How Much Should You Back Up Your Data and What is the Likelihood of Drive Failure?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

30 minutes ago, avrona said:

I deserve to lose my data because I am aware of how extremely low chances of it happening are?

There are two of your fallacies. One, the chances you could lose your data are actually pretty good. Two, it doesn't matter how low the chances might be, it still can happen and when it does, it will result in you potentially being out thousands of dollars in recovery efforts, assuming the data can be fully or even parially recovered (it often can't be rcovered) and on how much your data is worth to you. This is something many very knowledgeable people have tried to explain to you but you bullheadedly cling to the fallacies that the chances of loss are low (it's not) and that a low chance of data loss justifies not backing up your data (which is just stupid).

 

So, yes, you deserve to lose your data due to your willful ignorance of the importance of backing up data.

[avrona]

22 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

There are two of your fallacies. One, the chances you could lose your data are actually pretty good. Two, it doesn't matter how low the chances might be, it still can happen and when it does, it will result in you potentially being out thousands of dollars in recovery efforts, assuming the data can be fully or even parially recovered (it often can't be rcovered) and on how much your data is worth to you. This is something many very knowledgeable people have tried to explain to you but you bullheadedly cling to the fallacies that the chances of loss are low (it's not) and that a low chance of data loss justifies not backing up your data (which is just stupid).

 

So, yes, you deserve to lose your data due to your willful ignorance of the importance of backing up data.

And where's any evidence that the chances are high, drive failure rates are overall extremely low. And between unintentional backups, and the average user replacing their drives anyway due to wanting to move up to some more modern data storage standard, everything just points to it being extremely low, so I don't see how just seeing that means all of I sudden "bullheadedly cling to the fallacies".

[Lady Fitzgerald]

1 minute ago, avrona said:

And where's any evidence that the chances are high, drive failure rates are overall extremely low. And between unintentional backups, and the average user replacing their drives anyway due to wanting to move up to some more modern data storage standard, everything just points to it being extremely low, so I don't see how just seeing that means all of I sudden "bullheadedly cling to the fallacies".

  When someone clings to concepts that have been rufuted multiple times by people who know far more than you ever will know, that is the very definition of bullheadedly clinging to fallacies. There is no point in responding to you anymore because you stubbornly refuse to pay attention.

 

[kirashi]

On 9/13/2019 at 10:49 AM, avrona said:

... I'm actually in the process of starting up a whole new business and I most likely won't even have a backup for anything related to that, simply because there isn't a need for it, and the money isn't there to fund all that storage either.

In Canada (and I believe the USA as well) you are required by law to keep copies of financial documents for 7 years, otherwise some men in suits show up and ask you to come nicely with them. Again, it's entirely your call whether you'd like to be able to produce copies of these documents should your house go up in flames and you get audited, or whether you prefer jail. If you have a business, you budget your income for business needs, such as data backup. The ball is in your court.

[avrona]

On 9/16/2019 at 10:21 PM, Lady Fitzgerald said:

  When someone clings to concepts that have been rufuted multiple times by people who know far more than you ever will know, that is the very definition of bullheadedly clinging to fallacies. There is no point in responding to you anymore because you stubbornly refuse to pay attention.

 

Have you considered that they maybe no? Have you maybe instead of fighting what I said every step of the way for no reason and clinging to your idea, have you considered that there could be some logic in my logic here?

On 9/17/2019 at 7:23 AM, kirashi said:

In Canada (and I believe the USA as well) you are required by law to keep copies of financial documents for 7 years, otherwise some men in suits show up and ask you to come nicely with them. Again, it's entirely your call whether you'd like to be able to produce copies of these documents should your house go up in flames and you get audited, or whether you prefer jail. If you have a business, you budget your income for business needs, such as data backup. The ball is in your court.

Thankfully I don't live in either of these countries, additionally here you don't need to do anything with your company, no tax, audits, etc, as long as you earn below a certain amount of profit each year. Besides the chances of your house burning down are rather small, and besides that just sounds like a really broken approach. Isn't it better to invest in ways to prevent a fire from destroying your entire house to protect everything in it, instead of just investing in a backup to protect just your data?

[tikker]

On 9/15/2019 at 11:51 PM, avrona said:

I deserve to lose my data because I am aware of how extremely low chances of it happening are?

No, you don't deserve that, but you are too focussed on just the probability of a drive failing. The thing with odds is, they give you a number that allows you to quantify the chance of it happening. Say a ficitious drive X has a failure rate 0.1% within 5 years. What that means, is that if you buy 1000 drives, there's reason to believe that 1 or those drives will fail within 5 years. It also means that there is still reason to believe that your drive can fail within 5 years.

