Murphy's law of backups

[Pauld]

Hi all

Just thought I would share with everyone here a bad experience (or rather a nightmare) I have had over the last couple of days with recovering data from DVD backups. I hope nobody here has to go through the same frustration I have.

Having recently reached the capacity of my hard drive in my portable I thought I would buy and external 250GB FW drive along with an external DVD burner. I had moved a large portion of my older images to the new external drive while at the same time burn't a copy of all the images to half a dozen DVD's. I also had about 20 CDR's of most of the older images but not everything.

To cut a long story short my backup software managed to overwrite and erase all of my photos from my external hard drive, no problems I thought I would just copy the files back off the DVD's. Turns out the DVD's were all corrupted in some part and some of the images could not be retrieved to my frustration. I had previously checked several files on the DVD's and run verification on the disks which were all OK.

The moral of this story is to make sure you are confident backup data on your CD's or DVD's is OK, I would encourage you to run a test recovery of some files just to make sure.

[Glen]

Paul, sorry to hear of your hassles

[stubbsy]

Paul. A sad, but cautionary tale. My view is no backup strategy is 100% reliable - even if you buy top notch (= expensive) media. Best approach is two copies AT ALL TIMES. Preferably on different media. I back my stuff up to a hard disk in another PC I have networked and periodically also make a copy to DVD. That way both have to fail at the same time. And I avoid back up software since it's much safer & straightforward when you have total control.

Oh, and I take the DVDs to work so I have "off site" backup too

[MattC]

Paul. Sorry to hear about your dramas. I have been there and done that but not for a while - knock on wood. One little app that I keep handy for recovering damaged/corrupted disks is CD Check. I also use Nero DriveSpeed to slow the drive down if needed

http://elpros.si/CDCheck/

Cheers

Matt

[christiand]

Paul, you are spot on.

It is a fact that even in IT people do backups, religiously again and again,
but never try a restore until such time they need to.
Then the restore fails ... and disaster strikes.

p.s.: I create two DVDs and randomly test images.

HTH
CD

[Pauld]

Thanks for the advice guys, I did manage to get most of the images back but have lost about 100.

I am taking steps to improve my backups regime.

[darb]

this is why im grateful about having the use of AIT tape drives on a central backup server at m office

we back up a lot of internet servers across the wire to a central server, as part of our main business ... so a zipped (tarballed) copy of all my galleries and NEFS goes onto tape.

[glamy]

The only time I had problems was when I had a Sony DVD burner. I switched to Pioneer and Nero and so far so good.
Gerard