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Dan's Blog A Time to Lose Data
A Time to Lose Data
Written by Dan Schaefer
When is it a good time to lose your data? It’s a simple question with an obvious answer. It’s never a good time to lose your data. Data is something you work hard to accumulate, and it’s far more valuable than the disk drive that’s holding it. But since disk drives are subject to fail, a better question would be, “What is your data-loss strategy?”
Like any man-made product, disk drives occasionally fail. And when they fail, they take all your data with them. Though disk drive failure rates are impressively low, failures do occur, and thus your data is at risk. To mitigate the risks, you could use a backup drive. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that both a primary and backup disk drive will fail at the same time. It’s a pretty good strategy . . .
. . . but . . .
. . . what if both drives suffer from the same external catastrophe, such as burglary? Personally, I’ve had my home burglarized twice over the past 25 years. And my workplace has been burglarized about every two years. If theft is a problem that strikes you at home or at work, you’re at risk of losing all your data, even with a backup drive strategy. For most people, this risk is unacceptably high.
Having a backup drive is a good strategy, but only if the backup drive is in a different geographical location. Thus we now see the emergence of publicly available backup services over the Internet. These backup services offer to hold your data off-site where it will not be subject to the same risks you experience at home or at work.
There are a number of backup service companies available including Carbonite (my favorite, which I now use), Mozy and iDrive.
All these services satisfy the following requirements:
- They hold your data off-site so as to protect it from theft, fire, etc.
- They hold enough data to include your pictures and important documents.
- They encrypt the data so that nobody else can read it.
- They provide an easy way to continuously backup data on your primary drive.
- They allow you to use your PC while the backup operation takes place in the background.
- They offer a simple way to retrieve your data should your disk drive fail.
The only downside I’ve found is that the speed at which backup data is sent through the network can be somewhat disappointing. It took my PC about 3 days to complete the first back up 30GB of data on Carbonite’s system, even though I have 5Mbps upload speed. The other backup services have a similar limitation. I’m guessing that the backup service companies limit their bandwidth to individuals so as to service everybody fairly; however, this can put a practical limit on the amount of data you want to make available for backups. It will take you approximately one day for every 10GB of data you want to back up. The good news is that after the first backup completes, you only need to save the changes (deltas) to the backup data, so daily backups should only take a few minutes.
So here’s a good data-loss strategy:
- Organize your PC so that all your critical data is under a small number of directories or perhaps on a single drive.
- Get an account at a backup service company.
- Install their software on your PC.
- Instruct the software to backup the critical data on your PC. Generally, you just need to point it to your list of backup directories and files.
- Wait for the initial backup to complete. This may take days, depending on how much critical data you have. (You can still use your PC during this time.)
- Set up a backup schedule. I recommend periodic backups every 24 hours.
- Get familiar with the data recovery process. The specifics of this process will depend on the backup service company you selected. Generally, you’ll have to remember a username and password. If necessary, write them down in a place where you won’t forget them.
- Take a breath! You can now relax knowing that your pictures and all your critical files are safe.
Best,
Dan
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