 

The questions you have to ask yourself with backups is always: what are the repercussions if the drive fails and can I afford to lose this data forever or pay (tens of) thousands for data recovery. Especially for a business the answers are pretty much always downtime, loss of money and reputation, so you cannot afford it. Think about payment bills, customer data etc. Say you are working on a project for months, then your computer explodes and it's gone. You cannot just tell your customers you lost their product, because you couldn't take proper care of your data and you will take a big hit because you'll have to do it all again for free or/and suffer reputation damage.

 

Now, that may have been worded a little direct, but what I'm trying to say is that the odds do not and cannot tell you, is when the drive is going to fail. Even at a 0.001% failure rate, you could be that one unlucky person who buys the one drive that dies a week after purchase, just when you have put all your valuable data on it. Assuming it's not replaced beforehand, it will fail on you one day and you do not know when that day is. It can be tomorrow, or in 3 years, but each day it's a tiny bit more likely to fail on you.

1 hour ago, avrona said:

Isn't it better to invest in ways to prevent a fire from destroying your entire house to protect everything in it, instead of just investing in a backup to protect just your data?

There's only so much you can do, I could show up to your house tomorrow with a flame thrower and have myself a nice little BBQ. As said before, a big point around insurances is that most of them are probably never going to happen to the majority of people, but should they happen, you'll be glad you have it.

 

To address your original question how often to back up: as much as you cannot afford to lose something. If you get crucial data every day that you cannot lose, you back up your data every day. If what's on the drive hardly changes or isn't worth protecting (e.g an OS, scratch drive), back it up however you like or not at all.

[UrbanFreestyle]

I'm a backerupper.

I have Data Raid, backs up to 2ndary internal Raid, backs up to NAS and then finally to external drive.

I keep multiple versions.

[RayLeech]

On 9/18/2019 at 5:19 AM, avrona said:

Have you maybe instead of fighting what I said every step of the way for no reason and clinging to your idea, have you considered that there could be some logic in my logic here?

I believe its you that 'doth protest too much', avrona. Instead of arguing an unrelated point, maybe you should be taking the responses of people who understand backups and trying to understand how they DO apply to your situation, instead of crafting arguments how they DON'T apply,

Guessing you are not classically trained, consider the dictionary definition of Backup: "a person, plan, device, etc., kept in reserve to serve as a substitute, if needed". Notice that the words "percentages and likelihoods" are irrelevant to the definition. If the likelihood is over zero (no matter how low), at some point it may be needed -- but frequency of a single reason is not part of the equation. So no, there is actually no "logic in your logic".
 

Backups are simply about mitigating risk, and risk is not composed of a single factor (frequency of disk failures). The higher your risk aversion, the more 'things' you'll do to avoid failures.

 

A point you were "unintentionally" correct on was your fire comment. There are often multiple ways you COULD mitigate risk. So yes, you could do more to prevent fires rather than deal with the effect of a fire. Of course, since you resist spending $57 to cover a multitude of risks, I highly doubt you have any intentions to install an electronics-friendly, vapor barrier fire suppression system to cover the single risk of fire.

I have a laptop in the living room I've never used it for anything except surfing while watching TV.  I don't personally need that laptop, hence could care less if it burst into flames on any given day. I'd simply chuck it onto the electronics recycling pile and either surf on my phone, old laptop, or just stop surfing while watching TV. My need of that laptop and the risk of losing it are both essentially zero, so I've never backed it up. I do have more than $57 in available capital, so if I WANT to surf, I'll simply buy a new one!

 

My business machines are a completely different story. They ARE backed up using multiple techniques, many of which you've already been presented. Why? Because I would care if I were out of business for more than a few minutes.

 

Unless you actually don't care about losing data (my laptop example), maybe its time to get better at trying to understand the answers you were given. I'd definitely postpone making that video until you had a minimal understanding of the topic.

 

[Pickles von Brine]

14 hours ago, RayLeech said:

I believe its you that 'doth protest too much', avrona. Instead of arguing an unrelated point, maybe you should be taking the responses of people who understand backups and trying to understand how they DO apply to your situation, instead of crafting arguments how they DON'T apply,

Guessing you are not classically trained, consider the dictionary definition of Backup: "a person, plan, device, etc., kept in reserve to serve as a substitute, if needed". Notice that the words "percentages and likelihoods" are irrelevant to the definition. If the likelihood is over zero (no matter how low), at some point it may be needed -- but frequency of a single reason is not part of the equation. So no, there is actually no "logic in your logic".
 

