Ten copies of Altaro Backup to giveaway!

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mxpress

376 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 17

#385772 29-Sep-2010 10:57

Earlier this year, I decided it was time to clean out my main PC and do a cold reinstall of windows, etc.
I care fully backed up thousands of in replaceable family photos onto an external drive, purchased especially for the purpose and to act as a permament back up once the data had been restored to the "refurbished" PC. I did the format, reinstall, all the updates etc, gently got the external drive from where it had been carefully stored, and placed it on my desk next to the pc ready to be plugged in and the precious family memories copied back to the PC. At that point, my teenage son came bursting into the room (as they do), triped over the power lead for the external hard drive which then hit the floor with the force of a one ton slab of concrete! Needless to say, while the external caddy appeared undamged, the drive in it, never spun again and the entire family history was LOST! For some reason which i can't quite work out, the wife blames me for this great loss, since it was my idea to redo the computer in the first place! Several months later, things are still a bit frosty and i don't dare even say the word" photos" anymore. Like the photos on the drive, the word has been erased from my everyday vocabulary!

mxpress

fieldway

50 posts

Geek

#385779 29-Sep-2010 11:10

Have everything backup over 2 home build server and that thing call the Darfield earthquake came along and knock servers of their perk (just miss the cat) and badly damage the cases and fly both motherboard and damaged all the HDD in both server. Didn’t get around of copy all info and backups on DVD. A bad lesion learnt here

When people say 'Oh you just want to have your cake and eat it too'. Damn right! What good is cake if you can't eat it?

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

dothack

79 posts

Master Geek

#385845 29-Sep-2010 13:37

I was trying to move my boot files to a separate partition once and being the noob i am managed to format and move my boot files to my main data partition losing all my files. i was able to recover some of the files using some data recovery software.

another time i had a new digital camera and i thought i was being smart and brought a massive memory card, with the memory card being so big it seemed like a endless amount photo fit on it hence i never bothered to upload them. long story short i lost the camera and all the photos! like months worth. if i had a smaller memory card i most likey would have backed them up onto my comp as it got full.

jnimmo

1098 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 255

#385868 29-Sep-2010 14:21

Thankfully I still don't have a 'disaster' story to share. However, that means I'm all the more likely to have one any time now.
Worst loss of data I can recall was during a migration from Exchange 2003 to 2010, got everything across fine but didn't realise the public folders hadn't finished copying across to the new server before I removed it from the domain.
We lost our room booking calendar, and not much luck with Exchange recovery experts.
I'd love a copy of Oops!Backup for my Dad, who has recently scanned thousands of old family photo slides but doesn't really have an offsite backup.
With a copy of Oops!Backup and a couple of hard drives, I'll suggest he rotates the drives every few months between home and work.

jaymz

1136 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 76

#385910 29-Sep-2010 15:56

About 4 years ago, when I has just started at my current job as a bench tech, I was sent onsite to fix a problem.

The problem was their server had lost a disk in it's RAID 5 setup and there was a failed disk alarm going off (high pitched beeps) so I was sent onsite to silence it.

Simple enought job, restart server, enter RAID setup, silence alarm, reboot, job done.
EXCEPT
as the server booted up it got to the "Applying comptuer settings" and rebooted.

I thought: "OK, maybe it had an issue with the failed drive"

Server passed POST screens and I was greated with the lovely "Operating system not installed" message

Turns out another disk had reported failed! FML!

Returned the server to our office with backup tapes in hand, turns out the RAID card was poked, replaced it and restored Windows from tape.

Thankfully they didnt lose any data from the server, but they were down for a day while the system restored!

Also a friend of mine went onsite to install an external tape drive on a server.
He plugged it into the connector on the back of the server, however he didn't think to check if it was the SCSI controller for the server before doing so.
Blitzed the RAID and all data, they lost a days worth of work as he did it after hours before the backup ran, not a popular tech onsite that was for sure!!

Another friend, while doing a test restore from tape on a clients site, forgot to set the "redirect file sets" option.

Began the restore of their database over the top of the current one. Realising his mistake he cancled it part way through (Very bad idea!)
They ended up having to get the database guys back in to recreate their database as backups had not been working onsite. He was asked not to come back onsite :P

Kaos36

709 posts

Ultimate Geek

#385982 29-Sep-2010 18:23

Had to reinstall windows on a friends laptop rang them to ask what data they want saved. Yes I need all my docs, family photos and most importantly the wedding photos saved and the videos off the wedding please make sure you back them up cause they are the only copies of our wedding. Oh no problem I'll partition your drive and move all your data to the 2nd drive. Then will reformat and reinstall windows back on C.

Now this is where I lost the plot, seriously what was I thinking.

I had the laptop sitting alongside my desktop machine and browsing the net on my pc while working on their laptop. just to kill time. I proceeded to back up the data as I named the folders like I always do on my pc that I want to back up as Data01 Data02 and so on so named the folders the same on there's, I stopped to make a coffee before i started the backup. Came back sat down went into my pc into c drive and grabbed the folders Data01 etc., and started copying them to the D drive on MY pc not the laptop!

So there I was watching this data copying to the D drive quite impressed that it copied the folders over quite fast when it was suppose to have a few gigs of videos on them Yet it wasn't there data it was mine!. THEN I moved to her laptop and proceeded to reformat.

Yep all data saved to D drive now on with the reformat!. After all that and the installation I still didn't realize what I had done till i went to check the D drive on the laptop to find there was no data folders. What the hell wheres the folders? Then it hit me like a ton of bricks where i just wanted to die right there.

I got distracted by my pc and just wasn't thinking! Yes I am an idiot!

They wont be happy at all that I had lost their docs, wedding videos and photos. But alls good, in a state of panic & about 5 strong coffees later I downloaded a retrieve program and manage to save most not all but most of the data, lost some docs but wedding stuff was retrieved. Took me all night and all the next day retrieving them as the program only showed the deleted data as numbers so i had to check each one till i found the ones i thought were needed. And there were 100's if not 1000's of numbers. LOL.

But it gets better, I told them what happened they thought it quite funny cause the embarrassment state I was in then his wife says oh don't worry I know my mum has backups of the wedding... I then proceeded to curl up into a ball and suck my thumb.

I felt like I lost about 10yrs of my life that day.

I have no need for this back up program since that disaster I later on brought a copy of Nortons Ghost and and do damn images of everything before I proceed.

Just wanted to share my story. lol

Worst Response To A Crisis:
From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"

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bertyboynz

30 posts

Geek

#386069 29-Sep-2010 21:32

Hmm my worst one is I was downloading pics onto my pc for my Mother In Law. I had a newish hard drive so put them on there and didn't bother backing it up, thinking "its a new drive, it won't break" and anyhow the hard drive broke and it wasn't backed up anywhere... These were her only copies of the pics and she had recently been to the usa!! I now use Sync toy, and back up daily to a 2ndry had disk, always making sure the newest disk is the one that the stuff is being backed up to.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80655 posts

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+1 received by user: 41052

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#387067 2-Oct-2010 10:52

I have ten winners and will PM the keys for you later. The winners are

mentalinc
cws82us
b0untypure1
drajk
jjnz1
regs
graemeh
alvin
mxpress
bertyboynz

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