I just came very close to losing All my Poser work that I have done this year. After another Poser 5 total lockup/Hard reboot, I get a message that my registry is corrupt (Corrupted hive). Unfortunately I hadn't backed up in several months... (DOH!) Fortunately after a lot of Skull sweat, and patience I was able to recover all my data intact (knock on wood). I will never go more than a week without a backup again. ^_^

You would have gone Berserka ::::: og :::::

^_- Oddly enough I stayed extremely calm the whole time. Even a year ago I would have probably freaked out, or done something rash like just giving up and reformatting. I guess after all these years I've finally reached a level of technical sophistication where computers don't intimidate me any more. I knew that if I stayed cool I could most likely save the data. Of course having a 2nd comp to do research on helped a lot.

Having a second machine standing by is a lifesaver. Many a time I've been doing a "routine" hardware or software upgrade and run into a "cannot continue because of blah, unable to restart because of this" scenario. Having other machines on the network to go research with saved my ass and subsequently important data that, as you pointed out, would have been lost due to the "oh well, guess I'll reformat then" option. BTW, congrats on kicking the machine's butt Berserga :)

External hard drives are a great idea too.

Yeah but only if you Use them, hence my warning! :D

I burn everything to CD (I know, but I'm old technology as well..;), and load things UP to Poser..saved my bacon more than once..;)

I have an external drive to match each internal drive. Setup a backup program to automatically mirror each internal drive.

I'm always worried that I'll lose my massive Runtime folder, so several times a month I back it up to 7+ Rewriteable DVDs. I would hate to have to load every single model I ever bought.

Iomega Rev is a simple solution.

This is why I made the decision a few months back to rig an external tape drive I had to make all the backups I deem critical (though in honesty you can just as easily do the same thing with an external USB hard drive... I'm just paranoid about backups on things with moving parts is all :) ) Just got done backing up the Runtime today. I just turn it on, let 'er rip, then come back when it's done. I figure that this way, the worst that can happen is I lose a couple week's worth of goodies (usually not too many items.) Besides, my Runtime still has stuff in it from late 2001, when I first decided to use Poser, and began sucking down as many free items as I could scrounge off the 'net. It's been on three different PC's, and two Macs (and the following OSes via various rebuilds: Windows 2000, RedHat 9, Windows XP, SuSE 8.0, SuSE 9.1, Mac OS 9, Mac OSX 10.2, and now on Mac OSX 10.3/SuSE Linux 9.2) Went through a huge purge in 2003, and I'm just about due to do another one. (The directory weighs in at just over 10GB.) /P

Recently a hard drive died, and I spent at least two weeks reinstalling stuff. Then I decided to get external hard drives for backup of the Poser installations and all my projects. Buy an internal IDE drive, and spend maybe $40 for a USB/Firewire enclosure, and you're set.

I had my C drive go bad and had to do a total reformat last month. I would have lost everything, but I had EVERYTHING backed up, all my artwork on disc, and I ended up only losing a weeks worth of stuff. It was so easy to reinstall everything since I had it backed up. If you don't already do it, I would also reccomend backing up all your emails...especially the ones with passcodes and registration numbers. It really is worth the time it takes to back everything up!

Attached Link: Karen's Replicator

My "Maxtor One-Touch External USD Drive" is rigged to copy changes in POser runtime to an external hard-drive merely by literally just pushing the button on the external drive. When I install something, I can easily just push the button and back it up. Of course several other installation back-ups are in order in case the backed-up full installation becomes corrupt.

I bought a Western Digital Dual Option External Hard drive (USB & Firewire). It has "one-button" backup, using Retrospect backup software. Unfortunately I don't understand the program or docs. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to just copy an entire internal hard drive onto the external, and do incremental backups. I bought Norton Ghost, and can't figure how to make it do the job either. So I found Karen's Replicator (free), and it does the job.

Message edited on: 03/01/2005 09:47