Backups are simply about mitigating risk, and risk is not composed of a single factor (frequency of disk failures). The higher your risk aversion, the more 'things' you'll do to avoid failures.

 

A point you were "unintentionally" correct on was your fire comment. There are often multiple ways you COULD mitigate risk. So yes, you could do more to prevent fires rather than deal with the effect of a fire. Of course, since you resist spending $57 to cover a multitude of risks, I highly doubt you have any intentions to install an electronics-friendly, vapor barrier fire suppression system to cover the single risk of fire.

I have a laptop in the living room I've never used it for anything except surfing while watching TV.  I don't personally need that laptop, hence could care less if it burst into flames on any given day. I'd simply chuck it onto the electronics recycling pile and either surf on my phone, old laptop, or just stop surfing while watching TV. My need of that laptop and the risk of losing it are both essentially zero, so I've never backed it up. I do have more than $57 in available capital, so if I WANT to surf, I'll simply buy a new one!

 

My business machines are a completely different story. They ARE backed up using multiple techniques, many of which you've already been presented. Why? Because I would care if I were out of business for more than a few minutes.

 

Unless you actually don't care about losing data (my laptop example), maybe its time to get better at trying to understand the answers you were given. I'd definitely postpone making that video until you had a minimal understanding of the topic.

 

To further piggy back on this:

@OP 
How much are you willing to spend if your drive(s) failed? Are you willing to risk them failing at all? If they did fail, what would you loose? How would it affect you? Would it cause harm to you, your job (business or otherwise)? Is the data irreplaceable? 

If you have deemed the data cannot be replaced, it would cause harm to you or your business, affect you in a way that would cause you angst (baby pictures gone! OH NO!), or the data cannot be replaced at all, then you need a backup. 

 

I am formerly a data recovery engineer. The sentiment you are showing in this thread is why us data recovery engineers have job security. When your stuff fails, are you willing to risk paying 1500-3000 USD to recover your data, if it can be recovered at all?

As it has been stated in this thread time and time again, backups are insurance to a possible disaster. They are easy enough to setup. Hell, get a  drive, plug it in and setup Syncredible on your machine. Let it run every time you get on your system. You will have a backup no matter what. Then, play 6 USD a month and have your stuff go to backblaze. This way if your house burnt to the ground, everything is safe off site. You can order a drive from them, which they ship next day, to have your data back. Then send it back to them and they will give you your money back on the drive they sent. 

Honestly, to me it just seems like shear laziness on the your end to not backup. You don't want to spend the time, effort or maybe even money to have things safe. Nor the due diligence required to maintain them either. 

Large corporations rock multiple backups. I know of several that have a primary data recover on site, with a secondary in standby at all times ready to fail over if need. Then, data backed up offsite over dark fiber in case anything ever happened to those 2 data centers. Even the offsite backup has local secondary on standby as well. 

Even within the racks they have hot spares, redundant heads, sometimes pallets of drives ready to go to make sure data is maintained. All for that 0.0001% chance something happens. Why? Because IF it happened, they would be in super deep doo doo. What if a hurricane hit and flooded the data center? What if a tornado hit? What there was an earthquake? What if someone drove through with a bulldozer? What if the building caught on fire? None of that matters because they have insurances in place to maintain their data integrity regardless. 

If your data is important, you should have that mindset as well. You should care to take the time to backup, to care to prevent such a thing of happening instead of relying on, "Oh it will never happen to me.," mentality. 

Let me be clear. Drives fail. They WILL fail at some point. It could happen in 20 minutes or it could happen in 5 years. I have seen drives with less than a 100 hours on them suffer major platter damage with no previous poor handling and others with nearly 60000 hours on them seize a bearing. Most of the time, you do not have warning when it does. Why take the chance?

[SSD Sean]

8 hours ago, Lord Xeb said:

To further piggy back on this:

@OP 
How much are you willing to spend if your drive(s) failed? Are you willing to risk them failing at all? If they did fail, what would you loose? How would it affect you? Would it cause harm to you, your job (business or otherwise)? Is the data irreplaceable? 

If you have deemed the data cannot be replaced, it would cause harm to you or your business, affect you in a way that would cause you angst (baby pictures gone! OH NO!), or the data cannot be replaced at all, then you need a backup. 

