I just want to personally thank Eli the computer guy for taking the time to make this video along with all the other videos 🙏🏽You have helped me out so much with learning IT and for that I can not express enough appreciation and gratitude! I at the same time want rebuke all the people who are responding to Eli in a very hostile and condemnatory way. It is fine to disagree and share your opinion but make sure you do it in a respectful way. Furthermore, I honestly don't understand why those of you making these very hostile, negative comments would even waste your time watching a video like this if you know so much about the subject already?? Maybe instead of tearing others attempts down to educate those of us that are less knowledgeable, you could make your own video in response to this one sharing your opinions and experience on the topic. But I will say again, if you don't share your opinions in a respectful way nobody including myself will be interested in what you have to say. You will be like a clanging gong or symbol.
True Image filled my 2tb spare internal hard drive with incremental backups. I then realised that I needed to learn about making backups. Thanks, Eli, for all the superb info.
Thank you; I'm preparing a test, and all you info is great. By the way, I use a "do-not-see-my-info", or you said "drive-to-drive" system, from last century to today, more than 30 years! "be hidden" from any system! all my personal files were into an external drive (dual with a cloud drive today). My information is secure, readable in Linux-Apple-Windows. Any damage, virus, I just format the computer and ready to go!! I have all my information available from 1984 to today..jaja.. with very low cost: psychological, economic, peace of mind!
The answer to a solid backup solution is a combination of all of the above... At our clients sites we run nightly local backups to backup cartridges which are stored off site. We run nightly snapshots to a NAS (servers are all VM's) and we run a cloud based 15 minute differential backup with unlimited version control on just the file servers. (cloud backups are great for restoring individual files or folders not an entire systems... Although some cloud solutions will mail out a hard drive with your data on it, at a CO$T of course). We also run test restores every 3 months (Which is just as important as the backups, having a backup is no use if it doesn't actually restore correctly).
I've had home computers for 30 years and I've always been bad at backups. I've never had a complete disk failure, but backups come in handy when I upgrade to a new PC. I've used a number of different software solutions and when I tested for recovery on one in particular, not MS, the company had upgraded their software and couldn't help me with my older version. So now in retirement, since I've been so lucky, I've decided that I need to do backups on both mine and my wife's computers. Your video was a big help to me, now I just need to determine the solution I want to use. The off-site solution sounds good, but it does require responsibility on our part. I'm thinking that I'll use a bank safety deposit box and exchange the disks once a month. Anyway, we'll figure it out and thanks so much for posting this video.
So how has the monthly safety deposit box exchange been working out? VERY few people have the discipline to make that work. The best solution for home users is having a local hard drive based backup AND a cloud based offsite backup. Both which are fully automated. An automated strategy is the essential to consistent backups, rather at home or in a business, followed by periodic restoration testing. If restoration testing can be automated as well, then one has a good solution. FYI, I've had home computers longer than I care to admit and have seen several disk failures, and while I wasn't always as consistent at backups as I am now, I've never lost significant data. Not having consistent backups in the past for me had lot to do with the unavailability of reasonably priced fully automated tools. These days there really is no excuse.
This Guy has a wealth of knowledge and is not selfish with the information and he disseminate the info to people who need it. However, on another note, I dont share is view that tape drive as a solution is not needed anymore or it is obsolete and one must not consider it. Tape technology is constantly improving and is still a concrete solution for lots of companies. NAS,SAN and cloud-based solutions are good options for backup but equally Tape Solutions are viable and still has its fair share of advantages. One needs to access there own requirements and researching is also key.
+Kemar Lawes Couldnt agree more. For 99% of home users and even most small business' tapes are not appropriate at all but go work anywhere in an enterprise level system and tapes are still everywhere and aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Thanks thats very valuable information, I have come accross this problem in the past now that I think back, I hadnt used my USB drive for many months it was dead when I tryed to use it again months later. Cheers.
I've been harping on external drive back ups, online back ups, and periodic back up recovery (i.e., pretend that just you lost your entire building - what you gonna do now?) to anyone I know who maintains data; especially financial data. Recently lost software RAID on an Win2008R2 server - did the backups - so recovered. Back that puppy up!
Nuts. Eli's FREE info is good but giving people bad practice ideas is bad. Yes, I have eternal HDDs that I backup to however, I'm well aware it's NOT a good idea. For home use, maybe OK but for companies as he said "clients" it's shocking. Backups for a company should ALWAYS be either off-site or in a different fire zone but in a safe. NOT on another HDD in the same PC that is also burning while the building is burning down. Nuts.
I love your videos, a tips to you Eli is to have a glass of water around that you can drink some from. It might sound stupid at first but if you take a sip of water now and then it wont disturb the people watching and it will give you a better pause to sum up what you want to say without getting a dry mouth ^^
Man I stopped the video just to tell this is the 4th video I watched today from your awesome channel... My English is so fuckin' bad, but I learn alot from you, you are HITing the point direct! Preferably making tutorials by recording when you working on your system to be more specification / spesiftcated / specific WHATEVER :( Thanks Eli
2 big companies I worked at used tapes. I dropped them several times and they were always fine. Companies still use tapes as well as separated HDD areas. Tapes can be taken off site and stored in fire proof safes.
Hi Eli, thank you for the good job and all the time you have spent to teach us a lot of design on IT. I have seen your videos on different subject (AD, network...) so congratulations. All subjects can be discussed, but the most important is to share our knowledge ;-)
The add-ons for something like SQL or Exchange Server relates to the fact that one wishes to create a "hot" backup, that is whilst the database is live and being used. This requires an entirely different kind of technique than just doing a flat file backup. Thus it is not the "rip-off" the narrator implies.
Very great explain, love it Question, for the RSync backup do you need to have the original file in order to restore those bit/bite backup ? if yes, so if we lose the original file then we screwed ? Thx
I have to tell you that you are wrong, BackupExec uses the format MTF (Microsoft Tape Format) so anything that can read that format can be used in a pinch to restore the data.
