We recently returned from vacation (wonderful time, thanks for asking!) to find my data drive had stopped working. Not what I needed - then or any time. But fortunately, most of my data was backed up offsite. Unfortunately, some of it wasn't backed up at all. What about yours?
If you are one of those whose data isn't backed up (some surveys indicate that only 57% of users do back up their data), now might be a good time to make a change. And if you are already backing up, you might want to re-visit your practice to verify that everything you might want, is included in that backup.
Why back up?
All hard drives are rated by their manufacturer with a "MTTF" value - the "Mean Time to Failure." The highest quality drives today come with a MTTF of a million plus hours, although according to a Carnegie Mellon University study, customers are replacing drives 15 times more often than vendors estimate. Even so, you can expect your drive to last, on average, more than 7 years. But does that mean you don't need backup? There's a saying that "there are only two types of hard drives - those that have failed, and those that will." Even if your drive doesn't fail, there's always the chance that your system will be infected with a virus that can't be eradicated without wiping the drive - and with it, all of your data.
What to backup?
If your drive failed tomorrow, what would you lose? Probably you have installation disks for your applications - the programs you run. Reinstalling would take time, but your machine would probably run faster with a fresh install! But what about your data: contact information (email addresses, phone numbers), photographs, the bookmarks to your favorite websites? Your resume, spreadsheets or databases for your class reunion, or your family genealogy, or your hobby? How about your tax returns and financial data? Music or software that you purchased and downloaded? Maybe you could re-construct some of this information from paper copies, but think how tedious that would be.
Your email can be another resource you would miss. While you should assume that any email you've ever written is stored on a mail server somewhere (available for subpoena if you are ever charged with a crime), it would be a mistake to assume that said email is readily available for restoration to your account. Unless you configure your email client to keep a copy of your messages on the server (which can generate other problems if you overflow your space allotment), you may not be able to get this information back if you lose it. And unless you use webmail for sending messages, your ISP can't get back those either.
Where to backup?
Having copies of your files onsite is the fastest way to restore your data. You can backup to an external hard drive, USB drives, or make copies on CDs and DVDs. That being said, there are several reasons why these options might be insufficient:
- External hard drives can also fail, and due to cost considerations, may not hold as much as your internal hard drive.
- There is a limit of 700 MB for a CD, and 4.7 GB for a DVD. Unless you are using a backup application that will span multiple CDs or DVDs, you will have to come up with a different solution for larger files.
- At this writing, you can get a USB stick with 128 GB capacity - although it will cost you upwards of $400USD - but keeping that much information on an arguably fragile medium could require a lot of intestinal fortitude.
- In addition, what if you had a catastrophic loss (think fire or flood) where your onsite backups were also destroyed along with your computer?
Offsite backup is more reasonable than ever today, and many of them are available as a free account for 2 GB of backup space. The
best solution is a combination of on- and offsite backup, giving you rapid access to lost data and also protecting against a larger disaster.
There are companies that can work wonders on a dead hard drive - even ones damaged by fire or flood. But this service can come with a big price tag - hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and there is no guarantee that even the best forensic disk specialist will be able to recover your data. If you are ever in this position, you will wish you had taken the time to perform some type of backup!
There's a lot more to data backup than is in this article, for example, how to backup? What software application should you use? How often should you backup? What backup method should you use - simple copying, incremental backup, differential backup? And how will you restore the data if you need one file, or the whole thing? But I hope that if you are reading this far and have not backed up your data, that you make the commitment to do so now. It could save you a lot of stress - and money - in the future.
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