Lessons Learned & They Don't Come Cheap

JAM83 · Feb 1, 2025

I WISH i would have listened to MANY of you over the past several years about "BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP". . . I was doing a fresh install of windows. I wasn't paying attention and accidentally deleted the partition that had all of my saved software/serial numbers, documents, pictures on it. I will NOW join the rest of you and HIGHLY encourage people to BACKUP

antspants · Feb 1, 2025

That’s terrible mate. Did you try to recover the partition/files? There are ways you can try. But not if you try using the drive, every thing you do to the drive could make it harder. Don’t touch it and start a thread, maybe in Devices and Drivers

hsehestedt · Feb 1, 2025

JAM83 said:
I WISH i would have listened to MANY of you over the past several years about "BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP". . . I was doing a fresh install of windows. I wasn't paying attention and accidentally deleted the partition that had all of my saved software/serial numbers, documents, pictures on it. I will NOW join the rest of you and HIGHLY encourage people to BACKUP

Ouch! So sorry to hear that. That's a tough pill to swallow. For me, my paranoia set in many years ago in my previous life as an Enterprise Tech Support Engineer. I was working with a huge customer (a major bank!) who had backups but they never tested the backup scheme. They lost some critical customer data. So I learned the hard lesson then that one needs to not only make sure that a backup plan is in place, but to check that plan and make sure it is actually working.

In the customer's case, they got lucky - they were able to send drives out to a data recovery service but it ended up costing them many tens of thousands to recover. That is called having a really bad day.

JAM83 · Feb 1, 2025

antspants said:
That’s terrible mate. Did you try to recover the partition/files? There are ways you can try. But not if you try using the drive, every thing you do to the drive could make it harder. Don’t touch it and start a thread, maybe in Devices and Drivers

I've already reinstalled Windows on it. I've accepted that everything is gone

cereberus · Feb 1, 2025

Sorry to hear of your disaster. This is a reminder to embrace the 2 Golden Rules of Computing.

1) Backup important data frequently.

2) If any doubt, refer back to Rule 1.

Most importantly is developing a backup strategy.

Really important data should be backed up to two separate places (e.g. separate drives (external is good plan for one of them).

Really critical data could be backed up to three places even. Use of onedrive, google drive etc. is a good option but may require a message monthly fee (ignore the tedious naysayers who consider cloud services as a tool of satan).

If you categorise your data into say 3 categories e.g.

Critical - disaster to lose

Important - pain to lose but not a disaster,

Routine - annoying to losing but not a big deal (videos typically come in this category).

You will probably find, only a small portion comes in the critical category, more in the important category but usually most data comes in routine category.

So if you put data in subfolders (say) according to category, you can optimise backup strategies, optimising backup storage.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I store my critical data in 3 places (separate hard drive, external usb drive and Onedrive.

Important data on separate hard drive/partition and external hard drive.

Routine data on separate hard drive only (pragmatically accepting if laptop was stolen, or failure of both hard drive/partitions such data would be lost (risk is higher if only one hard drive).

The above is my strategy but each user has to work out their own stategy.

Some may choose to backup to two separate external drives. Otherd msy use cloud backup.

The key point is there is no "one size fits all" solution. However one decides to backup data though, redundancy is the most important aspect.

JAM83 · Feb 1, 2025

cereberus said:
Sorry to hear of your disaster. This is a reminder to embrace the 2 Golden Rules of Computing.

1) Backup important data frequently.

2) If any doubt, refer back to Rule 1.

Most importantly is developing a backup strategy.

Really important data should be backed up to two separate places (e.g. separate drives (external is good plan for one of them).

Really critical data could be backed up to three places even. Use of onedrive, google drive etc. is a good option but may require a message monthly fee (ignore the tedious naysayers who consider cloud services as a tool of satan).

If you categorise your data into say 3 categories e.g.

Critical - disaster to lose

Important - pain to lose but not a disaster,

Routine - annoying to losing but not a big deal (videos typically come in this category).

You will probably find, only a small portion comes in the critical category, more in the important category but usually most data comes in routine category.

So if you put data in subfolders (say) according to category, you can optimise backup strategies, optimising backup storage.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I store my critical data in 3 places (separate hard drive, external usb drive and Onedrive.

Important data on separate hard drive/partition and external hard drive.

Routine data on separate hard drive only (pragmatically accepting if laptop was stolen, or failure of both hard drive/partitions such data would be lost (risk is higher if only one hard drive).

The above is my strategy but each user has to work out their own stategy.

Some may choose to backup to two separate external drives. Otherd msy use cloud backup.

The key point is there is no "one size fits all" solution. However one decides to backup data though, redundancy is the most important aspect.

yeah i'm still kicking myself in the butt right now for not paying attention for one, and for not having a backup. I'm having to set here and try and remember all of the software that I had saved. (I am THANKFUL that I had all of my weather radar software on my other computers hard drive. So I didn't lose those serial numbers or anything. I decided not to split the partitions again. I'm just going to use the entire 512GB M.2 drive for my OS and software, etc. . . I'll be using a regular SSD for my software and such. I'm also considering using Terabox for cloud storage, since they give you 1TB for free.

Lessons Learned & They Don't Come Cheap

JAM83

iRacing Broadcaster for MaxspeedTV

My Computers

System One System Two

antspants

Like a rolling drone.

My Computers

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hsehestedt

Well-known member

My Computers

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JAM83

iRacing Broadcaster for MaxspeedTV

My Computers

System One System Two

cereberus

Well-known member

My Computer

System One

JAM83

iRacing Broadcaster for MaxspeedTV

My Computers

System One System Two

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