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Its bad you lost the data but it isn't really bad luck !
Without backups its was a planned inevitability.
But I think anyone who has lived with computers has lost data at some time or another !
All hard drives will die eventually - this you can rely on - some much sooner than others.
So if you arent backing up religiously then you are simply playing a continuous game of Russian roulette and the outcome of that is well known.
Its almost a certainty that you are going to lose everything potentially as often as every 2-4 years ! - if you dont back up
Some of this is simply related to the MTBF of your drive, but some of it will be physical damage or electrical damage from the environment or even your PCs power supply
Anyone on this forum doing AP and who puts any value on their data and all the effort that it takes to accumulate it - and the effort to get all the software and all the drivers and all the settings and parameters working just right - simply must start backing up.
Not just doing it once, but establishing a process where it can happen regularly and preferably automatically
Even if you arent backing up the entire system, at least the Data areas as a minimum - the OS and apps are relatively easy to rebuild - albeit very time consuming (like 40-50+ hours) and fraught with all sorts of version control problems that may make it impossible to restore back to what you had, but the data is usually irreplaceable.
USB drives are cheap these days so there is no excuse that it costs too much, as was once the case.
NAS servers can be built cheaply, even out of old hardware and a bunch of drives, as mentioned internet backup servers are available if you are happy using and paying for them
I run a cheap NAS file server on a 7watt 1GB Intel Atom micro PC (Fit-PC2) that has an internal and an external drive, the external drive is swapped over every so often and I cycle between three external drives.
So I have 4 copies of the data of different ages (at least one of which is stored at another site and 1 of those copies is no more than 24 hours old)
But I also use a Linux service called RSync which updates my "changed" data across the net to one of my work fileservers every night.
RSync is a really smart program that literally runs a service at each end (source and destination) and only sends the new bits or the changed bits of all the files and reassembles it all
So for example a 300mb accounting file may only actually have 20kb of changed data - so that is all that gets sent across the net even though the file is 300mb
Its quite typical that a small business of say 5-10 employees running an accounting system, email and everything else the backup only needs to exchange a few 100mb of data per night - so its uses a very small bandwidth.
The very first time you do this it makes sense to use a hard drive copy of the data to get 1TB of data across to the remote server.
So that's my fifth backup which is itself replicated (mirrored) on two drives on that server.
I have other non critical files (music etc) that resides on my desktop that I dont treat so seriously, but it still gets synced to a Time Machine every night.
I really think that anyone who gets involved in AP needs to consider Backing Up as a critical component just like the camera, mount and scope are critical !
My 2c worth
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