There are many ways to back up your hard drive; this article gives a brief synopsis of several of the major options.
The Pain of Data Loss
How important is data backup?
If you’re one of the thousands of Americans who answered, “Huh?” then you might want to check your computer. You might have just lost all of your family photos.
Or your client database, or your tax information, or your home movies, or your emails. When a hard drive goes down, and you haven’t backed up, you lose everything. Your choices are either paying for data recovery from a company such as ESS Data Recovery, or curling up into a ball and accepting your loss with the help of a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Hopefully, this hasn’t happened to you. If it has, you know the pain data loss can cause, financially and emotionally. Luckily, you needn’t face data loss if you back up your data.
There are many ways to backup your information. Below is a list of a few of the most popular ways, as well as a few general tips to keep in mind.
External Hard Drives
External hard drives are a great way to back up large amounts of data. They range in size from a few gigabytes to hundreds of gigabytes, and if you’re computer literate, you merely need to copy your necessary files to one of these drives for a little extra peace of mind. If you’re not, there are some hard drives specialized for backup that come with backup software. This software, such as Retrospect HD, allows you to back up either specific files, filetypes, newly modified files, or your entire drive to an external drive. Maxtor’s OneTouch series includes such software, and has a button on the front of their drives that triggers a backup. You can also set up backup drives to make a copy of your recently modified data every night while you sleep, which is great if you’re not good at remembering to backup.
There are a few problems with external hard drives. First of all, they tend to be expensive for vast amounts of data. This can be a problem for many home users. Secondly, an external hard drive is, well, a hard drive, and will eventually fail like any other drive. If you leave your external drive hooked up to your computer, and you have a major electrical problem , you might lose both drives. Then it’s back to the bottle of Jack Daniels.
You can avoid such a disaster by keeping your computer hooked up to a surge protector and checking your drive regularly for unusual noises. Problem noises include clicking sounds, whirring sounds, and the occasional “HELLPPP MEEEE!”
Jumpdrives/Compact Flash
A recent trend in backup technology is the jump drive, a small USB device that utilizes flash memory to store up to around a gigabyte of information. These are ideal for small amounts of data backup, as they can easily handle a good amount of documents, they’re more rugged than hard drives, and they fit on your keychain. As an experiment, I bought one of these drives to see how much damage it could take; I threw it across the room, dropped it, and even smacked it against my desk. It still read my files. These drives do tend to overheat, however, and in general fail faster than hard drives. However, you usually wouldn’t run one as often as you ran a hard drive, so it may last a great deal longer than your computer does. Still, the amount of data it can back up is pretty limited, which makes it infeasible for many people.
Tape Drives
You remember those old Macintosh computers in the late eighties that ran off tapes that took forever to rewind and even longer to load? Well, many businesses are using similar tapes as their form of backup. The difference is that while those Mac tapes were very, very small, most newer model tapes are capable of storing hundreds of gigabytes of data. This makes tapes very efficient for companies, who can back up their whole systems and easily catalogue them. Like jump drives, tapes are very resilient, and unless they’re stored in humid or wet environments, they tend to last a great deal of time. The problems with tape drives, however, are significant. First of all, tape drives are costly, and they’re not standardized. This means you’ll have to select which tape type to use, which can be a confusing process. Tape drives, though resilient, also fail, and data recovery on tapes is often more costly than on hard drives. Tapes take a long time to write to. And remember those long rewinding and loading times? Well, uh…ditto.
Remote Backup
Finally, you may want to consider remote backup. This consists of uploading your data every night to a web server that keeps a copy on hand for a nominal fee. The great advantage of this is that your data isn’t stored at your location, so if there’s a natural disaster or a fire, your data will still be fine. The problems with this method are that your data is probably on someone else’s hard drive, and if you don’t pick a good company, you could be in deep trouble. Ideally you want a company with a fast connection, secure backup, and small monthly fees. This brings us to the second problem with remote backup; there are monthly fees. This alienates a lot of home users; who needs extra bills? Nevertheless, if you can find a good trusted service and you don’t mind a few bucks a month, remote backup is a pretty strong option.
The Joy of Backup
Try loading the data that you have backed up and see if it has everything that you need. Think of basic things like work related documents, but don’t forget about important emotional keepsakes like pictures, and ask anyone else using your computer if they have anything important that they need to back up. There’s nothing worse than forgetting a crucial file when your computer goes down.
If you can, keep your backup medium in a different location than your computer, and have mulitiple backups of important files. If possible, it also helps to check to make sure that the copies of your files on your backup are readable; occasionally, a file copy can go bad, resulting in file corruption.
With your data safe, you can sleep a lot easier, and what’s more important, you can laugh at the poor souls who weren’t as responsible as you. Just remember that all hard drives eventually fail, and if you take unnecessary risks you may find yourself in a corner, slowly rocking back and forth and murmuring quietly about your Excel files.
External Links:
Maxtor - Great site for external hard drives, USB and firewire.