Johan, I am really sorry that you have been hit so badly. No one is 100% protected against such events. It's not the loss of the hardware itself that's bad, but the loss of solutions to problems that have grown and been painstakingly worked out over the years.
As sad as it is, the number of responses also shows us that we could all be affected by this problem at some point and finally need a functioning solution.
Personally, I programme on a highly upgraded T430 laptop from Lenovo with a 4-core I5. This laptop still has a large number of integrated interfaces, including an SD card slot. There is always an SD card in this slot, and a batch script automatically creates a kind of incremental backup when Windows is started. So you don't have to worry about anything.
Of course, this is no solution against theft or house fires. But at least it is a help if you have to reset a project because you have programmed in the wrong direction or the hard drive has died. Besides, this solution runs in the background and does not have to be triggered. You can forget about it once in a while.
My idea along these lines: Why not see this as an opportunity? Maybe Erel will read my post and start a new challenge. When you're not in the middle of a project or in such dire straits as my good friend Johan, programmers are looking for new ideas and tasks to sink their teeth into and keep their brains busy.
My suggestion: Let's create a challenge or start a joint open project! Everyone who likes can participate. Let's programme the "ultimate" backup software for our needs. With this forum, we have a place for exchange, enough old hands who know the intricacies, enough "newbies" who can learn a lot from it and in the end we all have something from it.
The programme should meet the following requirements (without claiming to be complete):
- independent backup, without having to start the backup manually
- Simultaneous backup on several freely configurable media (SD card, USB stick, NAS, cloud)
- Incremental principle with freely selectable retention period
- Compression of the backed-up data
- encryption protection
- free solution that is not linked to other platforms and service providers
Preferably (I think we all programme more or less on a Windows PC), this would be a solution with B4J.
It's probably not a big incentive for you, but I'm attaching my batch script to this post. The script is not witchcraft and should be transparent and changeable for everyone. It offers a certain minimum protection against data loss in the event of a disk crash, nothing more, and is only intended as a suggestion. Over the years, this script has proven itself to me.
This is going a bit too far here in Johan's thread and won't help him himself. Just think about it...
BV
robocopy e:/Backup/08 e:/Backup/09 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/07 e:/Backup/08 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/06 e:/Backup/07 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/05 e:/Backup/06 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/04 e:/Backup/05 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/03 e:/Backup/04 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/02 e:/Backup/03 /mir
robocopy e:/Backup/01 e:/Backup/02 /mir
robocopy c:/B4A e:/Backup/01/B4A /mir
robocopy c:/B4J e:/Backup/01/B4J /mir
robocopy c:/B4X e:/Backup/01/B4X /mir
robocopy c:/B4XHelp e:/Backup/01/B4XHelp /mir
exit