BACK IT UP!!!

Consider this post something of a public service announcement if you like, because while everything I say here may be common sense to you, you can bet your bottom dollar that both the sun will come out tomorrow, and someone hasn’t done this yet and will probably end up losing their lifes work/photo collection/bank details/porn collection.

Being an IT person, and one who spent several years looking after a sizeable server infrastructure, I know rather a lot about backups.  Whether it’s a single computer in someones bedroom or hundreds of servers in a multinational company, they both need backing up.  It doesn’t matter if you have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on a fully automated backup solution shunting multiple copies around on disk, tape, or a combination of the two.  You may even have a disaster recovery scenario already in place so your business can continue running without even breaking a sweat while aliens are firebombing your corporate headquarters.  If something fails and you lose your data you’re stuffed, and it doesn’t matter if it’s someones personal files, or an entire companies financial data for the last ten years, the result is one of devastation.

So why am I harking on about this?  Last Friday when I was saying my goodbyes one of the guys was mourning the loss of his laptop hard drive.  The thing had given up the ghost, and was refusing to boot.  This user is one I would rate rather highly, he is a genuine power user (not just someone who buggars around with their Windows desktop changing every little pointless setting to give themselves a “unique” (ie bloody ugly) colour scheme) and one I would think would have his head screwed on when it comes to backups.

Naturally I told him to try The Freezer Technique(TM).  This involves taking a dead hard drive, placing it in a sealable bag and putting it in the freezer overnight.  Sounds stupid?  Trust me, it’s genuine, and it can work too.  If you have a deceased hard drive that hasn’t totally collapsed and died you can place it in the freezer overnight, reconnect it the next morning and you may get the thing to boot long enough to get the data off it.  Don’t ask me how it works, something to do with the disk platters shrinking.

He hadn’t tried this method, and I wasn’t too optimistic that it would work anyway given that the BIOS was refusing to even see the drive.  So I said “You do have a backup, right?” to be faced with “that face”.  The face that says “No I don’t have a backup, please don’t give me a tongue lashing, I know I should have backed it up, but I didn’t”.  This drive contained a LOT of data too, and a huge collection of family photographs.

The moral of the story?  If it can happen to him, it may potentially happen to you.  It’s happened to me as well, I had a hard drive full of documents, music and video that keeled over and died one day and I didn’t have a backup.  Live and learn, and you only let it happen once.

So what’s the best way to back up your data?  Personally, I use several because I’m A: The paranoid type, and B: See A.  I use all of the following methods:

USB Stick
Your new best friend.  USB pen drives are now ridiculously cheap, and you can pick up one that will hold multiple gigabytes for well under £50.  I copy all of my most important documents (primarily business data, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, financial information) onto a USB pen once a week and keep it safely locked away.

Off-Site Backup
It’s all fine and dandy having a backup of your data in the house, but what if your house burns down?  Once a month I take the data that gets copied onto the USB stick and burn it onto a DVD.  This then goes off to my parents house in case of nuclear meltdown that is confined to my street.

Online Backup
Over the last couple of years a string of online backup services have appeared ranging from free to nominal fees for unlimited space.  I’ve been using Carbonite for the last few months and it has already saved my bacon on a couple of occasions.  The service provides a small client that integrates with the Windows Explorer shell, giving you the ability to right-click any folder (or drive) and add it to your online backup.  Simple as that.  Carbonite will then monitor your files and folders, and when a change is made it will back it up automatically.

Want to restore a file or folder?  Your Carbonite backup drive appears integrated into your Explorer window, allowing you to browse it, locate the file(s) you require and restore with a couple of clicks. It’s a great service, gives unlimited space and costs around £50 for a year.
The only downside for me personally with Carbonite is it will only backup data that is on a local drive in your PC.  I save all of my data onto a NAS box, and currently Carbonite does not support this.  It’s hardly a dealbreaker, and I have a daily scheduled copy task set up to move that data down onto a local drive for archiving.

Common sense, maybe.  But with the age of the digital home upon us, more and more people are storing hundreds of gigabytes of photos, music, video and documents on their PCs and think that it is safe.  The harsh reality is this: hard disks die, data corrupts, and hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Get your data backed up NOW, or risk having to give the IT person “the look”.  They won’t all be as sympathetic as me!

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