@RaphaClassic Well I can't argue against that. If you have trouble protecting your CDs and DVDs put them in a case, and keep them in a safe. My point is if you put a DVD in a safe next to a hard drive, the data on the DVD will last 6 times as long! That's a huge difference.
good video thx, problem with file backup is that if you backup a corrupted file on the source drive it copies it on the destination and then... no good copy of the file exists
Your A+ book is rather optimistic with generous extrapolation of CD-R life. I have several audio CDs from the 80s 90s and 00s which have suffered disk rot including a few that weren't taken out of the sealed celophane packaging. I've lost track of the number of optical data disks that have failed.
11 років тому
Holy Jesus. Just awesome. So usefull. :) Congrats. You should talk about RAIDs and that things.
Symantec bought out Veritas, and Veritas (formerly Seagate Software) created the backup software for Windows versions before Win7. The Microsoft Backup was a cut down version and if you were too cheap to buy proper backup software you were most certainly too cheap to buy proper media to back it up to.
Tape backups screwed me many times over at a small business. Subsequently, imaging to backup drives, cloning to a full instant replacement drive, all saved me multiple times. The tapes either physically failed, or the backup program failed to recognize and restore, or the backup was flawed in some other manner that was not discernable until the need for restoration happened. Witnessed a friend's business get screwed by a backup service that actually had their tape service fail to restore a crashed network. Economics might suggest tapes at large enterprise installations can be viable, but they will never catch up now, to HDD rates, because they actually depend on pulling hundreds of feet of magnetic tape through, to locate one lousy file. Had the highest quality tapes just plain get damaged exactly the same way old audio cassettes did, and the far more convenient, reliable HDD (have used ones for ten years, that outlived their connectivity, i.e. pre-SATA), easy to verify and clone for additional security. One compact tape, whoaa boy, 4 whole GB!? I bought a 128GB USB 3 flash stick for $65. Who are these posters trying to kid?
LTO-8 tape stores 12 TB on a single cartridge. Data immediately gets checked while it is written and writing speed is up to 900 MB/sec. Price per GB is a fraction of any HD solution. Archival life is around 30 years. So who is kidding here?
Actually, using Data Protection Manager - DPM (from System Center 2012) is very usefull for backup strategy because we don't need to use some additional plugin to backup sql server, exchange, sharepoint... So what do you think about this Microsoft product?
Hello Eli, in one project the following scheme was deployed: The server has 4 logical drives, one internal with RAID 1, three in the enterprise SAN. One of the SAN LUN drives is configured in RAID 10 (MS SQL 2008), the other two in RAID 5 (logs etc). In addition, the database is on a daily basis is backed up and the backup files are written to the tape. Isn't the scheme too excessive? Don't you think the RAID configurations for the disk is enough? Thanks!
Hi, thanks a lot for the information, it really helped me understand a lot and find a solution for my pc. Which backup software do you recommend these days? Thanks a lot, Elli from Greece.
This is a pretty old video. Is there an update that takes into consideration running a server as a virtual machine? Seems to me, it opens up some much more reliable and inexpensive options.
@entehrend ... I trust hard drives far more then optical disks... Whatever the half life of an optical disk is, I have seen far too many of them turn into coasters by just sitting in someones desk...
Thanks for the information. I need further info on what to do if you haven't backed up things correctly...I have a Seagate 2TB and it's full. However, when I look at what's on it, I can't make heads or tails of it. I only want to backup email and photos but there are crazy files on it that I don't know if I need or not. Do you have a video helping with this? Thanks!!
Hey Eli what do you think about using the backup system that follows Server 2012 R2. if think about the schedule backup and is it good to recover from ? and thank you very much for really good tutorial movies!!!!
If you are backing up to an internal backup harddrive then if the computer fries your backup HD fries as well - way to go genius. With regard to DVDs, if it is not a Rewritable DVD then if you leave it with data face up in sunlight for half a day your data will be gone. DVD RW and RAM if stored properly will last for a lot longer than 5 years. The main limitation of course is volume. 4.2 GB of data on a disk just isn't really a lot nowadays. A USB 3.0 external HD cures the volume problem.
in work we have tape backups running at the office and 2 offsite locations so if everything goes bang we can still keep running. costs us a fortune but is absolutely neccesary
Google KonBoot. There is the old free version still available but also the paid for version (well worth it). You can then boot from the CD/DVD and at the login screen just press enter as the password (password is blank) and it will log you in. It essentially bypasses the authentication but doesn't affect any files. Once into the admin account, you can reset the password. I use it a lot for such situations. You need to know the name of an activate account to be able to login to though.
This is great and everything but one thing, it's not tech things or anything like that, it not even your fault, it is the viewers fault, remember this is the internet, the internet likes things to be short and sweet, try to break you videos down a bit, try to have 20 min at max, and don't upload them all at once, space them out a bit, it should help with your viewer count and sub amount, also remember when you upload to youtube in HD it will say HD but if you don't record in HD it says HD but we don't see HD
For online backup it would take me 3h to backup 500 gbytes and 1h30 to have them back so it can be quick if you have a fast connection. My upload is 500mbit/s
Hi, 1st thing to say - Love your Videos i know that video was recorded while ago, but have you ever heard about backup software called GoodSync? I use it myself and i think it's really grate software. I just wanted your opinion, what you think about it. it's really cheep and dose handle a lot of problems that you mentioned in the video. One thing (personal opinion), i think online backups really get pricy when you start having a lot of data. I got at least 20TB + Thanks
Correct me if I'm wrong but there seems to be some misinformation here... Harddrives aren't a good permanent solution, they break down and experience bitrot. Also I've heard Tape drives have a shelf life of 30 years, not 1. although they don't last very long with constant reading and writing. Am I wrong here?
I've only known about System Backup the other day. Okay, so. if i backup my Windows am i backing my Programs files, System components, preferences, and other files too? So that i don't have to reinstall of of the files that i use in case of System Corruption. Most importantly when i Install my Windows i then install all the programs that i use it usually takes me really about 2 days for this careful work. But it would really help me if does Backup everything from which i could install it whenever i want. desirable on Cloud too i think it's more flexible:)
And of course an admin account to be able to reset the password. The administrator account on Windows 7 is disabled by default. Also doesn't work on domain accounts (which in your situation you don't need to worry about).
