Waffling about whether to invest in a backup harddrive? Maybe this story will help convince you:
I am crawling under my desk in my work clothes before I have to take children to school and then run for the train. There is a phone wedged under my ear and a bowl of cereal in one hand. With the other, I am trying to pull a cable from behind my computer while a customer service rep for Treo (like a Blackberry, but worse) attempts to diagnose why the computer just wiped out every article I have ever written and my appointments through next year. She is in Bombay. My children are in my kitchen. They are yelling for me.
Hard drives WILL fail. It’s just a question of when. Protect your sanity, and your work clothes from getting wrinkled, and get a backup harddrive.
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(Photo: Getty)
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External 2TB WD hard drive, switched to a 1TB mirror RAID array = redundant bliss for $450.
If the point of the article is harddrives WILL fail, then why is another harddrive being suggested as a reliable backup method? I just set up my mom with an account with Mozy.
@IphtashuFitz: I’ll have to check that out for my windows box, although I only use that for gaming so it doesn’t really need backing up. However, I was trying to think of things that your average computer non-geek can set up. I can do it, you can do it, but can they?
@Elijah-M: You can… I don’t remember where the option is, but I think it’s somewhere on the Leopard install disk — allows you to rebuild a working drive from a Time Machine backup. Fortunately, I’ve never had to actually do it. Yet.
@IphtashuFitz: Thank you. That was my point. It looks like people are so quick to be the first to scream “FANBOY OMG!!!!” (and not even spell it right) no matter how well the poster they’re responding to was trying to be neutral that they don’t even bother to think about what they reply to.
@matto: I have one thing to say about Time Capsule, it has a HD in it.
What happens when your Time Capsule HD fails. Of course I have no idea if the HD is user serviceable.
I heard somewhere that if your data is your life you should keep at least 4 backups.
1. Use RAID-5 (Redundant HDs, if 1/3 of the HDs fail you don’t loose any data. Totally doable with todays HD cost)
2. External HD
3. Online Backup (Internet)
4. Offsite Backup (Make a backup, send it to another location in case you get hit by a tornado or something)
Whee!
@Chongo: Or CarbonCopyCloner.
I’d still recommend Firewire either way – it’s faster.
My current setup on my main Mac: 2 internal drives set up as a mirrored RAID array, periodically backed up to an external OtherWorldComputing enclosure via SuperDuper & a FireWire 800 connection. Having a bootable copy of the OS has come in handy in the past, so I didn’t replace SuperDuper with Time Machine when I upgraded to Leopard.
I really need to get something for my laptop, though.
Make sure you have a copy of Diskwarrior. Diskwarrior is your best fucking friend.
@Buran: Sorry, misread that… I don’t have a Linux box — currently — although it might be useful for backing my website up which DOES run on Linux.
Sorry. I have a headache today that nothing is touching. ><
Arcronis is probably the best Windows backup program.
I got a 500GB WD external drive recently and it’s great to have that back up security.
I have 4 computers in my house, so I utilize a NAS, and every family member has been trained to save all of their data to that drive. To prevent against drive failure, I use a sync program that is set to automatically sync the data several times a day to a seperate “back-up” drive in my machine. When directories get larger than what will fit on a DVD (photos, music etc.), I make them “read-only”, and create a new directory called “Photos2″ or similar for the storage of any new data. Keeping directories the size of DVDs allows me to easily create a 3rd backup for storage off site (at my office).
As my storage increases, I am considering moving towards purchasing 2 external USB drives that I can move between home and work on a weekly basis and eliminate the DVD backup, but right now 2 DVDs captures all of the “Must have/can’t live without” data.
@syntheticlogic: Yes, RAID5 can fail. And not just in a fire. We had two drives go bad at the same time because of a heat wave that hit a couple summers ago. The central AC was on full blast and our apartment was still about 95F day and night. Luckily, the irreplaceable stuff (photos) were also stored on a computer at my husband’s dad’s house. Unfortunately, all the mp3s that we had legally purchased were gone, gone, gone. We learned our lesson, and will definitely be shutting off all computers if we have that kind of heat problem again. We also continue to store all of our photos on multiple computers.
Last week at our Geek Squad precinct, this poor lady was in tears because her kid restored her comp without knowing they would lose their files. I think only 10% of our customers back up their data and it just breaks my heart sometimes. It’s so Murohy’s Law, we had two people get their comps fried during the last round of storms and they had all their tax info in there.
