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Now
that flash drives are evolving from utility to fashion accessory
to near invisibility, having media to backup to is becoming
more of a no-brainer.
Photo: Mark LyndersaY
A
month ago, I had another drive fail completely in my working
computer, for a total of two in less than eight months.
In both cases, there was no warning at all, just a system
that became unresponsive and finally would not restart.
Anecdotal evidence gathered from calls to a few folks in
the repair business suggests that while prices for drives
have fallen as fast as capacities have been rising, quality
and reliability have also been taking a perceptible dip
as well.
There’s only one thing you can do about a hard drive
that’s likely to fail (these days, it seems to be all
of them at any time, particularly in laptops) and that is
to maintain a reliable backup of your files and software
that you can recover from quickly.
Regular readers of this column will know that I’ve
reduced this to a chant, best muttered quietly at the end
of a working day; backup, backup, backup.
In planning a backup regimen, there are some factors you’ll
need to consider...
How much work are you willing to lose?
Your backup frequency should cover the amount of work you
don’t want to reconstruct. I lost three days worth
of work when I tried to recover data after the most recent
failure, including a major writing project that I was emailing
when the system collapsed. It took more than six days to
get back to square one, and it became clear that a weekly
backup frequency wasn’t cutting it anymore.
Use software and reminders
Backup is exactly the sort of thing that software excels
at. You might spend half an hour rummaging through a folder
trying to figure out what to copy, but software designed
for backup can do it in seconds. More usefully, the best
software can be set to do incremental backups, adding only
changed files to your backup stash.
The best backup software can also be set to do its work
on a schedule, but even if you don’t choose handle
things that way, the idea of clicking a button and waiting
a few minutes is infinitely more appealing that dragging
files and folders around.
Plan multiple backups
A backup needs to be in two places at once, otherwise, you
just have a copy. For my most important files, I like to
have quadruple redundancy, with one copy on entirely different
media and one in an entirely different place.
Backups here are now made twice weekly to two different
hard drives, once a month to DVD media and once every two
months to a hard drive that is kept at another location.
The schedule isn’t kept as rigorously as I’d like,
but I think of it in tiers, with the twice weekly backups
an absolute requirement on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Plan your media strategy
Like safe sex, it doesn’t matter what you use, as long
as you use it all the time. A good rule of thumb is to gather
your working files into a single folder and to keep backup
media handy that’s at least four times larger than
the size of that work folder.
Some folks who work regularly with a lot of small files
may find hard drives and optical media a pain in the butt
for daily backups. Those users might find a pair of spacious
flash drives used in rotation to be the best bet.
My key backup solution spreads three terabytes across four
drives and maintains two current copies of my photography
files.
Use it
Invest the time to set up a backup system. Mac users can
take advantage of Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.5 or the free
iBackup.
Windows users have a range of backup solutions, but small
business and noncommercial users might want to start their
investigations with NTI’s Shadow.
It takes a bit of effort to set up a good regimen and reminders
to stay on track. I have “appointments” to backup
set in my calendaring software. But the payoff in the worst
case scenario is huge.
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