They did it at the worst possible time, too, I was helping my fiancee move into my house and we were settling in so I hadn’t time for the computer.

Yesterday I deleted the entire site, uploaded the back-ups. I have to do a minimum amount of page editing to get it back to how it was, Google has lifted the “attack site” warning.

The only thing I’m having problems with is the forum database, it doesn’t seem to be working. Which is not too big of a loss at the moment anyway as I’m considering moving over to phpBB3 now phpBB2 is no longer supported, security wise. I am suspecting it was a phpBB2 page that was injected and spread to the rest of the site.

PhpBB3 is just so much harder to customize, that’s the only thing stopping me converting.

In all the years I have been using computers, I haven’t experienced a hard drive crash, but I know very well that it can happen. Many people don’t backup until they experience their first crash and lose all their data. By then, however, it is too late.

Presona – Yup, that happened to me when I was at university. I lost my research project but had a backup. Unfortunately the backup had failed to, meaning I had to write 6,000 words in about 6 hours!

Phil – SuperDuper? Not heard of that. Wouldn’t using Time Machine be easier as it is built right into Leopard? I agree that there really is no excuse not to backup.

Polina – Your DVDs crashed? How do you mean? I would be surprised to hear of a DVD disc crashing – perhaps you didn’t copy the files across correctly. I would recommend a USB external hard drive – easy to use, and getting cheaper by the day.

Sorry to put it this way, but not backing up is just another
way of saying, “What I’m doing on the computer all day every
day isn’t all that important.”

Rants aside, the key to backups is making it easy, as
automated as possible. Here are a few tools that I’ve found
to be easy and helpful.

Martin, and other new Mac users, check out SuperDuper!

It’s a wonderfully simple app that allows you to very easily create a
fully bootable exact copy of your Mac, on a remote drive. If
your primary drive fails, you can get back to work in the
time it takes you to reboot. If you’re traveling, you can
take a small portable drive with your backup on the road,
and access your all your files and apps from any Mac.

Our website is backed up offsite, at another host.

More importantly, the backup company (bqinternet.com) set up
RSYNC for us, a Unix utility which automatically creates a
daily up to date mirror of our entire server at the backup
host. It’s pretty neat, it only copies over new data, so
you aren’t transferring massive amounts of data through your
bandwidth every day.

The key thing is the site backups are on full auto-pilot,
thus the most likely cause of failure, me, is kept out of
the loop.

I’ll conclude with the usual advice. Backup your data, or
someday you’ll really wish you did. Those are the only two
choices.

And don’t you dare start forgetting to use the letter ‘U’ in words !!! Don’t wanna be logging onto CommunitySpark to be seeing “color” and “favorite”

Smiley – Have you considered an external USB hard drive? It may be more convenient than burning to disc each time and the more convenient a backup process is, the more likely you are to stick to it!

America is treating me well so far; I am always surprised with the heat and humidity of New York City at this time of year, though and certainly miss the occasional(!) rain shower from England! This day next month, I’ll be a married man… who would have thought it?!?

JArthur – A backup artist, eh?!? I love it! It’s always good when computers give you some warning before they crash. If you still fail to backup, it really is your own fault. I know what you mean about photos – images and music filled up my last hard drive!

Eva – Ah, tough love; always the hardest lesson! Sounds like you have a similar backup plan to me – I think it’s worth it just for the peace of mind it brings.