Actually reading and writing from tapes is very quick. Had a server go down, recovering from tape took only about 3 hours while from disk (NAS) it would take 3 days. Always read-write is faster with tapes. We use Ultrium LTO tapes and the backup speed is 400megabytes per second. Faster than any hard disk.
you can set up off-site back up over secure ftp straight to your bosses house like we have where I work. No hard drive swapping required. Awesome video though.
I have no clue what your environment is like so I'm just taking a stab in the dark here, but there are two potentially bad problems that could occur with the setup that you just mentioned: 1) Location: I assume that your boss physically works at the same building that data is being backed up from. This tells me that unless he commutes 10+ hours to and from work every day, he isn't that far separated geographically from that office. If there's ever a natural disaster, and if it is bad enough, it could have the potential take out both locations, negating any backups. 2) Security: The more copies of sensitive info that you possess, the higher your chances are of that senstive info falling into the wrong hands. Unless your boss has his home backup stored inside a fire&water proof safe, bolted to support beams of the house, behind an bullet proof door with 3 X09 locks, there's a chance that if he's ever robbed the burglars could get those drives and sell off important info like payroll data off of those drives. The chances of this ever occurring are actually much higher then you might believe, doubly so since you, and now the entire internet, are aware of where these backups are stored.
1) My boss is actually significanly geographically seperated from the office, both laterally and in elevation. Definitly enough to have a good chance to make a difference in a natural disaster. No one lives at the office building and it has 24 hour surveillance and security. 2) The data is encrypted in transit as well as in storage. Yes my boss has a very secure fire proof water proof set up in a hidden room which for obvious reasons I wont describe any further. 3) how does everyone know where it is? You dont know my real identity or who I work for.
Hi Eli, Great job ! Great Insights from your video. I have 5 computers at home running all on Windows. I need to clone data from all of the HDDs onto one machine without jumbling up data of different systems. The systems are 3 Laptops and 2 Standalone PC(Pentium 4 and Core i5). Suggest me a way to accomplish this Please.
My 2009 A+ book says the opposite of you. It defines half-life (the life expectancy or shelf life) of a storage media is the time it takes for the strength of the medium to weaken by half. Magnetic media, including traditional hard drives and floppy disk, have a half-life of five to seven years, but writeable optical media such as CD-Rs have a half-life of 30 years. You called hard drives a permanent backup device.
Count that as 2. Company I worked for did off site. Doesn't have to be taken home just as long as it's in another building from the servers. Which these were, done every day. Same in new company, except they just have the tapes in another fire zone. Suggesting no one does it is crazy, as a lot of companies DO use offsite backup.
Hi Eli Great vids ! I use them to help youth learn about computer field. They are addicted to watching! Have you had a chance to play with LTO backup system.? Yes tapes normally are horrible satan spawns but this is very different from that world of backups...I catually became a believer! Media has very long life expectancy and does not "expire" like other types in fact the media is guaranteed for life (HP) I actually restored LTO tapes from almost 10 years ago for a client and it was smoooth.
offsite backups work better over the internet. instead of just having an external drive offsite it's better have it connected to a system that is also offsite. then you don't have to deal doing things manually. it's not exactly an online backup, because you don't have to involve a third party.
why are you dismissing tape for backups? ever heard of LTO Ultrium? that stuff is made for long term backups and what i've read from it it works pretty well. you're acting like you know more than you actually do.
hello i have windows 10 and my pc's hardware is splitted in two pieces as if it is two different computers in one. i want to upgrade my pc from 32 bit to 64 bit (it is capable of that i searched it) how can i do back up? will i lose everything if i dont? i mean even the programs or only the file videos photos etc?
SSD's are not recommended for long term backups because the stored data degrades over time. The bits and bytes may start to die if you don't use the SSD frequently enough. So in six months, for example, the data may become corrupted when you try to read it back. SSD's aren't made for long term storage, they're made for speed. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, but for now traditional platter drives do better long term than SSD or USB flash.
Bar the part where he breaks every best backup practise in the book by storing the backup HDD's in the same PC being backed up. So when the PC is burning, the backups go with it. Do that for a company you're hired to do backups for, expect to be sued for the lose of the data. Other than that, the other info is useful.
I've just bought a laptop running windows 8 the bloke told me that they don't give you a copy of the os on a disk any more, you have to back this up yourself now, or pay him £40 to do it (ha). He called it a media backup, but it's not the media I want to back up it's the os, so if I was to accidentally wipe my hardrive I don't have to go out and buy windows 8 all over again. How do I do this? All these videos I watch about back ups still talk about having to use a disk as well as the back up. He said I just create a backup on a memory stick and I could re-install the os if the hardrive gets completely wiped.
are you trying to create a mirror of the current state or factory defaults? You can create backups within windows or create restore points or a number of options since you are only worried about your single system
what about image backup..i think it is the best...after updatating everything...just takes 10 minutes ,runs from booted thumbdrive in DOS ..once a week..RECOMMEND NORTON GHOST...*.GHO
"I've seen this happen" at a company to a "Friend of mine". Anecdotal at best. Check Google. Tape is very reliable and has better longevity than a hard drive. External hard drive is considered permanent? Laughable. Good stuff other than a few issues here and there.
I just googled about tapes. And sony sells 1.5TB native storage tape for which they offer 30 years warranty for £17. If you deal with terabytes of data you can spend few hundreds on data backup each month
WARNING to those with Western Digital external hard drives!! I just learned the hard ways. On the WD My Book Elite external hard drive I used for my backups, the little micro USB port on it snapped right off the circuit board. I thought, no prob. I cracked open the enclosure, (yes it was already out of warranty) removed the bare hard drive, connected the bare drive to my computer directly via SATA and power cable. And guess what? I could NOT see any data on the drive. OS said the drive was unallocated, as if it had no partition. The Western Digital SATA to USB controller board used on their external hard drives is designed so you can't use the bare hard drive in any other enclosure, or in any computer. I could not find replacement parts or any other solution. Disaster! BEWARE if you use Western Digital external hard drives, you are screwed if the USB port or the enclosure breaks. Google it, this same problem has happen to countless others. I had to have the USB port soldered back on, and then had to use data recovery software to get my data back off that drive.
