Have you backed up your PC recently?

[shadowninja]

Lost everything today. All my trading notes. All my accounts.

Fortunately, I backed up my work files 2-3 weeks ago. Phew.

 

[Crap Buddist]

mmm, well how did it happen, I mean did your hard drive die or something ? What about those digital vaults they any good.... ?

 

[shadowninja]

Removed some old programs, defragged, rebooted. It refused to come back. Couldn't even just replace system files.

Fortunately, I have a backup PC so was up and able to check my trades in under 5 minutes. Still, spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reinstalling programs and updates. It was something I had planned for, though, in accordance with my trading plan. So, not too much of a hassle, just more a waste of time.

It can happen at any time so be prepared.

On the upside, my PC runs really quickly!

 

[Crap Buddist]

glad to hear its ok for you. I have backed up software on disks, but was thinking about uploading to bt's digital vault, 20 gigs I think Ive got, dunno how safe it is though..... seems to be how things are going though cyber storage ? photos, music, files, software backups and the such...

 

[shadowninja]

I bought a cheap external hard disk. Not very quick (probably quicker than uploading to a remote site) but relatively inexpensive (£80?). If you can, store the unit in a different location.

 

[nine]

Get a copy of Acronis Trueimage Shadow.

Back up your C drive image now (and save it on a DVD or two).

Then make incremental backups every week.

In a couple of months you can restore the original image (so you get full speed) and then just use the incrementals to get back the changes in your word/mail/excel etc documents.

I reimage my disk every month. Takes 15 mins for Acronis to do that and then 20 mins to recover changed stuff. My PC runs faster than it ever did since I started doing this.

 

[wasp]

I have 2 4gb usb drives, an SD card for important quick details plus 2 old laptop hard drives and a usb connector (one for music, the other for all else) and back it all up twice a week now. Too many times I've come close to losing all my music and that would make me cry! The only thing on my laptop is music, metatrader and internet access, the rest is backed up, twice!

 

[timsk]

Useful FREE back up software

Well done Shadow on two fronts - one for being prepared for such an event and the other for posting your experience which, hopefully, will prompt those traders who haven't made any provision for loss of data to do something about it. I have a cheap external hard drive and use a good bit of free software to automatically back up once a day . . .
cobian.se
Seems to work well.
Tim.

 

[0007]

Lost everything today. All my trading notes. All my accounts.

Fortunately, I backed up my work files 2-3 weeks ago. Phew.

Happy outcome! I refer the house to the post I made earlier: http://www.trade2win.com/boards/hardware/28847-data-backup-disaster-you-ok.html

Acronis 8 is still free on the cover of one of the PC mags. With this excellent software you can also take an "image" of your PC hard drive which means you can restore it with all software loaded etc in no time.

External portable hard drive (usb connection) is ideal for backup - might be technically slow etc etc but it does the job and you can if necessary store off-site. Pocket portable hard drives also excellent but more expensive.

There are only 2 kinds of backups: (1) those that you wished you'd done (2) those you did.

Just my 2 pennyworth.

 

[JTrader]

I have all my trading files (& other valuable stuff) backed up on a 2gb toshiba flash memory stick, £11 on ebay. It is very quick to write/copy.
Whenever i create new documents/images etc. i add these to the flash drive.

I lost everything on my PC about 4 years ago, when a power surge caused my PC to burn out. I had all my trading work on CD at the time luckily. But lost about half of an 8000 word college assignment.. Sometimes you have to learn the hard way i guess.

 

[shadowninja]

The longest/hardest bit was re-installing my favourite game. All is fine, now.

 

[timsk]

I have all my trading files (& other valuable stuff) backed up on a 2gb toshiba flash memory stick, £11 on ebay. It is very quick to write/copy.

JT - be careful . . .
The memory stick idea was my initial thought when considering the options available. However, two or three techies that I consulted all said - independently of one another - that this isn't a good idea. When I asked why not, their replies included words like 'unstable', 'unreliable' 'cheap' (i.e you get what you pay for) and 'short term'. Really only suitable for transferring files from A to B and far from ideal as a long term back up solution. I'm not a techie, so I can't comment, but I have taken their advice and decided against going down this route for these reasons. I just thought I'd pass that on in case you're unaware of the potential risks.

