The importance of backups

[Chuckz]

I just backed up a thumb drive last night and then I plugged one into the computer today and, wrote some articles and I think I saved them on the thumb drive. I forgot to eject the thumb drive and now my thumb drive crashes the computer because the thumb drive is probably corrupted. Ejecting the thumb drives usually finishes writes to the media. I usually don't have computer problems but it happens. I used device manager to check my usb ports and the computer reports they are working properly.

I am now running off of my backup until I can fix the corrupted thumb drive. Years of work can be gone if you don't have multiple backups and having different types of media can also be beneficial.

The media on a thumb drive can last possibly 21 years but most thumb drives have a warranty for two years because the crystal can dry out. Hard Drives can also fail after five years.

 

[PeanutGallery]

Been there; I have two laptops and backup each to the other; also backup on a thumb drive that I keep on myself, and on external drive kept in firebox. Saved heartaches a few times.

 

[LifeIn]

I do a lot of software development and I back up my code and important documents to CD every couple of weeks. The backups are added on to the CD with a typical CD burning app. In this way I can do 7 or 8 incremental backups to one CD. (They are the write-only variety.) Over the past 20 years I have accumulated 6 spindles of burned CDs. In addition to serving as a backup for current work, it also serves as an archive that allows me to go back in time to see what the code was like at some point in the past. That has helped me track down bugs that are only discovered much later, but have been in the code for a long time. In case my house burns down, I also have a backup (current code only) on Dropbox. I would not feel safe without these measures in place.