Your issue wasn't your drive, it was not having a good backup strategy. Having only one backup copy has never been acceptable. 3 backup copies of data, using two different methods, is the recommended standard practice. 2 local copies, and one in the cloud is what home users should have . All of which are fully automated. Also, periodic restoration testing of all methods needs to be done. For critical data, I have 4 copies at home and 2 remote, that's right, 6 copies. All automated nightly. Even that, isn't perfect or risk free. Non critical data such as OS images, I have 2 local copies.
Tape backups are bad? HELLOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! That is one of the most idiotic things I have ever heard. And tapes only lasting a year? Or being "fragile"? BS! This dude has no idea what he is talking about. Tape backup is and has been the only sure fire long term archival strategy for the last 40 years. Tapes made in the late 80's still have perfect data retention 25 years later. Hard drives from the same era were probably last readable in the mid 90's, and even then many would have needed intensive data recovery. As for being fragile, if you drop a tape or kick it across the room, chances are it will still read no problem as long as the spools are not damaged. Try that with a hard drive and see what happens. In addition, tapes have always been on par with hard drives in terms of write speed. LTO-5, which was released in 2010 had a write speed of 140MB/s. For many situations, hard drive backup does make more sense than tape, but that is no reason to bash tape with some straw man argument.
DO you have any Idea how much tape costs, the storage density of the tape and or the equipment needed to recover data. Restoring files takes longer, even today tape drives are far too prone to fail, cloud backup solutions are becoming faster, more reliable and affordable and allow for a more reliable ability for business continuity. Since data is stored sequentially if a small amount of it is damaged along the track, you might not be able to recover the data. Furthermore tape IS fragile, software problem can also damage the data on the backup and tape backups are a manual and intensive process, thus more prone to human error. Tape Takes Time, TIME IS MONEY
hugehandelfan To true. I was carrying a stack of tapes to the server room from the safe a few years back. Dropped the top one now and then and was never an issue (they were to tight to provide me a box or bag to carry them in).
He is talking about tapes being used everyday lasting 1 year, which is true. The "30" year warranty is for archive, i.e. backing up once onto tape and storing it. Tapes have their place I suppose, but if you have 100TB of data to back up I don't envy anyone who is using tapes.
Jamie D You are totally wrong: "The rectal particle LTO Ultrium 2 and Advanced Metal Powder-based SDLT media carry durability ratings of 1,000,000 head passes with an archival life expectancy of more than 30 years." from: www.symantec.com/connect/forums/how-many-times-i-can-reuse-tape-media By the way, now we have LTO-6 going....
If you don't have any backups then you have no one to blame but yourself when you lose data. It isn't a question of if, it is a question of when. You deserve what you get. A big fat headache and data recovery bill.
Hello,.My mom got herself lockout of her computer(well not totally lockout) she does not remember the password to open up computer as far as being admin. She finally switch from dail-up to broadband but the pc will not connect to internet,I tried to fix but cant do anything need to be admin. What can I do to fix this? can I get the password some how? And of course she dont have any drivers so I cant just wipe and reload
@elithecomputerguy Hello Eli, Im a advanced/gamer home user. I love your videos and learn TONS of NEW things. For some time my window 7 (Home Premium) back up stopped working month or 2 ago. The error code is 0x81000037 - "Shadow files cannot be read." It hasn't been working sense (as you said), and was looking for a temporary/other backup solution and "bare metal" would probably work best for me. I will have many questions to come! Bare metal recovery
Recently helped a new client that had a six disk raid 5 array that went bad (was brought in after the failure). They had no backup and paid 15k to restore the data. Scary stuff.
Hard drives are NOT for archiving. I've put 200 HDs in storage for 10 years. 30% of them died. Sticky heads, defective lubrication, problems with capacitors. Only relying on internal HDs is data suicide. A virus will immediately spread on the backup. Tape is still the best way to go. I'm not talking about mini QIC-40 of the 80s, I'm talking about LTO, SDLT and StorageTek. That means up to 5 TB on one small cartridge and with a changer, capacity is unlimited. And those tapes should last 30 years!
I just want to personally thank Eli the computer guy for taking the time to make this video along with all the other videos 🙏🏽You have helped me out so much with learning IT and for that I can not express enough appreciation and gratitude!
I at the same time want rebuke all the people who are responding to Eli in a very hostile and condemnatory way. It is fine to disagree and share your opinion but make sure you do it in a respectful way. Furthermore, I honestly don't understand why those of you making these very hostile, negative comments would even waste your time watching a video like this if you know so much about the subject already?? Maybe instead of tearing others attempts down to educate those of us that are less knowledgeable, you could make your own video in response to this one sharing your opinions and experience on the topic. But I will say again, if you don't share your opinions in a respectful way nobody including myself will be interested in what you have to say. You will be like a clanging gong or symbol.
True Image filled my 2tb spare internal hard drive with incremental backups. I then realised that I needed to learn about making backups. Thanks, Eli, for all the superb info.
Your into to this piece is frightening and priceless!
Thank you; I'm preparing a test, and all you info is great. By the way, I use a "do-not-see-my-info", or you said "drive-to-drive" system, from last century to today, more than 30 years! "be hidden" from any system! all my personal files were into an external drive (dual with a cloud drive today). My information is secure, readable in Linux-Apple-Windows. Any damage, virus, I just format the computer and ready to go!! I have all my information available from 1984 to today..jaja.. with very low cost: psychological, economic, peace of mind!
The answer to a solid backup solution is a combination of all of the above... At our clients sites we run nightly local backups to backup cartridges which are stored off site. We run nightly snapshots to a NAS (servers are all VM's) and we run a cloud based 15 minute differential backup with unlimited version control on just the file servers. (cloud backups are great for restoring individual files or folders not an entire systems... Although some cloud solutions will mail out a hard drive with your data on it, at a CO$T of course). We also run test restores every 3 months (Which is just as important as the backups, having a backup is no use if it doesn't actually restore correctly).
