Post AcASjF0Cs5EJ9bqSsi by Chigaze@mstdn.ca
 (DIR) More posts by Chigaze@mstdn.ca
 (DIR) Post #Ac9hMHXqYYG6X989bs by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T05:40:47Z
       
       1 likes, 1 repeats
       
       My computer failed tonight, and I lost the entire hard drive. Fortunately, I have everything doubly backed up: once on a local hard drive and once on a cloud service. It's still stressful, but it could be a lot worse.Consider this your reminder to back up your computer.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac9iXWKk0qxTXUvJ8C by robini71@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T05:54:00Z
       
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       @grammargirl I do similarly. Some laugh but I say I'm the queen of redundancy and I'm so ok with being laughed at for it. I rock with 4 external hard drives 2 mechanical, 2 pocket SSD's, and a backup internal drive in my desktop  and 3 cloud services.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac9iiUB0NBDM2Db8Ma by nomdeb@mstdn.social
       2023-11-25T05:55:58Z
       
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       @grammargirl glad it was only a frustrating time suck than loss of data. My critical stuff is also backed up in two places.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac9ksDf8pGghccSluq by BillMcGuire@universeodon.com
       2023-11-25T06:20:09Z
       
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       @grammargirl I really worry that my computer might crash and I lose everything I've typed up on my life stories.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac9nFMgfdddcBELJOC by PamelaBarroway@mstdn.social
       2023-11-25T06:46:43Z
       
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       @grammargirl Oh man, that blows. Glad you had a backup! This is a reminder to me to backup to my own portable hard drive tomorrow.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac9oWoazEG2Bc5ZKQi by mia@movsw.0x0.st
       2023-11-25T07:01:10.502Z
       
       2 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @grammargirl@zirk.us recently i screwed up rearranging storage and somehow ended up with two RAID members that had the same IDso one day i booted it up after a GPU crash and linux assembled the array with the disk that had stale data on it. XFS noticed that something is wrong and switched to read-only. i assumed the crash had caused an inconsistent journal and metadata entries so i ran xfs_repair… good thing i interrupted it while it was printing screenfuls of errors. not a mistake i’ll make again.lost a few GB of stuff there, but nothing important. could’ve been catastrophic because there’s a lot of stuff i don’t have the space to backup elsewhere, and that volume also contains backups of other machinesthat brings me to fs corruption, which can also happen silently: remember to check the integrity of your backups regularly as well! RAID systems with data redundancy should scan for inconsistencies automatically every now and then, some file systems have online scrubbing tools that verify checksums, and most backup software also has ways to do it.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ac9x94kARF4yKicNVI by vpermar@mastodon.online
       2023-11-25T08:37:39Z
       
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       @grammargirl A great reminder to not just have one, but two backups. I lost most of my early work samples when my hard drive failed, and then the backup drive also failed as I plugged it to get the files. It turns out there was a problem with the power outlet.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcA1F2L6gp1yQlzhXE by peemee@aus.social
       2023-11-25T09:23:29Z
       
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       @grammargirl @hugh I do. Two computers in regular use, one laptop, one desktop. Both are Apple Silicon devices. Both are backed up twice weekly to separate Time Machine HDDs and cloned via SuperDuper and CarbonCopyCloner to separate SSDs. That’s a total of eight external drives. I have had clones and Time Machine backups fail twice in the last year.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcA1SYGpHZX1EAR7Cq by martinvermeer@fediscience.org
       2023-11-25T09:25:58Z
       
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       @grammargirl It's good practice. I am lucky in that I back up everything in git, which is easy as LaTeX documents are plain text. As a bonus, it also documents the editing history. Email and such is of course in the cloud.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcA1m1BE1NEIOK6BY8 by MiEstasMiMem@infosec.exchange
       2023-11-25T09:29:32Z
       
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       @grammargirl Backuping and  ->TESTING restore too…<- The testing phase is the only step that can guarantee you safe if burning your HDD!!
       
 (DIR) Post #AcA2CkGV1D0bkWJIJs by jayesh@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T09:34:21Z
       
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       @grammargirl Pretty much. I got it on two cloud services, a local nas and once a month a backup on an external
       
 (DIR) Post #AcA529W75mEWkAFozA by on1arf@mastodon.radio
       2023-11-25T10:05:55Z
       
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       @grammargirl Nah .. that will never happen to me! 🙄
       
 (DIR) Post #AcA9MW4RLbhSIiHAQK by TimWardCam@c.im
       2023-11-25T10:54:33Z
       
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       @grammargirl Mine backs up to the cloud. Guess how often I test restore.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAAuJhRwqknjXCgGe by arratoon@mastodon.sdf.org
       2023-11-25T11:11:28Z
       
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       @grammargirl Oh I’m sorry to hear that. But yes, back up! I hard a hard drive fail once, and lost everything, so now I back up to an external HD, and a couple of clouds.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAB0W1b2N2FhDaByy by DaleOh@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T11:12:57Z
       
