The importance of data backup...

18 Mar 2012 - Nic Ho Chee

I’ve been pretty aggressive about backing up data, labelling things and having off-site backup etc. Unfortunately it looks like I lost a load of work I did on a flash 3d renderer that I wrote in 2007. The harddrive went down and it looks like somehow I didn’t back up any of it, possibly down to some brain glitch as I was working on the flash script. It looks like everything I did around the same time, including a mix cd that I did some scratching on has vapourised (although a mate of mine, Karch, might have a copy still, so I should be able to get it back off him…)

My current backup regimen:

1. Projects all live in one directory on my laptop.
2. Mirrored on my RAID 6 NAS a Synology 411J.
3. Backed up to a portable hard drive every Sunday which is kept in a secure place.
4. Backed up to a second portable hard drive which is kept physically off-site.
5. Certain data is backed up to DVD which is stored physically separate from my harddrives, just-in-case.

Unfortunately it looks like even that isn’t enough to make sure that I’ve kept all my data. Still fuming… but it looks like I’m going to have to get hold of an swf decompiler and see whether I can resurrect the code the hard way.