When was the last time you backed up your home or work PC?

[shadowninja]

Two weeks ago... and today it died so had to do a full install of Windows.

That was lucky!

[SystemParanoia]

home and work pc's rsync to eachother twice a week, as well as running in raid1 configuration.

i hate loosing data

[shadowninja]

With a name like yours I can imagine you'd do something so OTT.

[rayny]

My back up is always planned for the day after a major failure

[thinfourth2]

At most an hour ago

[jeevescat]

Yep, about an hour ago, time machine on Mac Leopard is one useful bit of kit.

[superlightr]

work - every night.

Home - not often - nothing of importance on it.

[Leithen]

When was the last time anyone attempted a full recovery from their backups.....

[furtive]

My PC backs itself up to the internet every night using http://www.mozy.com as well as to my MediaPC and to an external hard drive

/paranoid

[rich1231]

Every PC everynight.

Had to restore/rebuild a laptop for scratch a week ago. it tokk less than an hour.

Using Windows Home Server

And some special stuff also backed up to external disk, DVD and online

[lazy_b]

I'm lucky enough to have two desktop PCs, so I have set up a job to copy important data (like my home directory) automatically from one PC to the other. I try not to keep any important stuff on my laptop, so it only gets backed up when I remember to do it.

[agent006]

Last night (and every night) at home. Work PC has no data on it, and will rebuild from image in about 30 minutes.

[Strangely Brown]

Every night. Time machine on a laptop, whilst useful in its ease of use - you just plug the drive in and wait, is a pain for that self same reason. I will be investigating the "Time Capsule" as soon as they are available.

[markmullen]

[mft]

Whilst on this topic, if I was to buy a network attached storage hard disk, is there an easy way of replicating OS X's Time Machine functionality in XP?

[TonyToniTone]

Have two drives in my home PC C: D:

Have a ghost image of C: with my profile and data on d: drive.. data robocopy'd to C: each day..

Takes about 5 minutes to have it up an running again and a script runs I can add silent install to for anything not in image..

Bit of ball ache to setup but worth it..


Similar setup in the office..

[VictorMeldrew]

Yesterday, when I decided I'd pushed my luck far enough with my 2 disk Raid 0 array. Slotted in two more disks and reconfigured to Raid 0+1.

Other than that I only ever do work inside VMWare these days and back up the VMWare images to other PC's every once in a while. I do have a DLT tape drive, but my SCSI server died a while back. One day I'll move the SCSI card into another server and start using the DLT tapes I paid a fortune for.

[Strangely Brown]

markmullen said:

I thought that was, "Buddah makes incremental backups."

[CommanderJameson]

Plus One for the Time Machine crowd.

One of the really cool things you can do with this is boot off your OS X DVD, and it'll look for Time Machine disks and offer to restore your system from a backup. I'm going to be doing this shortly because 10.5.2 has introduced a really cool feature where my Mac periodically drops the wireless connection.

[CommanderJameson]

mft said:

Whilst on this topic, if I was to buy a network attached storage hard disk, is there an easy way of replicating OS X's Time Machine functionality in XP?

Short version: no.

Long version: no, because Time Machine's regime of hourly, then daily, then weekly, then monthly backups (and the removal of superfluous backups as a result of daily/weekly/monthly consolidation) would take quite some time to set up and is probably impossible with the built-in Windows Backup tool.

You could do it with Backup Exec (I'm several years out of date with backup products) and even then it's the pruning of old backups that's the handy bit.

However, the real sticking point isn't the actual mechanics of performing the backups; it's the integration with the Finder (Mac OS X's equivalent to Windows Explorer) that's the real gem. I'm in a folder, and I want the files from an hour ago. Or last week. Or whenever. I either search for them (click on the searchy bits in the sidebar) or I just click the Time Machine icon in the Dock and I'm presented with a 3D timeline of the folder I'm in, from now back to whenever. At first glance it's cheesy as , but it's a visual paradigm that really works.

And, of course, in Windows, you've got no real prospect of being able to restore your entire computer from one of these backups.

Edited by CommanderJameson on Thursday 14th February 07:38