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       @grammargirl My backup drive died last night in the middle of a restore. My paranoid self pulled out my backup backup drive and carried on. Ordered a new primary backup drive....
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAFZHtHyjb7oQX75M by Rasta@mstdn.ca
       2023-11-25T12:04:04Z
       
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       @grammargirl I lost a hard drive in 2005 that I never recovered from. All contacts, email, notes, receipts, etc. I have terabyte backup drives now
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAHsgrxX6PWgzI5tQ by CStamp@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T12:29:55Z
       
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       @grammargirl Multiple backups.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAKvkN5GiikHizxBo by xs4me2@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T13:04:08Z
       
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       @grammargirl Thats a good reminder to spend some time on making a back up of important information…!Thx!
       
 (DIR) Post #AcALQa1ZmvarAhdm7M by ljmclean@mstdn.social
       2023-11-25T13:09:44Z
       
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       @grammargirl Amen.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAPusWJz8DB2WixUm by JHB17@mastodon.online
       2023-11-25T14:00:01Z
       
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       @grammargirl And test your backups. I had a couple no-name drives fail in quick succession - "write" fine, but no read back.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAQ8CRxCNVqcB28Mi by Her_Doing@wandering.shop
       2023-11-25T14:02:21Z
       
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       @grammargirl I always told my clients "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have had a system crash, and those who haven't *yet*".I'm so sorry for the stress, but so glad you had everything backed up!  I hope your data restoration is swift and easy.   🙏
       
 (DIR) Post #AcARnPtsCB1G9oJHmq by macquilter@toot.community
       2023-11-25T14:21:03Z
       
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       @grammargirl Glad you didn’t lose your data! I lost everything once many years ago. Learned my lesson. I have three local external backups and Backblaze for offsite backup.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcASjF0Cs5EJ9bqSsi by Chigaze@mstdn.ca
       2023-11-25T14:31:32Z
       
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       @grammargirl Reminds me of the old computer adage: There are two kinds of people, those who back up, and those who will.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcATAipU5D8jTnvxk8 by Wandering_Goliath@sauropods.win
       2023-11-25T14:36:31Z
       
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       @grammargirl perfect implementation of the 3-2-1 backup rule!
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAUToqk1Xh9bjBxlQ by Itty53@mstdn.social
       2023-11-25T14:51:10Z
       
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       @grammargirl This is a good reminder for you to go ahead and TEST your backups too. Don't wait for a failure to find out what it missed.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAXSihvfsM28BEndA by marc_w@union.place
       2023-11-25T15:24:33Z
       
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       @grammargirl Backup, backup, backup! I have a second drive installed as a backup that gets updated every day, and two more plug-in drives that I alternate; one is local while the other is stored off-site. I have stuff from my TRS-80 mod 1 when backups were on audio tape. Never lost anything in over forty years.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAYJ1HTrd8EnGny9A by dinogami@sauropods.win
       2023-11-25T15:34:01Z
       
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       @grammargirl I've been backing things up in multiple places religiously for at least a couple of decades, ever since one of my fellow grad students had his laptop stolen and he lost 6 months of work on his dissertation! I have so much stuff, though, that free cloud service account limits are too small for my stuff, so I predominantly use hard drives.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAnsD9nCS3F4fRoJc by DamonHD@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T18:28:28Z
       
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       @grammargirl Just been making an off-site backup (with DOIs!) of my key public data sets!
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAvSA8UbmhtoDvh1E by dxzdb@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T19:53:22Z
       
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       @grammargirl bummer! I should go check some backups. I’ve caught Time Machine failing, sometimes.  So are you upgrading to a 24” M1 or M3) iMac?
       
 (DIR) Post #AcAvUa8KvBi31B0gbI by petrichor@digipres.club
       2023-11-25T19:53:21Z
       
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       @grammargirl Oof, I feel for you, it's so stressful even when you have all the backups in place.I had a drive fail on me the other week. It was part of a RAID array so I lost nothing and could keep on using it, and I have offsite backups too, but I was still sweating bullets until the replacement arrived and the array was back to full redundancy.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB2DTKleEUKgac4wK by trumpresistance@newsie.social
       2023-11-25T21:09:10Z
       
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       @grammargirl There are 2 kinds of computers - those which have crashed and those who will. 😱
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB48l4AUZmg8rjFtA by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:30:41Z
       
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       @triptych Backblaze. I've used to find individual files before and it worked fine. I was able to restore my files this morning from Time Machine on an external drive.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB4Qj06uUSQwsOkE4 by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:33:58Z
       
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       @dxzdb I'm leaning toward a 2021 Macbook Pro M1 with an external monitor. I have a 27" iMac, and I don't want to go to a smaller monitor. I was super disappointed when they didn't announce a 27" iMac at the last event. I had been hanging on hoping to upgrade. (My iMac has been buggy for a while.)
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB518ZxHxCShdWjwm by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:40:29Z
       
