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Back Up Procedures

Hornet3d

Wise
I am just taking a quick break from a project that has taken up almost all my free time for the last several days. I suspect there are many 3D artists that, like me, has a vast collection of content and and a growing amount of stored data as we create either more content, renders or both. While it is great to have a massive collection of content the big question is how you ensure you always have such data to hand, something quite pertinent with the closure of the Hivewire3D market place.

For some time my major backup has been thanks to a Network Attached Storage unit which has served me well but now the drives are close to 80% capacity. The NAS is a two disk unit and I have already expanded it once by adding bigger drives so this time I decided on adding a second NAS. That has been my project for the best part of a week, setting it up was breathtakingly easy but transferring data to the unit has been a long laborious process and with that now almost complete I need to rebuild my on going back up plan to make sure all in synched up.

I wonder how the rest of the community deals with the problem and how many do not back up and just trust to luck.
 

parkdalegardener

Adventurous
Half and half. Backup strategy used to be make another floppy. This became a ZIP Tape drive followed by CDs and DVDs. That became a NAS box. The NAS is now for entertainment. Movies, music and the like and I don't back up my machines anymore. I've spent a large part of my early life deriding the client server model of computing. Sadly, that is the state of affairs these days; and it's return is pervasive. That means no more backups of anything. New computers (not talking laptops) don't even come with a removable drive (DVD) anymore. All installation is via network.

Various email accounts hold the receipts and issued serials for all I have purchased over the years. Unless the providers go down I can get most any purchased product again.

Freebies and other miscellaneous software downloaded get sent to an external USB drive upon download so my backup is more like cleanup. I don't want, like, or use something I just drop it from the external.

As machines have been superseded here their drives were removed and saved for future reference or installation in a new machine. It never happens. The tech is always newer than the existing backup was made from. That means I have all the above listed backup material from as far back as a CPM machine. Precursor to VIC20 and even a few paper rolls from a drum with FORTRAN code punched in them. I never throw old code away and most probably should. It's useless these days.

The newest box here has a SSD hard drive. As noted above all downloads go to a USB drive. I have been made paranoid over the lifespans of SSDs and am old, poor, and on a fixed income. My XBOX DVD died last fall. I haven't used it more than an hour or two since. I have a rather large selection of games on disk as my internet was slow and expensive. Now if I want to play a game I have to repurchase it as Mickeysoft refuses to allow me to play games if they cannot verify the disk as in the system. That is the way of the future my friend. Your backups become useless as the tech changes.

I save my current work to a separate 2T USB drive in order to assuage my fears of SSD death. Since all new USB drives are SSD it begs the question of whom do I think I am fooling? Cloud backup is a viable way to go. It future proofs the media and offsites the data storage to be more secure than a box of drives, disks, and tapes; but it is out of your hands and in the possession of others. It's retrieval is as well.
 

Hornet3d

Wise
Half and half. Backup strategy used to be make another floppy. This became a ZIP Tape drive followed by CDs and DVDs. That became a NAS box. The NAS is now for entertainment. Movies, music and the like and I don't back up my machines anymore. I've spent a large part of my early life deriding the client server model of computing. Sadly, that is the state of affairs these days; and it's return is pervasive. That means no more backups of anything. New computers (not talking laptops) don't even come with a removable drive (DVD) anymore. All installation is via network.

Various email accounts hold the receipts and issued serials for all I have purchased over the years. Unless the providers go down I can get most any purchased product again.

Freebies and other miscellaneous software downloaded get sent to an external USB drive upon download so my backup is more like cleanup. I don't want, like, or use something I just drop it from the external.

As machines have been superseded here their drives were removed and saved for future reference or installation in a new machine. It never happens. The tech is always newer than the existing backup was made from. That means I have all the above listed backup material from as far back as a CPM machine. Precursor to VIC20 and even a few paper rolls from a drum with FORTRAN code punched in them. I never throw old code away and most probably should. It's useless these days.

The newest box here has a SSD hard drive. As noted above all downloads go to a USB drive. I have been made paranoid over the lifespans of SSDs and am old, poor, and on a fixed income. My XBOX DVD died last fall. I haven't used it more than an hour or two since. I have a rather large selection of games on disk as my internet was slow and expensive. Now if I want to play a game I have to repurchase it as Mickeysoft refuses to allow me to play games if they cannot verify the disk as in the system. That is the way of the future my friend. Your backups become useless as the tech changes.

I save my current work to a separate 2T USB drive in order to assuage my fears of SSD death. Since all new USB drives are SSD it begs the question of whom do I think I am fooling? Cloud backup is a viable way to go. It future proofs the media and offsites the data storage to be more secure than a box of drives, disks, and tapes; but it is out of your hands and in the possession of others. It's retrieval is as well.


