Made a right balls up

[cropwell]

After I had a hard drive failure on my CNC machine and had to rebuild and reload software, which included getting licence details from Mach3 and others, I decided that the best next step was to backup all my Mach3 and other CNC program directories to my Home Cloud which is a 500Gb mirrored RAID in a NAS box. My CNC machine has the Internet Gateway disabled so it only access my home network.

In deciding a backup strategy, you need to determine what you cannot replace, what you can repurchase or download and what you can afford to lose. Also you have to consider the time costs to rebuild.

There is also another way to lower the chances of failure, and that is to have a RAID mirror as your main hard drive(s) in the CNC machine. I have a raid card in a redundant PC and that may be going into my CNC machine at the next HD failure.