+Root User Great point. I've been onsite a few times where no one tested backup scenario. Then when you need it, realize it doesnt work :) Oops!
I've had home computers for 30 years and I've always been bad at backups. I've never had a complete disk failure, but backups come in handy when I upgrade to a new PC. I've used a number of different software solutions and when I tested for recovery on one in particular, not MS, the company had upgraded their software and couldn't help me with my older version. So now in retirement, since I've been so lucky, I've decided that I need to do backups on both mine and my wife's computers. Your video was a big help to me, now I just need to determine the solution I want to use. The off-site solution sounds good, but it does require responsibility on our part. I'm thinking that I'll use a bank safety deposit box and exchange the disks once a month. Anyway, we'll figure it out and thanks so much for posting this video.
So how has the monthly safety deposit box exchange been working out? VERY few people have the discipline to make that work. The best solution for home users is having a local hard drive based backup AND a cloud based offsite backup. Both which are fully automated. An automated strategy is the essential to consistent backups, rather at home or in a business, followed by periodic restoration testing. If restoration testing can be automated as well, then one has a good solution.
FYI, I've had home computers longer than I care to admit and have seen several disk failures, and while I wasn't always as consistent at backups as I am now, I've never lost significant data. Not having consistent backups in the past for me had lot to do with the unavailability of reasonably priced fully automated tools. These days there really is no excuse.
This Guy has a wealth of knowledge and is not selfish with the information and he disseminate the info to people who need it. However, on another note, I dont share is view that tape drive as a solution is not needed anymore or it is obsolete and one must not consider it. Tape technology is constantly improving and is still a concrete solution for lots of companies. NAS,SAN and cloud-based solutions are good options for backup but equally Tape Solutions are viable and still has its fair share of advantages. One needs to access there own requirements and researching is also key.
+Kemar Lawes Couldnt agree more. For 99% of home users and even most small business' tapes are not appropriate at all but go work anywhere in an enterprise level system and tapes are still everywhere and aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
This guy is great... speaks in non-geek language, and is very thorough. Video is a tad long though.
Jay Manne thank goodness for 1.5x to 2x speed!
Thanks thats very valuable information, I have come accross this problem in the past now that I think back, I hadnt used my USB drive for many months it was dead when I tryed to use it again months later. Cheers.
Eli I think your videos are so informative.
Thank's for your contributions to the IT sector.
Hi Eli , Since I teach Linux , so I use you video so much for getting idea , Thank you very much for you video.
Sophia
I've been harping on external drive back ups, online back ups, and periodic back up recovery (i.e., pretend that just you lost your entire building - what you gonna do now?) to anyone I know who maintains data; especially financial data. Recently lost software RAID on an Win2008R2 server - did the backups - so recovered. Back that puppy up!
You can't boot off of the Backup itself... You could restore the backup to a different system though...
Check out EASUS Backup... That should allow you to "clone" the drive which would make it bootable
Absolutely agree! I have seen many more coasters than dead HDs.
Nuts. Eli's FREE info is good but giving people bad practice ideas is bad. Yes, I have eternal HDDs that I backup to however, I'm well aware it's NOT a good idea. For home use, maybe OK but for companies as he said "clients" it's shocking. Backups for a company should ALWAYS be either off-site or in a different fire zone but in a safe. NOT on another HDD in the same PC that is also burning while the building is burning down. Nuts.
Very well constructed video as always, very concise thank you for sharing.
I love your videos, a tips to you Eli is to have a glass of water around that you can drink some from. It might sound stupid at first but if you take a sip of water now and then it wont disturb the people watching and it will give you a better pause to sum up what you want to say without getting a dry mouth ^^
Man I stopped the video just to tell this is the 4th video I watched today from your awesome channel...
My English is so fuckin' bad, but I learn alot from you, you are HITing the point direct!
Preferably making tutorials by recording when you working on your system to be more specification / spesiftcated / specific WHATEVER :(
Thanks Eli
Eli is the BESTTTT!!!! Please keep making videos
2 big companies I worked at used tapes. I dropped them several times and they were always fine. Companies still use tapes as well as separated HDD areas. Tapes can be taken off site and stored in fire proof safes.
you are my teacher mr.Eli .. thank you
Hi Eli,
thank you for the good job and all the time you have spent to teach us a lot of design on IT. I have seen your videos on different subject (AD, network...) so congratulations. All subjects can be discussed, but the most important is to share our knowledge ;-)
The add-ons for something like SQL or Exchange Server relates to the fact that one wishes to create a "hot" backup, that is whilst the database is live and being used. This requires an entirely different kind of technique than just doing a flat file backup.
Thus it is not the "rip-off" the narrator implies.
Very great explain, love it
Question, for the RSync backup do you need to have the original file in order to restore those bit/bite backup ?
if yes, so if we lose the original file then we screwed ?
Thx
If your main objective is data preservation, nothing beats an LTO4 tape drive or some kind of remote point-in-time recovery system.
I have to tell you that you are wrong, BackupExec uses the format MTF (Microsoft Tape Format) so anything that can read that format can be used in a pinch to restore the data.
@RaphaClassic Well I can't argue against that. If you have trouble protecting your CDs and DVDs put them in a case, and keep them in a safe. My point is if you put a DVD in a safe next to a hard drive, the data on the DVD will last 6 times as long! That's a huge difference.
good video thx, problem with file backup is that if you backup a corrupted file on the source drive it copies it on the destination and then... no good copy of the file exists
Your A+ book is rather optimistic with generous extrapolation of CD-R life. I have several audio CDs from the 80s 90s and 00s which have suffered disk rot including a few that weren't taken out of the sealed celophane packaging. I've lost track of the number of optical data disks that have failed.
Holy Jesus. Just awesome. So usefull. :) Congrats. You should talk about RAIDs and that things.
You are the best, Love all the Videos
im new in this >>> he is helping me a lot
thank you so much
Nice lesson on back up systems.
I don't really like online back up, too much though.
But I know, it can be really handy.
Symantec bought out Veritas, and Veritas (formerly Seagate Software) created the backup software for Windows versions before Win7.
