How important is your computer? If you’re anything like me, it’s like an appendage. I work on it. I communicate with it. I organize my time with it. I listen to music on it. I play games on it. I watch movies on it. I store my family photos on it. I read on it.
I recently got taught a lesson about just how important a part of my life my workstation has become when the power supply went out on my five year old Power Mac in March and I had to live on my laptop for the next three weeks until I bought a replacement Mac Pro.
I was lucky. Nothing broke on the old machine that can’t be fixed. I didn’t lose any data, just time. My box going down made me think about something I hadn’t taken the time to plan for before.
What if I would have lost a hard drive? True, data recovery is an option, but there is no guarantee that some, if not all, data will be lost forever. Not only did that hard drive contain stuff that would have inconvenienced me to lose, I would have lost every photograph my family has shot since 2004. Every picture of my now three year old son, since the day he was born.
Now that was a scary thought, and one that made me determined to come up with a plan. I had been lucky in my computer-using life. I had never lost a drive that was in a production system, only on boxes that had been around forever and had been relegated to infrequent use or given to my oldest son. The thought of losing a drive that had so much of my life on it made me feel all of a sudden like I was playing Russian roulette with my data.
So I started thinking about my options for having some peace of mind about my data.
It’s amazing that just a few years ago a 10 gb hard drive was big, but now our iTunes libraries wouldn’t fit on one. What this means is that for most of us, backup options that were viable in the past aren’t so viable anymore.
That rules out cdr and cdrw media as a viable backup strategy. Could you do it? Yes, but how many discs would you have to burn? The keypoint of a good backup strategy is to backup frequently so that in the event of hardware failure the impact on you will be minimal. It also rules out thumb drives. They have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper, but they don’t represent a good backup strategy.
DVD media. Could be done, but how many discs will it take you? How frequently are you going to back up? I don’t trust the longevity of rewritable media, and I figure our landfills don’t need any more help filling themselves with dvdr’s from my obsessive backups.
Hard drives are cheap. Do they fail? Yes. Do I trust one more than a stack of dvd+rw? Yes. Is it more convenient than using a stack of dvd+rw? Hell yes.
There are two options when it comes to backing up to a hard drive, internal or external. The internal option is a flavor of RAID, but don’t let that scare you. I’ll explain:
- RAID1 Adding a second, identical hard drive to your computer in a RAID1 array is a viable option. If you have a Mac or use a *nix variant, no additional hardware is necessary, and I believe the top tier of Vista also has built-in software RAID support.
RAID1, or mirrored RAID, does nothing for your hard drive’s performance, in fact, you will take a miniscule (read: don’t worry about the hit, it’s unnoticeable) bite out of your drive’s performance. What a mirrored RAID does is just that; it mirrors the contents of one drive to a second drive. You have two identical copies of your data at all times. If one of the drives in the RAID fails, you have your data intact on the drive that did not fail.
It’s not portable like an external, but it’s the cheaper option. Also, people like me who have gone to a RAID0 for the increased read and write performance can mirror their striped arrays as well, but a RAID card will be necessary for that flavor of RAID. $50 drive dies, your data is intact, and another $50 drive gets you right back where you were before the hardware failure.
- External drive External drives will set you back more than an internal, but maybe not by much. I bought a 1tb Seagate external for my new system, and only paid $100 for it. I would have paid close to that for a 1tb internal. The drawback was, that at that price, my external is USB-only. USB works fine, and results in a backup time of just under 2 hours for me. Firewire and/or E-SATA is faster and will up the price of the external drive, and in the case of E-SATA, you’ll also need an E-SATA card.
If you already have a suitable drive laying around, then sink the extra money into a nice external enclosure that does Firewire and you’ll be good to go.
Backup software for an external is probably built into your operating system. In my case as a Mac user, while I applaud Apple for including a nice, integrated backup strategy into OS X, it requires you to boot from the OS install disc should you ever need to install from backup.
There are third party software solutions that create bootable clones of your system. I use one, and in the event my system ever failed, all I would need to do is boot from my external and clone my system back to my internal hard drive. Much nicer solution. If the backup software is smart, after the initial clone, when it backs up it will compare the information on both drives, only adding/subtracting/modifying the info that is new or changed since the last backup. This makes for speedier backups, and is a nice feature.
No matter what your backup strategy is, just have one. Don’t wait until you have a drive fail before you realize the importance of your data. I guarantee you will lose something irreplaceable while you are learning that lesson.
