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World Backup Day 
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So the 31st of March is "World Backup Day": http://www.worldbackupday.com/

The problem with promotional events like this is that they usually fail to reach the exact people who need to learn. How do we go about preaching to the unconverted? I mean, preaching effectively so they'll actually take it seriously?

As the go-to IT resource for friends and relatives, is there anyone you might want to make an extra effort with?

I'll be visiting my mum in a couple of weeks, and now they finally have broadband I'll be setting up their photos to backup to their Google drive. She is very good though, kind of. She "backs up" important emails already... onto A4 paper. Don't laugh, it works for her!

I know most of you on 404 are responsible with your precious data, well aware that hard disks and flash drives will always fail eventually. Most of you do take advantage of cloud storage and multiple backups, on and off site. Some of you even have little mantras, Dave.

However, we probably all know people who have desperately asked for help when a years worth of project data was lost to a single device failure. People who think "backup" means moving all their photos onto a single external hard disk, or just won't accept that things ever go wrong - until it's too late.

These people could probably use a little help.

Most modern operating systems come with backup mechanisms included. Windows makes it very easy, and even nags you if it's not set up by displaying a warning in the notification area. However, it does require setting up and you need something to back up to.

A lot of portable devices do it automatically to cloud accounts, be that Google, Apple or Microsoft. Even my WebOS tablet came with a box.net account. However, that isn't ubiquitous on the desktop and sometimes the free storage may be insufficient. A home server is not something many would consider, but large USB drives are fairly cheap these days.

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Wed Mar 27, 2013 4:39 pm
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It is also good to do maintenance on the drives as well.

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Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:41 pm
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An obvious (but by no means only) choice on Mac OS is Time Machine. Essentially, you bung in an external hard drive and it'll ask you if you want to use it for TM, if you say yes it can format the disk for you and get you up and running with reasonable defaults.

Is there anything like this for Windows (XP, Visa, 7, 8) and Linux? One of the things I've noticed is that my Mac using friends are better at backing up their data, because of TM. I can't help but feel that one way of convincing people to back up is to demonstrate how easy and free/cheap it is.


Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:42 pm
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On Windows, when you click on the "Oy where you want your backups" bubble, it asks you to choose a suitable drive etc. and create a recovery disk.

If it's not nagging you, just type "backup" into the universal search textbox thingy previously known as run.

Image

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Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:55 pm
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Seems to be a good place to plug a series of videos we made for western digital last year. http://youtu.be/Ng51c8wCglM

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Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:58 pm
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forquare1 wrote:
An obvious (but by no means only) choice on Mac OS is Time Machine. Essentially, you bung in an external hard drive and it'll ask you if you want to use it for TM, if you say yes it can format the disk for you and get you up and running with reasonable defaults.

My Timemachine backup stopped working 18 months ago. It couldn't create folders. Reformatting the external drive and starting from scratch didn't help, it created about half a backup, then couldn't create folders again... I gave up and manually synced the file to the drive, no folder problems...

forquare1 wrote:
Is there anything like this for Windows (XP, Visa, 7, 8) and Linux? One of the things I've noticed is that my Mac using friends are better at backing up their data, because of TM. I can't help but feel that one way of convincing people to back up is to demonstrate how easy and free/cheap it is.

Windows Vista or 7 introduced something similar, although I used Acronis Non-Stop under Windows 7 - version isn't compatible with Windows 8. I'm currently using Microsoft Synctoy, which does all I need.

I have:

Sony laptop -> 1TB External E-SATA drive -> NAS -> iMac -> 1TB external drive and also a Cloud copy, although the RAW files only get copied locally, I only cloud store the JPEG versions, as I only have around 50GB on Skydrive.

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Thu Mar 28, 2013 5:41 am
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Mine was turned off but it is now back on again and about 30% through a 110Gb back up.

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Thu Mar 28, 2013 6:06 am
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