Ten copies of Altaro Backup to giveaway!

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freitasm

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Geekzone

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#68578 25-Sep-2010 09:36

Folks, we all know how relaxed with backups you are... Meaning you don't backup at all. And no, your RAID 5 is not a backup solution.

To help you with this problem the guys at Altaro gave me ten licences of Altaro Ooops!Backup to giveaway.
What you have to do to win is reply to this thread with horror stories (actual or otherwise) and what was your most terrible situation caused by data loss on your PC or home server.

Just one entry please and I will draw this on Friday 1st October...

My technology disclosure

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Ultimate Geek

#384242 25-Sep-2010 09:43

As I beta tested this software I don't need another license, but I will share my shock story anyway. I was in the process of uninstalling Linux and installing windows back on my laptop. I had "backed up" all of my files by copying them onto my external hard drive. I went to install windows and was unable to find my internal drive, so after some fiddling with a Linux live cd, I thought I had found a NTFS partition to install windows on.... after it had formatted what I thought was my internal hard drive, windows install says (paraphrasing of course) "Format complete, Unfortunately Windows cannot be installed on this USB drive". Bombshell drops, I have formatted and tried to install windows over my backup drive... I lost everything, and what I did recover with software was not much use......

The Morale of the story is:
ALWAYS have more than one copy if you are formatting your drives, and never install windows with other drives plugged in.....

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geek4me

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#384312 25-Sep-2010 13:46

Our worst loss was many years ago (late 80s) at work when PCs were only just fashionable and "affordable". Our first XT PC cost $10,000. Another bought a year or so later got a virus through an employee putting in a floppy disk that he had used in a PC at Victoria University.

We were virused as was every floppy put in the machine. We decided to reformat the drive losing important files but still had the virus - a boot track infection. Had to take the PC to get it "cleaned".

Backing things up then would have saved quite a bit of data re-entry. You live and learn!

mentalinc

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#384316 25-Sep-2010 13:57

I was hot plugging some hard drives in to a system that was running.
Short circuit some how and some capacitors blew on the 2 drives. mmm nice burning smell :(

I then started to spread my backup across multiple drives so if i lost on again i had the files elsewhere.
Then when i got burgled and saw my computer sitting in the middle of the lounge floor I figured that doesnt really work. now just copy my my docs folder to a USB drive which i store at my parents place.
Would be great to have an app to backup for me.

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cws82us

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#384320 25-Sep-2010 14:17

I work for mcdonalds and they pc system started placing oders with out us knowing. So my boss Smashed one of the tills with a hummer and then it starts getting. So in the end he smashed up all the tills. now we had to close the store for 1 week to we get new ones.

heavenlywild

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#384323 25-Sep-2010 14:24

Back many moons ago, before I understood the importance of backing up, I decided to update the computer BIOS.

"I will back up after the update I think".

So I double clicked the file and the upgrade began.

Off I went to the kitchen, thinking the world was great and I knew what I was doing.

I toasted some bread and half way through I went back to the computer and the screen of NOTHING-ness. It just wouldn't load Windows, or let me boot up in safe mode. I had that sinking feeling inside... and I knew I had lost everything. All my photos, documents and music down the drain.

Then I smelt something in the air - yep, my toast... was truly toasted too. Who said men couldn't multi-task? We can, but it doesn't mean we do a good job of it :P

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b0untypure1

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#384417 25-Sep-2010 21:46

I already have a copy of this software thanks to freitasm, but i will share my story anyway.
I had a single harddrive. So i made a complete backup of my 1TB of data using the windows 7 backup center. Once my second hard drive was put in (raid 0) i formatted both drives to start using RAID.
once i got windows back on, and all the drivers installed, i then turned on my external with my backup.
sadly when i clicked "restore backup" an error message came up.
"windows doesnt recognise the hard drive setup"
now i started to think, damn....raid 0 is totally different to a single drive :S
the windows backup made a one file image !
there went all my data.....
3 months later i managed to download most of the programs and games again. as for those uni assignments....restarted :S
moral: you can never have too many backups + use oops backup ! not windows backup~

drajk

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#384431 25-Sep-2010 23:10

Normally have a regular cycle of main system backups - drive trays - 4 copies of main system drive - clone complete drive - includes offsite backup etc... etc... - anyway for one reason or another let it be overlooked for 3 months and a Maxtor drive which was the main system drive at the time failed - couldn't be recognised in BIOS - tried a number of things including replacing circuit board on drive but all to no avail - lost 3 months of emails and heaps of other stuff - was not impressed!

jjnz1

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#384444 26-Sep-2010 01:18

cws82us: I work for mcdonalds and they pc system started placing oders with out us knowing. So my boss Smashed one of the tills with a hummer and then it starts getting. So in the end he smashed up all the tills. now we had to close the store for 1 week to we get new ones.

doesn't make sense mate... and I don't think so. I contract to MCD, that doesn't happen. Your boss would lose the store to head office.