Tim.

 

[osototasuki]

As a former IT geek, I can confirm that ALL devices break eventually. I also cannot recommend enough 1) Acronis for system image and/or file data backup, 2) use of now cheap secondary hard disks so that your PC system is always online (e.g. look into RAID which is available with almost all good modern motherboards or via add-on cards), 3) a minimum of monthly archive to DVD or CD of critical data. If re-writables are used, it is highly recommended you test each of the 12 disks immediately after they are burned and at least once a year as far back as required (you could compress into one archive and test this, or better yet use a hash utility like hkSFV or FlashSFV and automatically test against the original SFV check file). 4) all but perhaps the latest of these disks should be stored at a different geographic location if possible.

Note. with recommendation 2) you can take care of not only having an always available system but also non-critical data such as music or videos should never be lost. An alternative, for non-critical data, is to synchronise with your large multimedia player (40/80GB iPods etc) regularly.

I cannot recommend retail external devices for permanent archival unless there is no alternative. I have seen them fail far too often and people tend to use them as a complete one-stop shop for all their backup needs. You will find from researching around that manufacturers have been known to use older and/or lower warranty drives in these devices and they WILL fail when you least expect it with possibly a large amount of different types of your data (critical and non-critical, short-term and long-term all mixed together).

Tasuki.

P.S. Finally, for the technically inclined among you, I would consider dual booting either two XP partitions or XP and Vista (install XP first!) and storing the Acronis backup images on the separate RAID data drive I referred to above. This means you can extremely easily ensure either system partition is always up by using Acronis to restore your system within 2 to 10 minutes maximum without even having the Acronis boot disk and regardless of what happens to either of them. You will never need to worry about corruption from viruses or anything of the like again! In fact, you can backup and restore just for the sake of it (e.g. after de-fragmenting or when installing an unknown program)! Anyway....that's my lunchtime good deed done

 

[shadowninja]

Thanks for the info. The RAID system sounds good but too technical for me.

Out of interest, is it possible to connect two XP Home machines for the purpose of transferring files?

 

[firewalker99]

Get a copy of Acronis Trueimage Shadow.

Back up your C drive image now (and save it on a DVD or two).

Then make incremental backups every week.

In a couple of months you can restore the original image (so you get full speed) and then just use the incrementals to get back the changes in your word/mail/excel etc documents.

I reimage my disk every month. Takes 15 mins for Acronis to do that and then 20 mins to recover changed stuff. My PC runs faster than it ever did since I started doing this.

I've found nothing yet that compares to the easy and flexibility of Acronis True Image. It's a very cheap program, and it works like a charm. My C disk is imaged in under 5 minutes (I keep the C partition to a minimum by storing only the windows & program files there). Restoring it to another hard drive (in case of a crash or when I like to upgrade to a bigger one) I just restore it and I get everything back. No longer the hassles of having to go through the re-install process again.

There's one downside to this obviously, if you change your hardware (e.g. mainboard) it can cause Windows not to boot up anymore. But that's not the fault of Acronis.

For my data I use incremental backups on dvd and for really essential critical information I take another back-up on USB stick. Better safe then sorry

 

[firewalker99]

Out of interest, is it possible to connect two XP Home machines for the purpose of transferring files?

Sure, why wouldn't it be? Only thing you need to do is use cross-over cable and give them static IP addresses.

 

[shadowninja]

The reason I asked is that I heard XP Home wasn't very LAN friendly.

 

[black bear]

Ghost

Lost everything today. All my trading notes. All my accounts.

Fortunately, I backed up my work files 2-3 weeks ago. Phew.

Hi all

hardrive failure= complete pain even if you have backed up

sorry if mentioned in another earlier post on thread

Norton ghost is a good option, burn copy to portable hard drive then if you get real nasty hard drive failure the lots there, settings and everything

 

[0007]

The reason I asked is that I heard XP Home wasn't very LAN friendly.

For setting up a small, uncomplicated domestic LAN, XP Home is fine - though it doesn't give you "Remote Access" which I've found very useful within my house in conjunction with a router.

 

[JTrader]

...I also regularly re-write my files to a DVD-RW.