An Important Reminder
by Wyatt WalterPlease, if you don’t already have a backup in place for your computer, do so today. Don’t wait until tomorrow. I was reminded again last night when the hard drive in my MacBook (my main computer) died. Immediately, I logged in to Mozy and there were all of my pictures and documents. It’s a free service (up to 2GB) and takes only minutes to setup. I’ve been on the other end of this plenty of times before, having to tell people that they’ve lost everything, but never on the receiving end. The good news is I didn’t lose anything important, but very well could have. If I would have lost anything it would have been my own fault given that I’m a systems administrator by trade, but sometimes the ones closest to it forget that it can happen to ourselves. Please, take a few minutes to either double-check that you are backed up and can restore your files or take the time to get a system in place. You can use built-in OS tools to backup to an external hard drive or machine across your network, or you can sign up for an online backup service such as Mozy. If you have more than 2GB of critical data, you can sign up an unlimited home account for only $4.95 a month. A very cheap price to ensure your pictures and documents are not lost. Whatever you do, make data that cannot be bought back a prioirty. I used to be worried about my music, but when it came down to it I can go buy my music back if I want, but not my pictures. We all know that hard drives are ticking time bombs if we rely upon one to store our data, but I just wanted to give a friendly reminder to everyone. 
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Tags: backup, mozy
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Comments (2) :
Oct 11th, 2008
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October 13th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I could not agree more I have lost everything on my desktop because I had a HD fail and the system was not backed up. So I lost EVERYTHING I was quite upset because that is where I had all of my school work prom pictures (someone was not to happy with me) and EVERYTHING. I would highly recommend everyone who reads this post to sign up for a Mozy account or buy an external drive that is hooked to your system 24/7 and have the system set to automatically update in the mornings when no one touches it.
Good work Wyatt
October 14th, 2009 at 12:34 am
[...] enough, a lot of sysadmins seem to forget some basic rules of keeping valuable data around. After disasters like this, it’s important to examine our own [...]