Ultrathought

What happens when your word processor freezes and you haven’t clicked the save button for a while? In many cases you lose some or all of what you were working on at the time. So what happens then when your hard drive crashes and you haven’t backed up for a while? Well for some, it equals complete disaster and therefore a prudent strategy should always be employed. Making a copy of your data isn’t the preserve of professional photographers or large corporations and neither is it a black art. It is a simple, common sense approach to saving yourself a lot of heart ache.

The Options

There are a great deal of options for data storage; other hard drives, DVD, tape drives, flash memory and remote servers are but to name a few. Tape drives are old news and will be obsolete in the near future. DVD is probably the most widely available but cumbersome and won’t be supported forever. Flash memory is the fastest, but it is volatile and has a low capacity. The last option mentioned, remote servers, are probably the most beneficial as they are usually in a completely different physical location and therefore safe if your house / workplace burns to the ground or any other disaster strikes. The downside is that remote servers are only as fast as your bandwidth allows and usually come with a monthly price tag. There are also many cheaper online services (including your own web space of course) that you can use to upload data to a remote location via a web based interface.

Yes, It Happened to Me

Hard drives exist in two states: Those that have crashed and those that are about to. Recently I acquired a shiny new Dell Latitude wide screen dual-core laptop to replace my flimsy and much broken P4 Advent (never again). I duly transferred all of my data across to my new machine, threw the Advent up into the loft and thought that would be that. A couple of weeks later as I was tapping away in the dark hours my new Dell started to become strangly un-responsive.

Of course my PC’s have crashed before but this was different. No blue screen of death, no cursor movement, just a freeze. Even Ctrl-Alt-Del was down. All that was left was a faint clicking sound every second emanating from the area of the hard drive. I tried a restart, I only got just past the BIOS screen when it froze and the clicking was still there. I had to come to terms with the cold hard truth: My hard drive had cashed its chips in. Worse still, I hadn’t backed a stitch up.

Although it had only been 2 weeks since my upgrade, that was a hell of a lot of work to lose and I was gutted. I brought the Advent out of retirement and called Dell who to their credit and like a hardware undertaker I suppose, sent a rep round to my house then next day to collect the deceased drive and hand me a new one.

The Response

Anyone that has done it will know that it is a massive pain to configure a single new machine, re-install all of your data, applications and settings, let alone a companies worth. That’s why now I literally have OCD when it comes to backing up. I employ 2 x identical 512gb drives for storage because I figured that if one goes down, then I always have the second. Additionally, I always carry a 160gb slimline drive in my notebook case. The software that I use to streamline the process is EMC Retrospect by Iomega, an application that came free with my back-up drives and another good package is Nero BackItUp. I carry out, usually once a week what is known as a progressive back-up. This just appends new and modified files to my existing, huge archive that I initially saved without unnecessarily overwriting duplicate files.

The best bit of advice I can give you is; be fanatical about backing up, it will pay dividends in the long run because if you use them for long enough, a hard drive will one day, check out on you.

[tags]hard drive crash, data back-up[/tags]