which level raid my setup is. It has two disks that hosts the parity data. If one of them fails and one data drive unit fails, the other parity data unit one can be used to rebuild data . Also, if both parity disks fail, the parity data can be rebuild from data disks.

Currently I'm using flexraid but sooner or later I need to find another solution (e.g. DrivePool by StableBit and Snapraid) as the developer of flexraid is somewhat unpredictable. He's being absent for a while now and some customers are totally without support. For instance, some cannot activate their licenses they have bought because developer is away. My setup is running just fine but say I wanted to change the hardware, I would have to reactivate my license through the developer.

In RAID 6, you have two parity blocks and those blocks are distributed across 4 drives (at minimum) thus giving you a two drive fault tolerance (In RAID 6 your data is striped as well). Having a dedicated parity drive is a characteristic of RAID 4 and again your data is striped across all the drives except the last one though you'd only have a one drive fault tolerance. How many drives do you have?

Also would seriously recommend getting a dedicated hardware RAID controller if possible. In fact, Most modern motherboards nowadays have integrated RAID support where you don't have to purchase an expansion card.
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2018
I have 8 data drives, 2 parity data drives and a system drive where the OS is running. Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS

All data drives are 3 TB in capacity except two that are 2 TB
 
Joined
Feb 19, 2019
Gender
Feel free to use what pronouns you want. I use both sexed pronoun sets interchangeably.
I back up the important stuff from my computer to a detachable hard drive. I don't back up the full computer.

However, all of the files from Project Ragnarok are fully backed up to multiple locations.
 
Joined
Mar 9, 2017
I have 8 data drives, 2 parity data drives and a system drive where the OS is running. Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS

All data drives are 3 TB in capacity except two that are 2 TB

I think I'm missing something here. Two of the data drives are 2TB and the other 6 are 3TB giving you 22TB total capacty but you stated that you have 23TB of data. Unless you mean that the other two are your parity drives
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top Bottom