 

I am formerly a data recovery engineer. The sentiment you are showing in this thread is why us data recovery engineers have job security. When your stuff fails, are you willing to risk paying 1500-3000 USD to recover your data, if it can be recovered at all?

As it has been stated in this thread time and time again, backups are insurance to a possible disaster. They are easy enough to setup. Hell, get a  drive, plug it in and setup Syncredible on your machine. Let it run every time you get on your system. You will have a backup no matter what. Then, play 6 USD a month and have your stuff go to backblaze. This way if your house burnt to the ground, everything is safe off site. You can order a drive from them, which they ship next day, to have your data back. Then send it back to them and they will give you your money back on the drive they sent. 

Honestly, to me it just seems like shear laziness on the your end to not backup. You don't want to spend the time, effort or maybe even money to have things safe. Nor the due diligence required to maintain them either. 

Large corporations rock multiple backups. I know of several that have a primary data recover on site, with a secondary in standby at all times ready to fail over if need. Then, data backed up offsite over dark fiber in case anything ever happened to those 2 data centers. Even the offsite backup has local secondary on standby as well. 

Even within the racks they have hot spares, redundant heads, sometimes pallets of drives ready to go to make sure data is maintained. All for that 0.0001% chance something happens. Why? Because IF it happened, they would be in super deep doo doo. What if a hurricane hit and flooded the data center? What if a tornado hit? What there was an earthquake? What if someone drove through with a bulldozer? What if the building caught on fire? None of that matters because they have insurances in place to maintain their data integrity regardless. 

If your data is important, you should have that mindset as well. You should care to take the time to backup, to care to prevent such a thing of happening instead of relying on, "Oh it will never happen to me.," mentality. 

Let me be clear. Drives fail. They WILL fail at some point. It could happen in 20 minutes or it could happen in 5 years. I have seen drives with less than a 100 hours on them suffer major platter damage with no previous poor handling and others with nearly 60000 hours on them seize a bearing. Most of the time, you do not have warning when it does. Why take the chance?

Honesty, it’s hard to believe the op isn’t trolling the way he is replying. No amount of logic can refute a troll.

[Pickles von Brine]

I was thinking of the same thing but regardless wanted to get my two cents in. 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

49 minutes ago, Lord Xeb said:

I was thinking of the same thing but regardless wanted to get my two cents in. 

Frankly, he isn't worth even that much.

[avrona]

On 9/22/2019 at 4:04 PM, SSD Sean said:

Honesty, it’s hard to believe the op isn’t trolling the way he is replying. No amount of logic can refute a troll.

Last time I checked just saying your opinion on something isn't trolling, though I am kinda bored of just saying my point here over and over and have people take things I take out of context, the full video has been released and up on my channel if you want to know my full opinion on the matter and not just snippets of it on a forum.

[tikker]

13 hours ago, avrona said:

Last time I checked just saying your opinion on something isn't trolling, though I am kinda bored of just saying my point here over and over and have people take things I take out of context, the full video has been released and up on my channel if you want to know my full opinion on the matter and not just snippets of it on a forum.

I think it's perfectly fine to inquire about the need for backups, but I think saying it is not necessary is wrong, because that is subjective objectively not true. There are entities that just cannot afford to lose the data they store. How much is necessary, depends on how much you value your data. So I had a look at your video, and here are some of my points/counterarguments to what you go into.

 

Let's take Wikipedia's definition of a backup:

Quote

 a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event.

 

RAID is a form of backup

No, it is not. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives. Take RAID 1/5/6. You could theoretically consider it some sort of backup, because when a drive fails the data can be reconstructed from the second(other) drive(s). Here's why it should not be considered a backup:

1. If the drive fails, you pretty much cannot plug the drive into another computer and read it. You have to rebuild the array. If the second drive fails during this, the data is lost.
2. If you accidentally delete a file on your RAID array, it is gone, exactly because the second drive is not a backup of the first, but simply a mirror of what is on that drive at that time.

People do not really need multiple (off-site) backups, RAID arrays etc.

Agreed. Your needs scale with the value of your data. I agree that for most people, synchronizing important files to Google Drive, Apple Time Machine, Dropbox, whatever is more than enough, with maybe an offline copy as well somewhere.

 

Failure rates of "only" 1.8% per year

You state 1.8% as "not really likely". However, this is still almost 2 out of 100 drives failing in a year and there's a few more than that out there. Yes, this becomes more obvious and prominent for e.g. datacenters, where you are running dozens of drives instead of 1 to a handful for the typical consumer, but it's not something that I consider a neglible fraction. I've addressed if vs. when in my other reply.