The Microsoft Backup was a cut down version and if you were too cheap to buy proper backup software you were most certainly too cheap to buy proper media to back it up to.
Tape backups screwed me many times over at a small business. Subsequently, imaging to backup drives, cloning to a full instant replacement drive, all saved me multiple times. The tapes either physically failed, or the backup program failed to recognize and restore, or the backup was flawed in some other manner that was not discernable until the need for restoration happened. Witnessed a friend's business get screwed by a backup service that actually had their tape service fail to restore a crashed network. Economics might suggest tapes at large enterprise installations can be viable, but they will never catch up now, to HDD rates, because they actually depend on pulling hundreds of feet of magnetic tape through, to locate one lousy file. Had the highest quality tapes just plain get damaged exactly the same way old audio cassettes did, and the far more convenient, reliable HDD (have used ones for ten years, that outlived their connectivity, i.e. pre-SATA), easy to verify and clone for additional security. One compact tape, whoaa boy, 4 whole GB!? I bought a 128GB USB 3 flash stick for $65. Who are these posters trying to kid?
LTO-8 tape stores 12 TB on a single cartridge. Data immediately gets checked while it is written and writing speed is up to 900 MB/sec. Price per GB is a fraction of any HD solution. Archival life is around 30 years. So who is kidding here?
Actually, using Data Protection Manager - DPM (from System Center 2012) is very usefull for backup strategy because we don't need to use some additional plugin to backup sql server, exchange, sharepoint... So what do you think about this Microsoft product?
Hello Eli,
in one project the following scheme was deployed:
The server has 4 logical drives, one internal with RAID 1, three in the enterprise SAN. One of the SAN LUN drives is configured in RAID 10 (MS SQL 2008), the other two in RAID 5 (logs etc). In addition, the database is on a daily basis is backed up and the backup files are written to the tape.
Isn't the scheme too excessive? Don't you think the RAID configurations for the disk is enough?
Thanks!
Hi, thanks a lot for the information, it really helped me understand a lot and find a solution for my pc. Which backup software do you recommend these days? Thanks a lot, Elli from Greece.
This is a pretty old video. Is there an update that takes into consideration running a server as a virtual machine? Seems to me, it opens up some much more reliable and inexpensive options.
Very useful class. Thank you.
@entehrend ... I trust hard drives far more then optical disks... Whatever the half life of an optical disk is, I have seen far too many of them turn into coasters by just sitting in someones desk...
Thanks for the information. I need further info on what to do if you haven't backed up things correctly...I have a Seagate 2TB and it's full. However, when I look at what's on it, I can't make heads or tails of it. I only want to backup email and photos but there are crazy files on it that I don't know if I need or not. Do you have a video helping with this? Thanks!!
Hey Eli
what do you think about using the backup system that follows Server 2012 R2. if think about the schedule backup and is it good to recover from ?
and thank you very much for really good tutorial movies!!!!
If you are backing up to an internal backup harddrive then if the computer fries your backup HD fries as well - way to go genius.
With regard to DVDs, if it is not a Rewritable DVD then if you leave it with data face up in sunlight for half a day your data will be gone. DVD RW and RAM if stored properly will last for a lot longer than 5 years.
The main limitation of course is volume. 4.2 GB of data on a disk just isn't really a lot nowadays.
A USB 3.0 external HD cures the volume problem.
in work we have tape backups running at the office and 2 offsite locations so if everything goes bang we can still keep running. costs us a fortune but is absolutely neccesary
shouldn't good backup software pop a big fat warning message on the desktop when it fails a task?
Google KonBoot. There is the old free version still available but also the paid for version (well worth it). You can then boot from the CD/DVD and at the login screen just press enter as the password (password is blank) and it will log you in. It essentially bypasses the authentication but doesn't affect any files. Once into the admin account, you can reset the password. I use it a lot for such situations. You need to know the name of an activate account to be able to login to though.
Thank you. This is a great help.
This is great and everything but one thing, it's not tech things or anything like that, it not even your fault, it is the viewers fault, remember this is the internet, the internet likes things to be short and sweet, try to break you videos down a bit, try to have 20 min at max, and don't upload them all at once, space them out a bit, it should help with your viewer count and sub amount, also remember when you upload to youtube in HD it will say HD but if you don't record in HD it says HD but we don't see HD
For online backup it would take me 3h to backup 500 gbytes and 1h30 to have them back so it can be quick if you have a fast connection. My upload is 500mbit/s
Hi,
1st thing to say - Love your Videos
i know that video was recorded while ago, but have you ever heard about backup software called GoodSync?
I use it myself and i think it's really grate software.
I just wanted your opinion, what you think about it.
it's really cheep and dose handle a lot of problems that you mentioned in the video.
One thing (personal opinion), i think online backups really get pricy when you start having a lot of data. I got at least 20TB +
Thanks
we can take the same hd which is working and exchange the control card of each other..
Correct me if I'm wrong but there seems to be some misinformation here... Harddrives aren't a good permanent solution, they break down and experience bitrot.
Also I've heard Tape drives have a shelf life of 30 years, not 1. although they don't last very long with constant reading and writing.
Am I wrong here?
wonderful lecture. ..
thanx ....
I've only known about System Backup the other day.
Okay, so. if i backup my Windows am i backing my Programs files, System components, preferences, and other files too?
So that i don't have to reinstall of of the files that i use in case of System Corruption.
Most importantly when i Install my Windows i then install all the programs that i use it usually takes me really about 2 days for this careful work. But it would really help me if does Backup everything from which i could install it whenever i want.
desirable on Cloud too i think it's more flexible:)
+Eli
could you make a step by step guide on building a computer image to image 400 computers.
And of course an admin account to be able to reset the password. The administrator account on Windows 7 is disabled by default. Also doesn't work on domain accounts (which in your situation you don't need to worry about).
Hello, would you recommend backing up to a solid state hard (USB) better than a hard drive that has moving parts, (could wear out etc).
