Greetings.

[mobrien316]

Hello to all. I just joined this morning and am looking forward to learning more that will help me improve my maps.

I've been drawing on CC3 for a while but my computer crashed in January and I lost my D&D campaign setting. It was an entire world that I was also using as a setting for my perpetually-working-on novel. I should have backed it up, I know... All I have now is the printed-out maps that have handwritten notes on them, since I wasn't thinking at the time they would be all I would have left.

BTW, great idea for a forum! I am looking forward to learning from the more experienced cartographers here.

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the Guild.

Yeah, I had a PC crash a few years back, losing LOTS of maps. Now, I always back up, often!

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

[Gandwarf]

Backing up is your friend... eh

Anyway, that reminds me, I need to do a backup myself

Welcome!

[Redrobes]

Welcome mobrian,

Thats a bummer when you loose data like that. I have a pretty simple and effective backup system. I have two harddrives both the same size. One has everything on it (work, email, apps, temp areas etc) and the other is a clone of it. Not a RAID type clone tho. Just a copy of every file and I never delete anything off of the clone drive unless its been deleted off the normal one and it also happens to be huge and taking up a lot of space. I.e. you very rarely touch that second drive (until everything goes **** up and you need a full recovery).

Then I just use XCopy (comes with windows) machines to get the copy done.

heres my batch fie:

xcopy E:\*.* F:\ /K /O /X /E /Y /D /C /R /F /H
pause

Now and again just run it. Every few days or when I have just done some work or took some unique photos I dont want to loose etc. I have a similar one when I use an external USB harddrive too.

So stage 1 (local 2nd HDD) protects me from local files getting corrupted or apps crashing and half writing files or I accidentally delete something.

Stage 2 (external USB) is for when my machine blows up taking all the drives out. I would loose a week or maybe two but it would not be catastrophic.

Stage 3 is where I have some stuff "off site" but that does take more effort so its for key data only.

I have lost really important stuff in the past too. But since I have adopted this method I have never lost anything important even tho I have had HDDs and my whole machine die too.

[Gandwarf]

A good system, although if you keep the second drive in the same house you still got a problem when there's a fire for example.

That's why occassionally I drop off DVD's with important files at my parents for example

[Redrobes]

Agreed - see stage 3 above. Doable but somewhat harder to implement.

[Gandwarf]

Some of my friends make backups over the internet, storing files on a server. I might look into that myself in the near future...

[RobA]

I use Syncback (freeware version) rather than XCopy and it works great!

I have it set to copy all changes from the source to the target, and never delete from the target is the source file disappears, so backuos are always incremental. It is a "one touch" backup, as I have the autorun on the removable USB drive set to launch the backup when I plug in the drive.

The USB drive lives in my fire-safe.

More recently, I bought an HPMedia vault 2120 that was on salfe for stupid cheap, and installed a second drive configured as raid (500MB each drive). It comes with backup software (NTI Shadow) that I installed on all the home computers (4 in my house) that just runs in the background.


-Rob A>

[icosahedron]

Backups are sooo essential... Er, that reminds me...


Have you looked at the possibility of professional HDD recovery? A drive crashed on me a few years ago. I put it aside and started a penny jar to pay for its recovery. Two years later I got my data back without noticing the investment.

Some companies charge silly money, but shop araound; I got my data back for a couple of hundred pounds.

More recently I lost a hard drive in a house-move. Any suggestions on recovering that data would be most welcome.

Yes, I know, I should have backed it up...