AAAAHHHHHGGGGAAAA I just deleted my music collection!!!

[haraldo]

Well, you should actually have two backups as a minimum.
If something goes wrong while you're doing the backup, you may end up with both the master and the backup being broken....
Still, this is a cheap insurance......

 

[astrodon]

I also always keep at least one copy of everything important.....
Ideally in another physical location.
I want to say that hard drives are NOT unreliable, they are incredibly reliable. The thing is thought that a hard drive may fail, without any pre-warning. Which is why the backup is so important!

Good point about storing in different locations when possible. I have replaced 7 failed hard drives on various machines (5 on Unix/Linux boxes and 2 on MS PCs, both at work and at home) over the past 8 years. This was the reason for my "unreliable" statement. But you are correct, under normal use in optimal room conditions, hard drives can last a long time.

 

[jamie2112]

Not as bad as I thought.

Thanks for all the positive posts. I think I only lost about 19 movies and just over 13 gigs of music. This a very positive thing for me as I have been here with my Mac buddy. It turns out that I had backed up my external hard drive a month ago so I only lost the newer stuff. What a boulder off my shoulder, I will get another 1 TB drive and time machine is what I will use Adam thanks for the heads up. Once again I learned a very valuable lesson BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER on a regular basis I once again thank all of you for your positive comments. Jamie

 

[MDS]

Well at least it turns out to not be a total disaster. I have to wonder though, just how did you end up deleting everything?

Two quick stories related to this topic:

1. Years ago one of our team members sat down at the server and didn't realize he was at the root directory. He typed rm -rf and poof the entire server was erased. [For those that may not know, -f means 'force' as in 'don't ask me if I am sure I want to recursively delete everything'].

2. Same project, but this time it was me...but on my own machine. I write a lot of tiny little batch files or scripts to do repetitive crap that would involve typing long directory paths. I keep those in my general tools directory. So I CD'ed to \wintools and created a new file for the script. But I had a typo where I did something like '@ c d \build'. Naturally that was an error, the directory didn't change and the next line was, you guessed it, 'rm -rf *.*' and I deleted my entire tools directory. Now I make my tools directory read only.

That never happens at home and I have all the WAV files on an external drive and the MP3s made from those WAVS on both computers.

 

[jamie2112]

MDS, I deleted my stuff by emptying my startup disc. Funny me I didn't realize that I was deleting my itunes as well.I thought that my itunes was its own file but it was part of my startup . I won't pull that idiot move again. I now am going to hook up my external HD every day or at least every time I get something new I want to keep. Thanks again .....

 

[mouettus]

For those of you who could help...

I get some music weekly. I wanted to know if there was a simple trick for copying new files over to my external drive. What I do to be absolutely sure is I delete all the files and copy them all over in the external HDD. But it takes like over half an hour. Other than that it's the old "are you sure you want to replace *.mp3" all over again for some thousand times. Is there a way to RAID one folder only? lol

 

[MDS]

I get some music weekly. I wanted to know if there was a simple trick for copying new files over to my external drive. Is there a way to RAID one folder only?

The RAID part happens automatically without your intervention.

You can copy one single file, multiple files, or one or more directories. You don't have to delete everything and copy them all again. If you use the Windows GUI and have all the new files in a single directory, you can open that folder and select all of them, then drag them to another folder or right-click and choose copy.

If you don't mind typing and want to learn to do things from the command line, xcopy has many options that will allow you to do whatever you want.

 

[jinjuku]

For those of you who could help...

I get some music weekly. I wanted to know if there was a simple trick for copying new files over to my external drive. What I do to be absolutely sure is I delete all the files and copy them all over in the external HDD. But it takes like over half an hour. Other than that it's the old "are you sure you want to replace *.mp3" all over again for some thousand times. Is there a way to RAID one folder only? lol

If you are using Windows, NT Backup has a differential backup option. Simply run a full system (normal backup) and then a differential (only the files that have changes since the last normal backup).

To do a restore you will need both the first normal backup and the last differential backup.

You could also do a full backup and used the advanced button to schedule a backup of the entire machine once a month.

As example. If you have 90GB of computer to backup (we are talking the entire machine) then with a 500GB external HD, you would get almost half a year of point in time backups that you could restore from before over writing the oldest backup. This is a round robin style that is effective and cheap.

A word on RAID. RAID is not backup, RAID is redundancy. RAID does you no good if you get hit by a nasty virus. RAID protects from hard disk failure.

 

[speakerman39]

Thanks for all the positive posts. I think I only lost about 19 movies and just over 13 gigs of music. This a very positive thing for me as I have been here with my Mac buddy. It turns out that I had backed up my external hard drive a month ago so I only lost the newer stuff. What a boulder off my shoulder, I will get another 1 TB drive and time machine is what I will use Adam thanks for the heads up. Once again I learned a very valuable lesson BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER on a regular basis I once again thank all of you for your positive comments. Jamie

Jamie, I am so very glad you was able to get most of it back. Just go back and re-do some of the newer stuff you lost. Just be sure to back it all up this time. Kudo to your buddy for saving the day!!!!!!!

Cheers,

Phil