Back up your Backups!!

Once again just a few days ago I saw another Western Digital external hard drive that just pretty much died.  There was nothing I could do, I tried many tools but the drive was not recognizable.  Even though there were great family memories on the drive, the customer could not afford the $2K+ on recovery.  I wonder though, this is the second Western Digital drive.  Is this a coincidence?  I like Western Digital drives but have noticed a higher failure rate with them lately.  I wonder if their QC is going downhill?

The customer thought they were doing the right thing.  I have to give them credit, at least they had a backup plan.  It’s just unfortunate that one drive was the only part of that plan.  They asked for help and advice to make sure this wouldn’t happen again.  There are several different options out there but they all require money and time, something “home” computer users generally do not have.  I personally have a laptop that has two drives so I backup to the extra drive.  I also have about 7 external drives, with only 5 of them in service.  The others are smaller and/or older so I took them out of my backup routine and actually plan to send them to members of my development team so they have additional hardware to test and play with.  My desktop has 3 hard drives in it, one for the OS and the other two are for backups and archiving.  I have wasted spent a lot of money over the years on those drives and that is not something that “home” users want to do.

Generally I recommend that customers backup to at least one external drive and keep backups on DVDs.  My general idea for DVDs is to backup all data monthly or at least every other month depending on how much data they add.  I like the idea of redundancy with DVDs because they are cheap and I honestly do not completely trust them.  Manufacturers always report that their discs will last 100 years or more but I find that hard to believe.  It also depends on the environment that they are kept in, that affects life span.  I’ve had a few CD-RWs that after 3-4 years were unreadable.

Then there are online services.  I personally do not like or trust cloud computing.  I do not like the idea of my data sitting somewhere else.  What happens if there is a security problem on their end?  Will the nude “art” photos of myself end up on the Internet for everyone to see?!!?  Seriously though, I’ve read too many stories of these online services going out of business and leaving their customers with no data.  Sometimes you luck out and receive a warning, but the traffic to their site from all customers hurrying to get their data usually kills your ability to get your data.  Most of them though are just shut down with no warning and your data is lost forever.

Time is a big problem too.  “Normal” people have “real” jobs and family that get in the way.  Backing up irreplaceable data is not important enough to them, even after a disaster.  Even us computer geeks can fall short.  I’ve had a few occasions where I didn’t back something up or my backup was messed up.  I honestly forget to back up regularly also.

This last customer had a pretty good idea though.  I don’t know if my local market is big enough for it though?  I doubt that we could really compete with the online pricing either?  A local service for data backup does sound pretty good.  It would give me a really good excuse to finally build a “real” server for myself though!  I wish I had the money to do it and wish that I knew if it would at least pay for itself in the end.

In conclusion, please be prepared.  Warn your friends, colleagues, family, and others of the possible disaster that not having a good backup plan can cause.  If you need another external drive, please check out my Burrows Solutions site.  I always have great deals on external drives.  If there is a model that you want that isn’t listed, please contact me.  I’ll bet I should be able to save you at least $10 on the drive you want.  Make sure you are prepared though, you normally can’t recover from one of these disasters.