 

Unintentional backup

This just illustrates that, for you and those people, it does not matter to you if you were to lose that data.

 

Hard to backup large amounts of data

Perfectly fine argument, and I encounter this every day, working with dozens of TBs of data that would be annoying to lose, but is hard to backup. This is one of the reasons RAID was invented (it's still not a backup).

 

You make one key statement around 4:50 that is quite relevant here:

Quote

instead of moving them, I copy them, so there's two copies available if something were to happen

 

Congratulations, you just made a backup because you don't want something to happen to your footage during editing and be forced to abandon your video or shoot it again, and that is what the point of backups is.

 

This is my stance on backups: if you cannot suffer the consequences of losing that data, you have no excuse for not having a backup. Whether having an online backup is enough or you need offline backups or a multi-tier redundant backup, depends on its value to you (and your budget )

[SSD Sean]

9 hours ago, avrona said:

Last time I checked just saying your opinion on something isn't trolling, though I am kinda bored of just saying my point here over and over and have people take things I take out of context, the full video has been released and up on my channel if you want to know my full opinion on the matter and not just snippets of it on a forum.

Lol, sorry. I didn’t know you were a teen with no real world experience. You’re right. You know more than the professionals. How silly of me, a professional in the storage industry, to try to refute your knowledge. Nobody needs to back up. Just accidentally back up for the lolz. No data really matters to anyone. If you lose it, oh well.

[sandvich64]

9 hours ago, tikker said:

I think saying it is not necessary is wrong, because that is subjective

you just played yourself

[tikker]

1 hour ago, sandvich64 said:

you just played yourself

Hence the "I think" at the beginning.

 

Edit: Actually, I'm going for a bolder statement. It is objectively wrong.

[sandvich64]

3 minutes ago, tikker said:

Hence the "I think" at the beginning.

 

Edit: Actually, I'm going for a bolder statement. It is objectively wrong.

when it comes to objectiveness right and wrong translates to true or false

[tikker]

13 minutes ago, sandvich64 said:

when it comes to objectiveness right and wrong translates to true or false

You are correct. What I was trying to state is that saying backups aren't needed, because the chance of drive failure is so small, is wrong, and that there are scenarios where loss data is just unacceptable. It does become subjective again if you consider your personal data irreplacable or not.

[sandvich64]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

You are correct. What I was trying to state is that saying backups aren't needed, because the chance of drive failure is so small, is wrong, and that there are scenarios where loss data is just unacceptable. It does become subjective again if you consider your personal data irreplacable or not.

i agree backing up data is a no-brainer no matter what the storage purpose is

[avrona]

8 hours ago, SSD Sean said:

Lol, sorry. I didn’t know you were a teen with no real world experience. You’re right. You know more than the professionals. How silly of me, a professional in the storage industry, to try to refute your knowledge. Nobody needs to back up. Just accidentally back up for the lolz. No data really matters to anyone. If you lose it, oh well.

Wow such a mature argument, not wanting to listen to someone's opinion, and then just using age as just some metric of knowledge in the subject. 

[nox_]

@avrona The business you said you started, what kind of business is it? Would you care to specify?

[avrona]

15 hours ago, tikker said:

Congratulations, you just made a backup because you don't want something to happen to your footage during editing and be forced to abandon your video or shoot it again, and that is what the point of backups is.

I explained exactly why I do it in the video.

I do a copy and not a move because:

1. I often need the data on my SD cards for easily looking back to see what I did in certain photos or videos, make sure angles are about right when continuing to shoot a video, etc.

2. The main issue I worry about comes from the pain that is moving files on my system in terms of Windows because of some weird permission issues, and very often moves of bulk files don't work, so then you can just easily try again as it's all still there on the original drive, instead of messing around in what works and what doesn't. For example when I copied data to my NVMe, at first none of the files wanted to open because of permission issues, so I just copied them all over again with some different settings and it worked. What I'm trying to say here is the thing that is the issue is the way Windows does moving and permissions, which is all way more likely to happen, and happens to me all the time. 

[avrona]

Just now, noxdeouroboros said:

@avrona The business you said you started, what kind of business is it? Would you care to specify?

We are expanding into building PCs, why exactly are you asking?

[nox_]

Just now, avrona said:

We are expanding into building PCs, why exactly are you asking?

Are you over 18? Which country do you live in? In Europe you must be over 18 to have a legal business, I'm very curious about the country where you live, odd laws you have there.