{MOD COMMENT : SP : We can draw our own conclusions about the post, lets not take this thread OT.}

nakedmolerat

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#385667 28-Sep-2010 22:15

4-5 years ago, prior to having dedicated softwares to do backup for me. i designated a folder with all my assignments in it. i manually backup them each time after i made changes to the document. one weekend, after spending hours finishing my assignments, i went to search for some 'songs' on google. i clicked download now button (through a website not filesharing) and voila! something has slip through my antivirus, harddrive was inaccessible and there was no chance for recovering my files - ever.

it was saturday night and the following sunday was my birthday. celebrate my birthday by sitting in front of the laptop typing away my assignment as it was due by 8am - monday morning. it wasnt funny at all.

Aaroona

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#385693 29-Sep-2010 00:06

About a 2 years ago, I had a Dell 1720 - my first laptop ever, which was used for my school work (and only my school work).

Everything was fine until around 7 months into having the laptop, the hard drive just died. I lost all my work for the year (which would have been used for revision etc at the end of the year).

Dell replaced the hard drive, which was DOA, so had to be replaced again - this took over a week to get up and running again, and even then, I was far behind because I lost all my work, some of which had to be redone. :(

EDIT: was 2 years ago now... man time files!
EDIT2: flies, not files.. D'oh!

Oh and come to think of it, my external hard drive failed just recently, losing more school work (though not as much) and quite a lot of pictures :( Was totally gutted.. still not quite recovered from that one..

Regs

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Snowflake

#385702 29-Sep-2010 02:16

mentalinc: I was hot plugging some hard drives in to a system that was running.
Short circuit some how and some capacitors blew on the 2 drives. mmm nice burning smell :(

I hot-plugged a replacement disk into a failed RAID-1 that was running. A few seconds later, the RAID array had finished reconstructing and I had two completely empty disks! The empty disk got mirrored over the full disk instead of the other way around. Not quite sure how it happened, but i sure as hell aint gonna stick in a new disk in the same scenario again until i have another backup of the system located elsewhere.

p.s. i dont need the copy of altaro as i already have a license, courtesy of geekzone/altaro.

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graemeh

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#385734 29-Sep-2010 09:14

Too many years ago to mention my boss was formatting a few boxes of floppy disks (yes, so long ago that it was before they even had an option to buy pre-formatted).

He had a brain explosion after a few disks and typed "format c:". Of course Windows said "are you sure" - just the way it did when he typed "format a:".

You can guess the rest - we had a PC with a nice clean and freshly formated hard disk. Fortunately there was no data on it but it took us days to reinstall and configure all the applications that were stored on it.

There was no backup that we could use to recover from.

alvin

207 posts

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#385746 29-Sep-2010 09:35

our home pc's hard drive crashed and died instantly, we lost most of our son's baby pictures.

tripp

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#385755 29-Sep-2010 09:59

a few years ago now (late 1990's early 2000's) was helping the flatmate with her computer and re-installing windows, we made sure that we moved everything she wanted to keep over to another harddrive in the computer (this took most of the day as we went over almost everything in her machine).
Well when it game to re-format we booted up the windows CD when it asked us to reformat the drive we wanted to install windows on, well you guessed it, i did not read what was on the screen and hit the reformat option.
So after windows was installed and booted up, we had 2 copies of windows, none of her files and one very pi**ed off flatmate.
I had to do all the house work for a month because of it lol

jrwebnz

8 posts

Wannabe Geek

#385761 29-Sep-2010 10:16

In a previous role where I took over from a Sys admin. Our development server which had mirrored drives, failed, one HDD failed. I went to rebuild the mirror, and to be safe, checked to ensure backups had been completed. The previous sys admin had not put the server into the backup plan! To be extra safe I got our support twam to ghost the remaining good drive onto a spare, in case the mirror ended up doing a blank over good disk! damn support person, ghosted a blank image over the remaining good disk... doing the exact thing i was worried about doing when rebuilding the mirror.

worst part was, this was a dev platform which was doing the operation of web server, db server, exchange, file, and custom app server.... with no set up documentation. in all it took 80 hours to rebuild!

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