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Go-C Graphics

Thank God for Backups

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Well it happened,   The motherboard died on my main computer.   

Of course it's stressful because you have to basically start over.  

 

Amazon to the rescue. Man I love prime. Ordered it Thursday morning and set it up today.  I got an ASUS with a 6th gen i5 and 8gb DDR4 ram. Traded out the 1Tb hard driver for a 500gb SSD.  I'll still use the 1Tb as a backup. Any computer worth getting came with Win 10 so I'll have to see how that goes.  

 

But the best money I ever spent was a program called Allways Sync.   

It runs all the time and it automatically syncs folders. My whole business is run out of a single folder.  This folder includes all my saved graphics, Projects, Quickbook backups, and business documents.  

 

This 1 folder is synced to a 128gb flash drive, DropBox, a different internal harddrive, and an external harddrive using allways sync.  

Whenever I make a change it automatically makes a change to the file in all the locations. 

 

Saved my butt for sure.   

Any program I've ever downloaded is saved in a DL folder that's also synced.   This way I have a record of all the programs I've used and it's super easy to reinstall all the ones I still want.    

 

 

Moral of the story.................  BACKUP YOUR STUFF!!!!!!!

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Moral of the story.................  BACKUP YOUR STUFF!!!!!!!

AND, back up the BACKUP for safety's sake.

 

Last September my Backup drive failed!

 

Sue2

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Have remote and local backups of my drives. Everything I do from 3d design to decals is saved to a server that I have. This is also backed up the same way and is nice because I can just walk over to my other computers to either pull something to work with or can show someone on my tab what it is. I also have scripts that run for almost all my applications that save every X minutes to a .bak file so if illustrator, photoshop, or anything else crashes that I work with often, I know I can start off near where I was instead of working from scratch. Quite nice and something I recommend.

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Amazon to the rescue. Man I love prime. Ordered it Thursday morning and set it up today.  I got an ASUS with a 6th gen i5 and 8gb DDR4 ram. Traded out the 1Tb hard driver for a 500gb SSD.  I'll still use the 1Tb as a backup.

 

Good advice. I've been pretty sloppy with backing up files. I just put together a new computer with 4 hard drives. Two 120GB SSD drives in RAID1 for the OS/system files and two 1TB drives in RAID1 for programs and storage. I have a program called Acronis True Image. I'm going to get that setup to do a continuous backup of files onto a 3TB NAS drive. It can also make complete partition backups. Every now and then I should back up the backups onto a remote server. Never know when something horrible might happen.

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If we talking about back ups, here is proper way to do it. (comes from the guy with 20 years in IT world)

 

It's cheapest way to get the most bang for your bucks.

 

-------SETUP---------------------

 

1. Get "Buffalo Linkstation, 2 bay drive" (about $100 on Amazon)

It plugs into your router and you see it as a network drive in your windows. Supports basic security such as Folders and access per user. You can set it up so each user only sees his folder so children can not accidentally delete your staff.

 

2. 2 hard drives. Does not need to be anything fancy. 1 TB each will be good for many of us. Anything less probably not worth it. 

(Western Digital is a good choice) about $80 each.

 

3. Configure 2 drives as RAID1 in Linkstation.  It will mirror them. You will see them as 1TB Drive. But if one fails you can recover data form another one.

 

4. Any Backup solution that supports external service such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google drive, ...

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Benefits:

 

1. Local drive is much faster than external service. It will take you whole day to recover 1 Gigabyte of data from DropBox.

All those external services only good if you have fire in the office and your local back up is gone as well as your primary.

 

2. Buffalo mirroring guarantees you that if one drive fails you still can get your data from second drive.

 

3. Buffalo will sits next to your router and you are not touching/moving it (ever).

Flash drives, movable storage is not good for back up. They small and you can easily drop,lose, step on them. They will fail much faster especially if they have normal hard drives (not SSD).

Normal hard drives have moving heads that actually hit the surface of magnetic disc when you shake it. 

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I'd like to mention another level of back up that pertains to people dealing with art work.  All the normal backup's are critical, but sometimes an extra bit is helpful dealing with art work.  I use a program called FileHamster, (free version,) that watches folders you specify.  When ever a file is added or changed in that folder, it creates a new file with a file name reflecting the time in a specified location.  This is revision control for you artwork.  I have the saves go to an external drive.  You can get straight to the file, no restore needed.  Sometimes you would like to "undo" a file save.  Dealing with CorelDraw X8 this is helpful as all the Draw versions have options to save in other versions.  An X8 file might not open in X7 or earlier, so having a real file change history is nice.  Plus sometimes you just like to go to an earlier version of a file to see what happened.  There are other programs beside FileHamster that do this, but art work and revision control are nice together.

 

Tauntdevil seems to be doing something close to this with scripts, which would be superior if you forget to hit save often, but inefficent if no saves happen during the x minutes.  Either way, think about getting some revision control, it has saved my hiny a few times.

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I need to back mine up...if the computer were to crash i'd lose hundreds of hours of work... actually i'm doing that now. Because if that would happen i might be tempted to quit.

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While we're on the subject, does anyone know a good cloud base storage like dropbox that holds more?

 

I've currently maxed my dropbox with only the most important stuff and I don't really have the budget to spend $100 a year.   

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Look into Carbonite.

They have several plans for cloud back-up & storage.

 

Sue2

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I save everything to Microsoft Onedrive I figure if we loose Microsoft we are all screwed so it doesn't matter.... I also a diskstation.

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After looking around it came down to Icloud Drive and Google drive. Drop box was just too expensive for me. 

Google was $2 for 100gb

Icloud was $3 for 200gb of space.

 

I ended up signing up for ICloud.    I'll have to play with it some to see if I like it.   

With iCloud I can also backup my phone and Ipad.  

 

The only other thing I need to check on is how fast it syncs. I do all of my design work in my office.  I then go out to the garage where the laser is and load up the project onto my laptop.  Dropbox was fast and by the time I walked out to the garage it was synced in the folder and ready to load.  

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