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Author Topic: How often do you back up your HD, and how?  (Read 2140 times)

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Offline AndyFCTopic starter

How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« on: February 03, 2020, 07:20:30 PM »
After nearly losing my A1200 config and files yesterday through a failing HDD, I've started wondering how often you back up, and how?

I last backed up in June last year and was able to recover the corrupted .prefs files and the Xen font I use for the desktop; nothing too serious this time fortunately. I use lha to make an uncompressed archive to an SD card. It could have been a lot worse.

I'm also replacing my 3.5" HDD with a 4GB CF adapter preformatted with PFS from AmigaKit.
A1200 in DIY Tower. 3.2 ROMs (softkicking 3.2.2), OS 3.2.2 with ClassicWB, CF card, CD RW and IDE to SD adapter running off the internal IDE port (using the A4000 4-port IDE adapter from Amigakit), Pistorm 32 lite with Pi4/2GB/Emu68 or Blizzard 1230-IV, with 32MB 60ns RAM and 50MHz 68882 FPU. 3COM PCMCIA Network card running with Miami DX.
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Offline TribbleSmasher

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #1 on: February 03, 2020, 07:54:59 PM »
It is advised to backup everytime you changed/added anything important, like source code or new dokuments, like right after you did the changes (because after this change is = before your future change).

I personally never backed up single preferences or fonts or that stuff alike. Only folders, partitions, complete installs and so on. And i did it regulary. So, e.g.
 in the 90s i had SCSI Zips and Syquests, that usually holds e.g. the complete (bootable) copy of one of my machines system partition. Or some folders with documents etc.. When i decided to backup my develop partition, most of the times a CDR was only 25% full, including all pictures and textdocuments i hoarded over time.
So, to fill the space up i used to burn all previous backups (from those external drives) onto every new backup CD as well.
I still have 99% of everything i had 25 years ago. Including complete bootpartitions, disk images and so on.

Today i have CFs and once in a while (see above) i clone the whole thing or just a partition and shovel it over to my fileserver and also external drives, zipped.
Most installs are present as clones in UAE anyway...
All my older CDRs are ofcourse imaged and saved as well.

The thing is: Make at least a full backup once in a while and store it separately, on a different external drive (or usb flash or whatever). and don't overwrite older backups, just make a new one everytime, but save space by not saving all stupid things over and over again, e.g. wallpapers you could easily get again from somewhere else (your cloud for instance. thats what it is for: wallpaper storage).
« Last Edit: February 03, 2020, 08:39:58 PM by TribbleSmasher »
 

Offline paul1981

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #2 on: February 03, 2020, 11:17:49 PM »
After nearly losing my A1200 config and files yesterday through a failing HDD, I've started wondering how often you back up, and how?

I don't, and my chair is made of wood.


 

Offline scuzzb494

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #3 on: February 04, 2020, 02:29:52 AM »
Hi

The simple trick with the Amiga is to keep your Workbench pretty trim and lean and then just copy it over to your Work partition. That way when you get a problem you can simply format the Workbench and just copy your Workbench back and never have to switch the Amiga off. Saved my life no end of times. I always have more than one drive on computers and have my backup on another drive. I've always got two copies of everything. Probably once a month I copy everything over.

I also have my main Amiga networked to a few PCs so I do copy and burn to CD or stick on a USB. I use ZIP drives and cus the WB is less than 100MB I have my WB backed up onto ZIP.

PS I don't use CF cards, only 2.5", 3.5" and ZIPS. Good thing about a physical drive is that I can stick it in the fridge and hit it with a hammer if it really starts to cause problems. Usually works. I can also hear problems with a drive that goes round and generally tell what I need to do.


Offline walkero

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #4 on: February 04, 2020, 09:18:03 AM »
In my A1200 I use an SD card for HD and from time to time, usually every two months, I do a full image of it on my Linux Machine. The good thing with this method is that you can restore the whole HD two as many SDs you want. Also, you can easily mount it into an emulator (WinUAE, FS-UAE etc) and make changes there if needed.

The downside is that it takes a lot of space. Mine is 16GB, so it takes almost the same space on my hard disk. But because the data it contains are not crucial, I delete the previous backups, as long as I am sure that the new one is working.

For my AmigaOne's I use git for all my development projects and commit all the latest changes every time. Other than that, I use a second hard disk where I sync all the apps and system.
 

Offline kolla

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #5 on: February 04, 2020, 10:58:54 AM »
I avoid having "user data" on local storage, using network filesystems for such. For Amiga systems where using networked filesystems is impractical, I use rsync to keep local directories in sync with remote directories. For the OS, I typically have a backup boot partition that is identical to the default boot partition, and also a stripped down plain OS boot partition that is barely ever touched, and disabled except from cold boots, for those foobar moments :) Oh, and I also keep scripts and various (kickstarts and other OS components) updated around the crowd using a combination of rsync and git.
« Last Edit: February 04, 2020, 11:01:17 AM by kolla »
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Offline redfox

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Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #6 on: February 04, 2020, 09:31:16 PM »
Over the years, I have owned two systems, an A2000HD and an OS4 system.

