Our printer rarely drops off the wifi. When it does, a restart usually fixes it.

Quote from: Carol Haynes on July 11, 2011, 12:21 PM

Whatever you think about Skdrive remember it is MS and personally I don't trust them with my data since they lost a whole pile of community websites after a server failure (and didn't have backups).

I hope they learned the lesson (I certainly did - which is why I will never trust them to look after my files again - and that includes Office 360 or Office Live).

who do you trust (?!)
... a sort of a rhetorical question I guess

They can't all fail, right?

Quote from: Stoic Joker on July 11, 2011, 07:38 PM

Nightly backups churned on for months until somebody needed one of the year X records that weren't there anymore.

One of the reasons why I try never to do incremental backups any more. I'll do full backups, image snapshots - or sync directories. But no incrementals. All they ever seem to do is increase the potential points of failure along with the likelihood of not being able to restore a backup.

re: your client

Eek! indeed...

One more reason why it's so important to actually look very carefully at those backup logs each day. (Not that I or anybody else I know ever seems to do it religiously. )

Very few offering free services ... call me a cynic but in the world of data storage I suspect you are likely to get what you pay for - and if you are paying you at least have some comeback if/when things go wrong.

One of the reasons why I try never to do incremental backups any more. I'll do full backups, image snapshots - or sync directories. But no incremental. All they ever seem to do is increase the potential points of failure along with the likelihood of not being able to restore a backup.

One more reason why it's so important to actually look very carefully at those backup logs each day. (Not that I or anybody else I know ever seems to do it religiously. )

Quote from: Stoic Joker on July 12, 2011, 12:03 PM

Look at them for what? If it says verified/successful, and it's about that big... *Shrug* The missing data (files) weren't large enough to raise any flags (maybe 100MB total out of an 85GB backup) ... So it's pretty much a Perfect (oh shit) Storm of events.

If a year's worth of data suddenly drops off your backup you don't notice something is wrong? Or you don't think it's unusual when yesterday's backup had over a million items and today it's around 80% of that?

You will often need to change how your backup reports are configured since the default is usually either to log nothing - or everything.  Unfortunately, most people have them log every detail - which is useless since it can easily run to hundreds of text pages.

But that still doesn't make them totally useless. As you pointed out, most have a file count summary and success/fail report at the end of the job. And I do eyeball for certain especially critical directories. I don't care if the office temp's 'furry porn' collection went missing. But I do worry when accounting or other important directories flag backup errors on half the files.

addendum: another thing worth looking at in the log is the job run times. If backup time is steadily or abruptly increasing without a corresponding increase in the number of items being backed up, that's a red flag. It could indicate hardware issues, excessive file fragmentation, or corruption of the backup system's database or indexes. All are things worth investigating before disaster strikes.