Can you buy insurance to protect against the loss of data? That seems like a bad company to start up. Since nobody is going to compensate you for the trip to Australia so that you can re-take your irreplaceable vacation photos, you might want to consider what your backup strategy is.
Maybe I’m lazy. I bought an external drive for backing up downloaded applications and registration codes. When the computer died, I used the external drive to restore everything. It worked great. Unfortunately, I did not duplicate the drive back onto the computer, I merely re-installed directly from the backups. Later, when I switched the drive to a brand new PC, I performed the same procedure.
Well, that PC was struck by lightning or something. The booting SATA drive in that PC failed, but the data drive was left intact. The external drive (the one with all of my software on it) seemd fine and lasted long enough to rebuild most of that system, but suddenly died two nights ago.
I’m still in shock, I think. We’re talking thousands of dollars of software here, not to mention some photos of Abby when she was really little.
So. While I consider how I might still get data off of that drive, I’m trying to figure out what backup strategy is best for my needs.
The main problem with my data at the moment is that I have a decent about of it that I would want to keep safe, and it’s not all in one place. I suppose that it is all in a neatly delimited area, but there’s good stuff mixed in with bad stuff, making it difficult to simply backup the entire area.
Moreover, the data is large and impractical to move. This is, I think, one of the main reasons why people don’t backup their data - it’s a pain in the butt to find a place to put it.
Face it, if backup was as simple as pushing a button to get an instant, perfect copy of everything, we’d do it all the time because we could automate it very easily. But the truth is that most consumer backup solutions want you to backup to CD or DVD. I’m sorry, but my backup will not fit neatly on a single DVD, nor can I automate the task, since I would need to keep fresh blank disks in the drive for that to happen.
Tape drives are too expensive and unreliable. I’ve never really understood why this is so. My very first computer used a standard audio cassette tape and a standard cassette recorder for external storage. That should cost virtually nothing to reproduce with today’s technology and production. I would even be willing to pay 10 times the price of a cheapie cassette recorder for good tape backup, but the good tape drives cost in the thousands of dollars, have flaky compatibility, and require expensive software to run properly. For the price of tape backup, you could buy three computers and mirror their drives to maintain a better backup than tape.
RAID seems promising, but as Berta points out, if lightning strikes the PC and wipes out both drives, you’re just as dead in the water as if you only had one burnt-out drive. Plus, if your PC is damaged, it might be difficult to get your RAID-stored drives to be recognized in another RAID-capable PC to retrieve your data.
Internet backup seems promising, but there are so many things that aren’t quite up to my needs yet. First of all, there is no easy software that is well-designed for performing backups on a Windows PC to a self-hosted external service. What I mean to say with that statement is several things:
- There is no simple internet backup software
- The software does not allow you to backup to your own server
- The software that does exist typically doesn’t run under Windows
- Your mom doesn’t run Linux
I’ve toyed arond with the idea of building a nice front-end to a Windows-based Rsync (that’s what the Linux folks will tell us we could have been using if we were all running Linux instead of Windows) and providing some instructions for its use. It could do incremental rolling backups over the internet, provided you had the bandwidth to make that practical.
I think the bandwidth problem is the limitation we had the last time I was discussing this. I was trying to push 80GB of backup over rsync nightly with five days of changes, and the bandwidth was the trick.
Someone should offer a service that does this. I know about StrongSpace; I use it. But it doesn’t seem like a backup solution to me. StrongSpace feels more like external storage. Maybe that’s just because that’s how I use it. And certainly the price is not right for the volume of backup I want to push.
The solution that I’ve implemented in the mean time is one of Netgear’s home office SAN boxes. It looks like a toaster, holds two drives, and connects to the network. I loaded it with two drives and told it to mirror them, and it seems to work.
What I don’t like about it is that it does not use SMB shares, but instead uses its own driver to find the drive. The driver must be installed on any PC that would use the drive, which is kind of inconvenient. With all of the trouble that installing network printer drivers causes at my house, I see this having the same ill effect.
At least I have some redundant storage now. Now I’ve got to recover the files from that USB drive. Anyone have any tips for restoring data from a messed-up Maxtor One-Touch?