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       @keetchey Glad to hear it! And thanks.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB5AkS5qX2mlqQsRE by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:42:15Z
       
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       @dinogami Wow, losing 6 months of thesis work would be painful.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB5DvTJKe4VofW8Bc by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:42:53Z
       
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       @marc_w That's impressive!
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB5LrVRxY7XpmImpM by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:44:19Z
       
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       @JHB17 Wow, I wouldn't have thought of that. Thanks.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB5lI2ESmm7LplDjE by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:48:56Z
       
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       @peemee @hugh Yikes!
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB5ngxmkekdFBpGz2 by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:49:22Z
       
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       @vpermar It makes sense that such a thing could happen. How awful!
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB68rhu09Cwe9Ud16 by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:53:09Z
       
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       @sindarina Yeah.   I knew it was a high risk machine at this point.As I joked to my husband, "Sure it was smoking last week, but it seemed to be working fine the last few days." It had actually become buggy again after I thought it was fixed last week, and I was reinstalling the OS to see if that would help when it failed (mid-install). My next step was going to be to wipe it and start over anyway, but I was hoping to put it off until I got some other things done.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcB6WMqSOgm5sbhX8K by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-25T21:57:24Z
       
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       @sindarina LOL, thanks. :)
       
 (DIR) Post #AcBE0JXDy639yovqEq by dxzdb@mastodon.social
       2023-11-25T23:21:16Z
       
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       @grammargirl oh I thought you had a 21inch. Yeah smaller screen would be a rough transition. I wouldn’t want to leave the nice Apple screens
       
 (DIR) Post #AcCWPXBsKJHDuA57Zo by leswarden@mastodon.world
       2023-11-26T14:22:13Z
       
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       @grammargirl And whatever you do, if you’re getting a new computer, DON’T let the old computer know! 🤖 🖥️ 😳😉
       
 (DIR) Post #AcChA9Q5WSCzKib3lw by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-26T16:22:41Z
       
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       @leswarden 🤣
       
 (DIR) Post #AcD3xt7IboSoEzvidM by Maverynthia@dragon.style
       2023-11-26T20:33:50Z
       
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       @grammargirl Wish I had the money for extra hard drives and cloud services.Backing up precious files is a luxury.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcFMbZLrhX8M0zjZZI by ablade@mastodon.stickbear.me
       2023-11-27T23:16:28Z
       
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       @grammargirl @BTyson Or be like me and do not store anything on the hard drive but screen reading software that has to be directly on the computer. Everything I work with is either on an external Flash Drive, SD card, Google Drive, or dropbox. It has  definitely saved me a few years ago when my computer had to be factory reset.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcGqXoq3N3I2fgwTQG by failedLyndonLaRouchite@mas.to
       2023-11-28T16:26:40Z
       
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       @grammargirl PSAMicrosoft has something called bitlockerand it is turned on, afaik, by defaultand if you loose the key, your data is , truly, really, toastand in particular:IF YOU HAVE A WINDOWS 7 OR 10 MACHINE THAT MS UPGRADED FOR YOU, YOUR MACHINE WENT FROM NO BITLOCKER TO BITLOCKER ON BY DEFAULT
       
 (DIR) Post #AcGuazj5kLvR7mSJ96 by mina@berlin.social
       2023-11-28T17:12:02Z
       
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       @grammargirl
       
 (DIR) Post #AcHGup9AzIrn63W6ue by wolfnowl@universeodon.com
       2023-11-28T21:22:10Z
       
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       @grammargirl My computer is backed up and my external hard drives are backed up. In addition, I have a folder called Installed that has the installation files for every software program on my computer. Those get replaced with updates. Also in that folder is a file called Licenses, which lists the software keys for every piece of software on my computer.Rebuilding my system: Install Windows, re-install software (also a good time to ask, "Do I still use this?") then restore data from backup. Time consuming but reasonably effortless.One of my profs (let's say forty years ago) told us that he had a class where they gave all of the students a stack of pages to type in, waited until they were approaching being done, then cut the power to the room. At that they said, "Let's talk about backups."
       
 (DIR) Post #AcHHObt4qqRaezBpkO by grammargirl@zirk.us
       2023-11-28T21:27:32Z
       
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       @wolfnowl Sounds like a good strategy, and wow — it seems mean, but I also bet those students remembered the lesson.
       
 (DIR) Post #AcR6ZRxovmO19YyS92 by Wraithe@mastodon.social
       2023-12-03T15:13:22Z
       
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       @grammargirl A great reminder and glad it saved your bacon!As an addendum, most of the tech folks I know recommend a “3-2-1” backup strategy.3 different backups of important data2 backups in different locations/media (hard drive and NAS for example)1 backup offsite (Backblaze, CrashPlan, etc)When I’m talking backups with clients the question I ask is how much data is where they start getting worried if I told them it was all gone (the last day? 2 days? A week? A month?) 😀