Actually reading and writing from tapes is very quick. Had a server go down, recovering from tape took only about 3 hours while from disk (NAS) it would take 3 days. Always read-write is faster with tapes. We use Ultrium LTO tapes and the backup speed is 400megabytes per second. Faster than any hard disk.
This video is 9 years old dude...
you can set up off-site back up over secure ftp straight to your bosses house like we have where I work. No hard drive swapping required. Awesome video though.
I have no clue what your environment is like so I'm just taking a stab in the dark here, but there are two potentially bad problems that could occur with the setup that you just mentioned:
1) Location: I assume that your boss physically works at the same building that data is being backed up from. This tells me that unless he commutes 10+ hours to and from work every day, he isn't that far separated geographically from that office. If there's ever a natural disaster, and if it is bad enough, it could have the potential take out both locations, negating any backups.
2) Security: The more copies of sensitive info that you possess, the higher your chances are of that senstive info falling into the wrong hands. Unless your boss has his home backup stored inside a fire&water proof safe, bolted to support beams of the house, behind an bullet proof door with 3 X09 locks, there's a chance that if he's ever robbed the burglars could get those drives and sell off important info like payroll data off of those drives. The chances of this ever occurring are actually much higher then you might believe, doubly so since you, and now the entire internet, are aware of where these backups are stored.
1) My boss is actually significanly geographically seperated from the office, both laterally and in elevation. Definitly enough to have a good chance to make a difference in a natural disaster. No one lives at the office building and it has 24 hour surveillance and security.
2) The data is encrypted in transit as well as in storage. Yes my boss has a very secure fire proof water proof set up in a hidden room which for obvious reasons I wont describe any further.
3) how does everyone know where it is? You dont know my real identity or who I work for.
Hope my response didn't come of as negative. Just responding to your questions and assumptions. I welcome the comments.
Hi Eli, Great job ! Great Insights from your video.
I have 5 computers at home running all on Windows. I need to clone data from all of the HDDs onto one machine without jumbling up data of different systems. The systems are 3 Laptops and 2 Standalone PC(Pentium 4 and Core i5). Suggest me a way to accomplish this Please.
is this info still good for 2015
Hey Elli would it be possible for you to remake the video on Back up once again
What program is your company uses to back up? Was it Crono....what's the spell. Thanks
My 2009 A+ book says the opposite of you. It defines half-life (the life expectancy or shelf life) of a storage media is the time it takes for the strength of the medium to weaken by half. Magnetic media, including traditional hard drives and floppy disk, have a half-life of five to seven years, but writeable optical media such as CD-Rs have a half-life of 30 years.
You called hard drives a permanent backup device.
Count that as 2. Company I worked for did off site. Doesn't have to be taken home just as long as it's in another building from the servers. Which these were, done every day. Same in new company, except they just have the tapes in another fire zone. Suggesting no one does it is crazy, as a lot of companies DO use offsite backup.
Do the inicial online backup proccess still take like one month?? I mean since the video there have been passed 5 1/2 years.
Hi Eli Great vids ! I use them to help youth learn about computer field. They are addicted to watching!
Have you had a chance to play with LTO backup system.? Yes tapes normally are horrible satan spawns but this is very different from that world of backups...I catually became a believer! Media has very long life expectancy and does not "expire" like other types in fact the media is guaranteed for life (HP) I actually restored LTO tapes from almost 10 years ago for a client and it was smoooth.
offsite backups work better over the internet. instead of just having an external drive offsite it's better have it connected to a system that is also offsite. then you don't have to deal doing things manually. it's not exactly an online backup, because you don't have to involve a third party.
Hi Eli so the legacy tapes cannot be encrypted any proposed solutions ?
why are you dismissing tape for backups? ever heard of LTO Ultrium? that stuff is made for long term backups and what i've read from it it works pretty well. you're acting like you know more than you actually do.
"what i've read from it it works pretty well"
Have fun with that...
LTO is made for 15-30 years of storage. A lot of sources claim that you shouldn't rely on HDDs longer than 5 years.
... come back and be snarky when you realize your comment is amusing...
hello i have windows 10 and my pc's hardware is splitted in two pieces
as if it is two different computers in one. i want to upgrade my pc from
32 bit to 64 bit (it is capable of that i searched it) how can i do
back up? will i lose everything if i dont? i mean even the programs or
only the file videos photos etc?
All laptops are Wifi enabled. I have a firewall, modem and a router if they can be used. Is there any case it could be Wireless-ly done ??.
SSD's are not recommended for long term backups because the stored data degrades over time. The bits and bytes may start to die if you don't use the SSD frequently enough. So in six months, for example, the data may become corrupted when you try to read it back. SSD's aren't made for long term storage, they're made for speed. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, but for now traditional platter drives do better long term than SSD or USB flash.
Bar the part where he breaks every best backup practise in the book by storing the backup HDD's in the same PC being backed up. So when the PC is burning, the backups go with it. Do that for a company you're hired to do backups for, expect to be sued for the lose of the data. Other than that, the other info is useful.
good stuff i liked it ty
I've just bought a laptop running windows 8 the bloke told me that they don't give you a copy of the os on a disk any more, you have to back this up yourself now, or pay him £40 to do it (ha). He called it a media backup, but it's not the media I want to back up it's the os, so if I was to accidentally wipe my hardrive I don't have to go out and buy windows 8 all over again. How do I do this? All these videos I watch about back ups still talk about having to use a disk as well as the back up. He said I just create a backup on a memory stick and I could re-install the os if the hardrive gets completely wiped.
are you trying to create a mirror of the current state or factory defaults? You can create backups within windows or create restore points or a number of options since you are only worried about your single system
what about image backup..i think it is the best...after updatating everything...just takes 10 minutes ,runs from booted thumbdrive in DOS ..once a week..RECOMMEND NORTON GHOST...*.GHO
I'm not sure if System Image Backup was available at the time Eli posted this video...though I'm not sure of my assumption.
mottbone It's been available for ever. This is what the Unix command dd does which has literally been around for decades.
How are all these backups differ from dedup backup ?
Thank you for the lesson
"I've seen this happen" at a company to a "Friend of mine". Anecdotal at best. Check Google. Tape is very reliable and has better longevity than a hard drive.