Back in the day, I used the following strategies for my A2000HD ...
- I used Quarterback to backup files from my HD to floppies.
- Later, I used Amiga Explorer to backup files from my A2000HD to my pc.

For my OS4 system, I use two different strategies ...
- occasionally perform a full backup of my SYS: partition
- more frequent backups of important files, prefs and S directory

I intentionally keep my SYS: partition small enough to fit on a  single CD-R disc.

I use AmiDVD to backup my SYS: partition to CD-R disc (to create a bootable recovery disk).

I use BackUp.lha by Daniel Westerberg (onyxsoft) to backup important files to my Backup partition and my USB sticks.

---
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« Last Edit: February 04, 2020, 09:34:58 PM by redfox »
 

Offline matt3k

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #7 on: February 04, 2020, 11:02:25 PM »
See:
http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?88189-Amiga-backup-software-comparison&p=874878#post874878

I use Amiback, sadly with 3.1.4  it now crashes when I backup to my NAS.  With 3.1/3.9 it worked flawless. 

In the process of moving to my aa3000+ soon and will use 3.1, will see then.

I backup whenever I make changes.  Amiback has a scheduler.  Use latest version of smbfs to a NAS.
 

Offline Jope

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #8 on: February 05, 2020, 09:40:44 AM »
Sporadically, Ami-Back or lha.
 

Offline darksun9210

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #9 on: February 05, 2020, 04:07:59 PM »
i used to use a DDS3 tape drive on the back of my then daily driver A4kT with a licensed copy of diavolo backup.
then i sold the A4kT when i went PC; thinking i could just keep the tapes and restore back to an amiga when i got a machine capable enough again.

then i lost the tapes and a few big boxes of disks in a house move.  :'( everything gone. years of creating stuff just tipped in the bin somewhere. Thanks big yellow storage.

so i don't really care now. i just use pre-built WB distros - they're usually much better than anything i could have the time to put together. and slap on the relevant P96/USB/network device drivers/stacks to the machine i'm setting it up on. if i get a half decent stable system then i'll copy it over SMBFS to a share on some NAS. or if the case is off and the amiga in question is running on a CF card, i'll pull the CF card, plop it in a USB3 media card reader and make an image of it on a PC and dump that to NAS.

if you dump the amiga disk to NAS keeping the file structure raw, instead of lha'ing everything up - it's only a matter of a few clicks in winUAE to boot from that folder if you need to do something a bit quicker than on original hardware.

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Offline klx300r

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Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #10 on: February 08, 2020, 03:31:11 AM »
lately it's full backups to another HD on both my OS4.x and various OS3.x systems...for my beloved Amiga 1000 I still have my QuarterBack floppies which have been backed up to ADF's in case the floppies go bad one day
@ AndyFC
I'd recommend using an SSD or DOM card in your 1200 instead of any CF card as their cheap nowadays and the DOM's especially fit so nice and sweet into the 1200 IDE slot  ;D
« Last Edit: February 08, 2020, 03:33:36 AM by F1Lupo »
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Offline giZmo350

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Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #11 on: February 08, 2020, 05:17:06 AM »
I'd recommend using an SSD or DOM card in your 1200 instead of any CF card as their cheap nowadays and the DOM's especially fit so nice and sweet into the 1200 IDE slot  ;D

I never thought of that....  just pop a DOM on the IDE port! I have a few of those laying around.  :)
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Offline klx300r

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Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #12 on: February 08, 2020, 05:57:57 AM »
I'd recommend using an SSD or DOM card in your 1200 instead of any CF card as their cheap nowadays and the DOM's especially fit so nice and sweet into the 1200 IDE slot  ;D

I never thought of that....  just pop a DOM on the IDE port! I have a few of those laying around.  :)
I absolutely love them and replaced CF cards in both my 1200 and 4000 in the past year as I've had too many CF cards or controllers go flaky on me over time
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Offline vince_6

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #13 on: February 10, 2020, 12:34:09 PM »
I backup my WB every week in a different partition and once per month the full disk.
I use my DOpus bootable disk that I made back then that can see big HDD's&partitions so I can recover if something goes bad.
Stopped making full backup with the copy method and I use HDDRawCopy for years now for all my disks, even linux - windows combos.
My BBS : flashbackbbs.sytes.net:6502
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Offline paul1981

Re: How often do you back up your HD, and how?
« Reply #14 on: February 11, 2020, 11:40:15 AM »
I'd recommend using an SSD or DOM card in your 1200 instead of any CF card as their cheap nowadays and the DOM's especially fit so nice and sweet into the 1200 IDE slot  ;D

I never thought of that....  just pop a DOM on the IDE port! I have a few of those laying around.  :)

I could never get on with those things.