It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud. I (potentially) lost one year of progress on a book I’m writing because of my negligence.
So please don’t be like me.
I always make sure to back up my dozen half-baked incomplete coding projects that become incomprehensible to me one week after I last touch them
Sorry to hear that. You are not the only one who had to learn it the hard way :/
It’s even harder the second time… I should stick to ink and paper.
Can’t stress this enough, especially if you’re a server operator! Any data that doesn’t exist in at least 2 different places should be considered volatile. Also keep in mind that the “cloud” is just someone else’s computer and shouldn’t be used for backup, since you have no control over it and it requires a working Internet connection to access it. Better to get an external USB 3 drive with enough capacity to fit all your most important files; They’re relatively cheap (especially HDDs) and last a long time (my personal one that I got years ago has 48524 hours on it as I’m typing this and it’s still perfectly fine).
Local (and ideally offline) backups are great, but I also have remote backups to mitigate the risk of a catastrophic event happening at my home and destroying the hard drives. I have offline backups because then hacks and viruses are mitigated. With an always-connected hard drive a malicious actor could access it just like the primary drive.
Of course you don’t have control over cloud storage, but you can encrypt the data that’s sent there, and unless you have really poor internet connectivity I don’t see that being an issue. In the worst case you have to wait a day or so to be able to restore something, but better that than it being lost forever.
You’re right. I have both local and online options so I maximise the chances of file safety but my work is the only thing I didn’t make a recent backup thereof, even though it’s the easiest thing to backup out of my files.
Highly recommend setting up syncthing on at least 2 devices. Then you never have to worry, as it’s automatic.
It’s not as good as a proper backup solution but it’s definitely much better than nothing.
It really depends on how many devices you’re talking about. Two is infinitely better than zero, but not ideal. If you’ve got several devices at several locations syncing files, I don’t see how that’s much worse than a cloud service. And amazon can’t look at my Weiner pics that way.
(I’m kidding, of course. Making Jeff Bezos see my hog is a feature of AWS, not a defect.)
One problem with it is that deleting a file in Syncthing may also delete it on other machines. And a backup solution will keep multiple versions of old files which can be lifesaving if you make a bad edit.
I would do that except I looked at prices for external drives and they’re fecking expensive.
It’s funny (or tragic?) because I have syncthing and did not bother sync my work. Only thought about it in retrospect.
Hrm, must have not been running. That’s its only job.
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My Raspberry Pi sd card failed in a not immediately obvious way, luckily I had a backup and it actually helped me restore most important stuff almost right away. Just fresh image, copy the stuff and it works.
yeah, backup discipline is a must for a modern computer user
I recommend for writing that people make frequent versioned copies as well. For example after some amount of pages or time spent I’ll copy the file itself and rename it <filename>_backup<date> to try and protect against corruption that happens to part of the file without being noticed and just to have the option of rolling back to a previous iteration or at least looking at it. It can clutter things up a little but if you like you can put the backups in their own folder somewhere. Though this is obviously no substitute for backing up to another device as this method doesn’t protect you against your storage device failing, suffering corruption, malware, etc so it’s more important to do that.
Sorry this happened to you OP.
I’ve never really thought about it outside of the context of code, but I wonder if Git would be handy for this. Plain text and markdown would work perfectly, but there might be better version control systems for things like Office/LibreOffice.
For smaller binary files it’s fine. I use it for my desktop wallpapers. For large binary files there are a bunch of extensions out there like git-lfs or git-annex. Vanilla git can handle binary files up to a few GB IIRC but it gets unusably slow when you throw multiple large binary files at it.
Many backup apps or scripts create differential backups, so even Office documents and whatever else doesn’t play nice with Git is still backed up an additional time when there’s any change detected in the file.
Be careful who you back up with, as well, if you live in a country that could potentially get sanctioned by the US i.e. if you live outside the US.
Oh dang, thanks for that! I haven’t backed up my major projects in months.
Please do! Better be safe than sorry.
It also needs saying that RAID is not a backup.
But I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you’re able to recover it.
It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud.
I’ve been waiting for four days now for a couple hundred thousand of my files to finish uploading to a back‐up service. It still isn’t done.
That’s utterly miserable. What happened? Would it be at all possible for a professional to dig through the deep dark of your computer to try and find any remnants of the file/files you lost?
There might be a chance that it hasn’t been overridden yet or might be hiding in a place a regular person wouldn’t think to look.
I wish you luck though, it’s awful that happened to you.
Laptop stopped working, it reeks of burned smell. I don’t know if extracting the data is even an option since the device has no HDD but instead a tiny chip soldered onto the motherboard.
It’s completely my fault, I should’ve known better.
That is still recoverable. You’d be surprised what techs can do. I would give it a shot!
No luck today finding a store that can repair it. Will see next week, but I pretty much lost hope and began writing all over again. fml.
Not even repair it, as your computers probably completely totaled. They can however scrape as much data as they can from the memory and put it on an SSD for you if you’re lucky. Any average repair shop could do that for you, I would look for ones that offer a free consultation or inspection and get a second opinion just in case.
Just do not expose your computer to heat or humidity.
DO NOT TRY TO TURN YOUR COMPUTER ON AS WELL.
Again it’s a long shot, but good luck.
Ok I will see. As I said, the laptop doesn’t have a HDD but an eMMC soldered on the motherboard.
They can still scrape that. It’s just a bit more difficult.
so what you’re telling me is that i need to back that thang up?