Cheapest way to back up data is to email the most important stuff to yourself so you can access it anywhere. Of course, for those of you with TBs of data…
Also RAIDs can fail too, and doing data recovery on those is way more difficult (and costly).
I wish I had a terabyte of data, but even I can’t fathom that many photos of my dog.
I’ve been using Carbonite for a couple of years now and it works fine (I got 3 free copies when they were free with rebate at Staples). The advantage is that my data is backed up off-site, helping me in case of a fire or other disaster. Heaven forbid I lose my primo pr0n and LOLcat macros.
I’ve got a weekly complete image (for easy backup and restores), routine file backups to a local file server as needed.
Critical files are backed up no less than once a week to an offsite provider.
Don’t want to risk loosing data… just to cheap and easy to take that chance.
Personally, I like mozy.com. It’s painless.
I use Acronis True Image and a 300GB usb external drive. You just have to remember to keep the backup current.
I also backup important work files to Kingston usb 2GB drives.
@RandomHookup: Was Han Solo included?
Backups only work if they’re fully automatic. If there’s a manual step involved, they will eventually be forgotten.
I have personally experienced too many horror stories of people losing years of unrecoverable data, pictures and files due to either no backup or a backup ‘process’ they stopped doing months earlier.
USB thumbs drives (or even burning to DVD) recommended on this thread may work for people with less than 2, 4 or 8 GB of important documents, but it fails the ‘manual effort’ rule above.
For those techies out there, get a Windows Home Server for $500-$700. The HP MediaSmart EX470 and EX475 are a great choice since they’re already built and allow you to drop in additional hard drives as needed. Backups done on up to 10 machines each night (even supports Mac TIme Machine) without any interruptions. A child could set it up.
There’s a cheaper version made by HP based on UNIX for those who bristle at the mention of Microsoft. Less features, fewer drives – but you can get your anti-MSFT kicks.
Even cheaper, get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box ($150-$300) – basically a hard drive on the network you can write files to. No features, but you can run your own script or backup program to the NAS every day.
For all of the above, pay for a service that allows you to offload your files offsite. Redundant drives or an in-house server would all be lost in a fire or theft.
For grandma, load her up with a free service like Windows Live Sky Drive, HP Upline Remote Backup Service or Elephant Drive (there are lots of others too). Make sure it’s one that does the backup automatically – or you write a script that does the daily lifting.
@ladycrumpet: I just got a fabrik simpletech signature mini, pretty happy. Also, it’s blue.
I can back up all my data, excluding music, on a flash drive (the iPod serves as the music backup). So I’ve got the big external HD, the flash drive backup (in firesafe box), and then I also print off some documents 8 pages to a page, since digital data can degrade. If it’s super-important, I’m willing to squint at tiny little print to recreate it if necessary (and that way shrinks paper storage needed).
I also e-mail things to myself on occasion and keep some archived in my e-mail. I’m experimenting with keeping some kinds of documents online at google docs as well as on my computer; nothing like bank documents, but many of my lectures, which are obviously recreatable, but would be an enormous pain my ass and would require quick access so I could keep teaching in the wake of a hard drive catastrophe.
@Buran: They’re using the keyword system. They hear the word “Mac” and immediately give the “smug Mac fanboy” script.
My household has all backup and storage drives duplicated for redundancy (that’s also why SuperDuper is good). The duplicates are left unplugged and disconnected, so power surges can’t hit them. Belt and suspenders.
@nequam: Good Call!
I think part of the problem for people who don’t back up is that they haven’t conceptualized their computer as being something which requires maintenance. They see it like a T.V. or refrigerator which hums along and does its thing until it fails without considering what they’ll lose if it does. They need to see it more like the lint screen in the dryer – every time you use it, you have to take care of it or there’s a risk that something bad will happen.
I back up data onto an external USB hard drive which is networked to 3 computers (2 PCs and a Mac). If that drive fails, the data is still on the computers’ internal drives. If the internal drives fail, the back-up drive has the data. For the PC, I use Norton Ghost. Unfortunately, I can’t use Time Machine on the Mac because it won’t recognize the networked drive (as it is physically connected to the PC, not the Mac) without some Terminal tweaking that I’m not prepared to do, so, the Mac system isn’t necessarily perfect.
@heavylee-again: “…harddrives WILL fail, then why is another harddrive being suggested as a reliable backup method? I just set up my mom with an account with Mozy.”
The odds of two hard drives failing from the same manufacturing defect is small. What do you think Mozy is storing its stuff on?