Lost 10+years of work, Need advice on next back up plan

geoff5093 wrote in post #10181338
They are, although other times there is software that one could download that can recover some, if not all of the data. Most programs have trials that let you see if the data can be recovered, and if it can it's cheaper then sending it off to a recovery center.

$1000 would be cheap for a physically damaged disk -- and remember that we were talking about a disk that'd been through a fire, not one that simply doesn't boot MS-DOS any more.

anthony11 wrote in post #10181396
$1000 would be cheap for a physically damaged disk -- and remember that we were talking about a disk that'd been through a fire, not one that simply doesn't boot MS-DOS any more.

Apologies, I didn't remember reading that the drives were physically damaged.

Coming a bit late to this topic.

When circumstances permit (desktop/tower), I recommend mirrored drives for the operating system and programs. It's a pain in the anatomy to have to re-install OS and apps. Either software that performs daily mirrored backups (duocor.com) or a RAID configuration.

Data to be kept on separate drive(s) than OS and apps.

I use Acronis for backups. Main drive and data drive are backed up each night to NAS consisting of 4 1-TB drives in RAID 5 configuration. Truly critical info (bookkeeping, &c.) are put in an encrypted .zip file and FTP'ed to my domain-hosting service once a week.

I also backup my tower, and laptop, to an external hard-drive once a month - again to protect against having to re-install OS and apps. That drive is stored off-premise.

When it comes to data backups, a little (or even a lot of) paranoia is a good thing.

I have had hard-drives fail over the past few years, but it has now been well over 10 years since I lost any info.

G'Jim c):{-

DriveImage XML seems like a good, free program for creating images of your hard drive. I'm going to be using that for my OS drive.