External hard drive is considered permanent? Laughable. Good stuff other than a few issues here and there.
Is tape still reliable, asking for a friend of mine
do you have any info on DPM and where can i get some material about it.....we got it a month ago and i need to learn how to use that
I just googled about tapes. And sony sells 1.5TB native storage tape for which they offer 30 years warranty for £17. If you deal with terabytes of data you can spend few hundreds on data backup each month
Grazie Mille Fratello...:)
cobian backup is free and it is great.
try it if u can
Wow, man, you help so much!
First i was like, fuck this video is long, but i actually learned a lot. and it was really helpful if i want to keep my files protected. thank you
When you do a full backup can you boot another pc off the backup on the ehdd
Well can you tell me how to copy windows to a blank hard drive?
I wish I could back up my brain, so that if my body dies or my brain cells die, I could restore it on another medium.
I can recommend JesusChrist.exe
Haven't you seen Altered Carbon or Black Mirror?
The whole new enterprise of resurection
WARNING to those with Western Digital external hard drives!! I just learned the hard ways. On the WD My Book Elite external hard drive I used for my backups, the little micro USB port on it snapped right off the circuit board. I thought, no prob. I cracked open the enclosure, (yes it was already out of warranty) removed the bare hard drive, connected the bare drive to my computer directly via SATA and power cable. And guess what? I could NOT see any data on the drive. OS said the drive was unallocated, as if it had no partition. The Western Digital SATA to USB controller board used on their external hard drives is designed so you can't use the bare hard drive in any other enclosure, or in any computer. I could not find replacement parts or any other solution. Disaster! BEWARE if you use Western Digital external hard drives, you are screwed if the USB port or the enclosure breaks. Google it, this same problem has happen to countless others. I had to have the USB port soldered back on, and then had to use data recovery software to get my data back off that drive.
Your issue wasn't your drive, it was not having a good backup strategy. Having only one backup copy has never been acceptable. 3 backup copies of data, using two different methods, is the recommended standard practice. 2 local copies, and one in the cloud is what home users should have . All of which are fully automated. Also, periodic restoration testing of all methods needs to be done. For critical data, I have 4 copies at home and 2 remote, that's right, 6 copies. All automated nightly. Even that, isn't perfect or risk free. Non critical data such as OS images, I have 2 local copies.
Tape backups are bad? HELLOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! That is one of the most idiotic things I have ever heard. And tapes only lasting a year? Or being "fragile"? BS! This dude has no idea what he is talking about. Tape backup is and has been the only sure fire long term archival strategy for the last 40 years. Tapes made in the late 80's still have perfect data retention 25 years later. Hard drives from the same era were probably last readable in the mid 90's, and even then many would have needed intensive data recovery.
As for being fragile, if you drop a tape or kick it across the room, chances are it will still read no problem as long as the spools are not damaged. Try that with a hard drive and see what happens.
In addition, tapes have always been on par with hard drives in terms of write speed. LTO-5, which was released in 2010 had a write speed of 140MB/s.
For many situations, hard drive backup does make more sense than tape, but that is no reason to bash tape with some straw man argument.
DO you have any Idea how much tape costs, the storage density of the tape and or the equipment needed to recover data.
Restoring files takes longer, even today tape drives are far too prone to fail, cloud backup solutions are becoming faster, more reliable and affordable and allow for a more reliable ability for business continuity.
Since data is stored sequentially if a small amount of it is damaged along the track, you might not be able to recover the data.
Furthermore tape IS fragile, software problem can also damage the data on the backup and tape backups are a manual and intensive process, thus more prone to human error.
Tape Takes Time, TIME IS MONEY
he might be talking about walkman cassette tapes lol lol
hugehandelfan To true. I was carrying a stack of tapes to the server room from the safe a few years back. Dropped the top one now and then and was never an issue (they were to tight to provide me a box or bag to carry them in).
He is talking about tapes being used everyday lasting 1 year, which is true.
The "30" year warranty is for archive, i.e. backing up once onto tape and storing it.
Tapes have their place I suppose, but if you have 100TB of data to back up I don't envy anyone who is using tapes.
Jamie D You are totally wrong: "The rectal particle LTO Ultrium 2 and Advanced Metal Powder-based SDLT media carry durability ratings of 1,000,000 head passes with an archival life expectancy of more than 30 years." from: www.symantec.com/connect/forums/how-many-times-i-can-reuse-tape-media
By the way, now we have LTO-6 going....
But what is an incremental backups
If you don't have any backups then you have no one to blame but yourself when you lose data. It isn't a question of if, it is a question of when. You deserve what you get. A big fat headache and data recovery bill.
Hello,.My mom got herself lockout of her computer(well not totally lockout) she does not remember the password to open up computer as far as being admin. She finally switch from dail-up to broadband but the pc will not connect to internet,I tried to fix but cant do anything need to be admin. What can I do to fix this? can I get the password some how? And of course she dont have any drivers so I cant just wipe and reload
@elithecomputerguy
Hello Eli, Im a advanced/gamer home user. I love your videos and learn TONS of NEW things. For some time my window 7 (Home Premium) back up stopped working month or 2 ago. The error code is 0x81000037 - "Shadow files cannot be read." It hasn't been working sense (as you said), and was looking for a temporary/other backup solution and "bare metal" would probably work best for me. I will have many questions to come!
Bare metal recovery
Recently helped a new client that had a six disk raid 5 array that went bad (was brought in after the failure). They had no backup and paid 15k to restore the data. Scary stuff.
Hard drives are NOT for archiving. I've put 200 HDs in storage for 10 years. 30% of them died. Sticky heads, defective lubrication, problems with capacitors. Only relying on internal HDs is data suicide. A virus will immediately spread on the backup. Tape is still the best way to go. I'm not talking about mini QIC-40 of the 80s, I'm talking about LTO, SDLT and StorageTek. That means up to 5 TB on one small cartridge and with a changer, capacity is unlimited. And those tapes should last 30 years!
I hate the time problems and solutions takes to read listening to suggestions just to figure what i need, backup windows 8 HP throw back 2003