You have to laugh, don’t you?
There’s us, banging on in Show 47 about the importance of backing up your data, and this week, we lost a vital file.
The file in question was actually a transcript of the latest show, Show 50, kindly created by the team at Typing Angels. Foolishly, our Pete deleted the email with the transcript, and later, during some housekeeping, emptied the Recycle Bin.
Fortunately, each night, we take two backups of important files such as our Inbox. One copied to an external drive, and one backed-up to an online backup service (We use PCFort)
Irritating, the local backup is set to overwrite the previous day’s file at midnight, so when we came to look to the missing transcription, as it was deleted over a day ago, our local backup didn’t have the file either.
So, we turned to our online backup – which is set to keep the last three versions of backed-up files. The PCFort backup service sends us an email every day to confirm that the overnight backup worked, or reporting errors if it didn’t. We logged on to the backup service, found a copy of the Outlook file that should have contained the attachment we were looking for, and hit “Restore”. As our Inbox isn’t small, it took several minutes to download and decrypt… before reporting a problem decompressing the file.
After some faffing, we got onto PCFort support, whose support chappie told us:
“I have had a look and the backup for the 29th ran out of time prior to completion. As the .pst file was split into smaller pieces for upload the second part did not get uploaded. As the restore is expecting 2 parts that is why it is not restoring.”
Practical upshot – although the file shows as available to recover, does not appear in the “Failed Backup” section, and didn’t generate an error message of any kind… the file is unrecoverable.
The backed-up file, looking good to go
The lesson here – even if you think you’re doing the right thing – your backups may be less use than you think, and if you use PCFort, you may not actually be able to recover files that you’ve backed up.
Lesson learnt?
We’ve switched online backup providers (again), and we’re glad we did. Now, we’re using Acronis Online Backup. They offer 250GB of online storage, you can back up up to 5 PCs, multiple versions of files can be stored away, you can access your files from any PC, and it’s all secured using a personal encryption key of your choosing. Oh, and it’s under £40.
If you want to give Acronis a try, there’s a free trial available from www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing
As a reminder, there’s lots of discussion of backups and ways to keep your data safe back in Show 47. And if you want to read the missing Show 50 transcript, it’s here: mp3 extras (thanks to Typing Angels who manage to keep things safer than we can!)
Happy Easter all!