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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
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Crash Boom Bang
I've been using computers for many, many years now, and finally had something happen to me that has never happened before: a disk crash. It happened yesterday. "But you have backups, right?" you might wonder. But of course! I back up to a network disk system every night. And that's what crashed: my backup disk!
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I've got a new one in already (even in rural Colorado, I can get one overnighted to me; sweet!), and as I write this I'm backing up my working system's hard drive. Since it was the backup that died, I didn't lose any important data, but it could have just as easily been a working system's drive that crashed. (This is the one I got, if you're interested.)
I've heard horror stories of people who were working on their Great American Novel, or their master's thesis, or their doctoral dissertation, or something else they felt was incredibly important -- and had the disk crash, or they accidentally deleted the file, or forgot a password, or whatever, and lost a lot of work because their only copy was on their hard disk that crashed, or was stolen, or.... Do you have your important work backed up?
Every few months, in addition to my online backup, I burn a CD of my most important files, seal it in an envelope, and hand it to a friend who lives a few miles away. And he does the same thing with me, handing his own back. Because a backup is great -- unless the house burns down. So I have a backup of my backup stored somewhere else.
Do you have your important work backed up? I've been incredibly lucky that in 25 years of professional writing work that I've never had a hard drive crash. Until this week. But the fact that I've never lost any of my work isn't luck, it's due to careful planning. Do you have your important work backed up?
Don't say nobody ever warned you. Hard drives crash. You need a backup of anything you mind being lost without notice.
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Most Recent Comments
Posted by Harvey, Commack, NY on May 18, 2009:
Having been an IT professional for 30+ years I too know the importance of backups. I have my home PC backed up automatically at 2am every day. Once a week I do a full backup and I do incrementals the other 6 days. I keep 2 full backups. The reason for this is what do i do if there is a crash while doing the back up and today's backup is overwriting last week's. I would have nothing. I have 6 files for my incrementals, MONDAY, TUESDAY, etc. This week's Monday overwrites last week's Monday. At worst I lose a day's worth of work.
Posted by Jim Lyles, Holly, MI on May 20, 2009:
I've been backing up my home computers for years. I used tape drives for awhile, then switched to DVDs, but now I use an IDE/SATA-->USB cable kit to back up to hard drives. The cable kit allows me to buy cheap internal hard drives, which I hook up as external drives temporarily via the cable kit. When I'm not backing up to them, I keep them stored away, out of sight. I have three backup hard drives that I rotate between, and I always keep the most recent one at my work building. (Yes, I agree that an offsite back up is critical.) I do these back ups every month or two.
Meanwhile, I also do a daily backup of current working files on a 16 Gb flash drive, which allows me to also carry them easily between my work and home computers. There have been a number of cases in which I've accidentally deleted or trashed a file I was working on, which I recovered from with minimal pain thanks to my trusty flash drive.
The flash drive, cable kit, and 3 hard drives represent an investment of less than $300. I think it was money well spent.
This whole back up routine might seem a nuisance, but I was really glad I'd done it when someone broke into our house years ago and stole our computer. I'm utterly amazed at how many people (the vast majority, it seems) have absolutely no backup plan at all. If you are one of them, then for heaven's sake (or rather, your data's sake) stop in a local computer store on the way home today and buy a 500 Gb hard drive (less than $100) and a cable kit ($25) and back up your home computer TODAY. Don't put it off!
Posted by Tim, Australia on May 30, 2009:
Surely you know, Randy, that there are two kinds of user: those that HAVE experienced major hard disk failure, and those that are GOING TO experience major hard disk failure. You've just moved from one group to the other! Congratulations for making the move as smooth as possible.