I think I have followed much the same path first CDs and then remember using the Zip drive until the tapes became more expensive than backing up to DVDs. I still do some storage on DVD but they are the 'M' drive variety and I use them for data that will not change such as old photographs. I do have some cloud storage but I prefer to have a working back up copy and some of my financial details I would not trust to the cloud so the cloud is very much a plan B.

I used the purchase of the new NAS to weed out some data such as old programs which will either not work these days or I just do not see a use. for them.

A big chunk of the NAS is entertainment for a start I have digitised all my old LPs and 45s and also copied all my CDs and there are aa few videos I created of some rare holidays. While I still have both the CDs and the vinyl dicks I would hate to have to start the library building process form scratch.

Sorry to hear about the problems with the Xbox, I moved to Xbox last year from a PlayStation 3 that I hardly used. I was surprised to find how much had changed, like the need for a hard drive and the fact that you still needed the disk even when ported to the hard drive. The amount of updates both to the Xbox and the games was also an eye opener.
 

parkdalegardener

Adventurous
Too lazy to spend half my remaining life digitizing my vinyl. I have a wall of milk crates full of albums. Many decades worth of albums. I bought a new turntable and two replacement cartridges for it instead of digitizing them and I have a rather good, though old; stereo system already. The new turntable has a Bluetooth connection to the Raspberry Pi I use to control my media NAS box. Connects to a soundbar via cable or Bluetooth. I have half a dozen Pi cards around here I use for various pet projects. One was to digitize my rather too large cassette tape collection to CDs. Seemed so convenient at the time. Now the CDs are all on the NAS that I don't use to back up my computer anymore. I wish I had done something about some of my video tape. That is all gone over the years. Much is no longer available in a modern format.

That is the lesson here to me. Software; like music changes over the years. No matter what you do to future proof yourself, the format is going to change. If you like what you have back it up, and then next year back it up again; you never know when what you have just isn't gonna work for what ever reason, and there is no guarantee what you want is still around in a format you can use.
 

Hornet3d

Wise
Too lazy to spend half my remaining life digitizing my vinyl. I have a wall of milk crates full of albums. Many decades worth of albums. I bought a new turntable and two replacement cartridges for it instead of digitizing them and I have a rather good, though old; stereo system already. The new turntable has a Bluetooth connection to the Raspberry Pi I use to control my media NAS box. Connects to a soundbar via cable or Bluetooth. I have half a dozen Pi cards around here I use for various pet projects. One was to digitize my rather too large cassette tape collection to CDs. Seemed so convenient at the time. Now the CDs are all on the NAS that I don't use to back up my computer anymore. I wish I had done something about some of my video tape. That is all gone over the years. Much is no longer available in a modern format.

That is the lesson here to me. Software; like music changes over the years. No matter what you do to future proof yourself, the format is going to change. If you like what you have back it up, and then next year back it up again; you never know when what you have just isn't gonna work for what ever reason, and there is no guarantee what you want is still around in a format you can use.

Digitising my vinyl collection was a long process mainly because I used a USB turntable to play them when I had time to listen adn stored it on an SD card at the same time, the whole process took years. I would hate to have to start again hence multiple back up. Years ago I used to have a Sytemdeck turntable but with all my vinyl now in digital form I sold it when there was new interest in vinyl and made a few hundred pounds. I play the music on different systems, a Bose setup or Bluetooth headset when working on my computer, through an Echo for background or a Yamaha based movie multi speaker set up when I really want to listen to music.

I am very aware of software changing, for many years I used a cataloging program to store lists of my DVD, CDs, books and Blue rays so it held about ten years of data then the company stopped supporting it. That would have been alright except they did nothing about the 'phone home' on start up so it will not recognise the license I purchase and will only open the restricted trial version. At least I had back up a version the the database that can be read by Excel so the data is retained. I did look at getting another cataloguing program but not only did I not want to start from scratch it was also a question of once burned twice shy.
 

Hornet3d

Wise
Too lazy to spend half my remaining life digitizing my vinyl. I have a wall of milk crates full of albums. Many decades worth of albums. I bought a new turntable and two replacement cartridges for it instead of digitizing them and I have a rather good, though old; stereo system already. The new turntable has a Bluetooth connection to the Raspberry Pi I use to control my media NAS box. Connects to a soundbar via cable or Bluetooth. I have half a dozen Pi cards around here I use for various pet projects. One was to digitize my rather too large cassette tape collection to CDs. Seemed so convenient at the time. Now the CDs are all on the NAS that I don't use to back up my computer anymore. I wish I had done something about some of my video tape. That is all gone over the years. Much is no longer available in a modern format.

That is the lesson here to me. Software; like music changes over the years. No matter what you do to future proof yourself, the format is going to change. If you like what you have back it up, and then next year back it up again; you never know when what you have just isn't gonna work for what ever reason, and there is no guarantee what you want is still around in a format you can use.


Forgot to say that seems a good use of a Raspberry Pi.
 
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