A little over a year ago, my desktop computer started acting a little… “funny.” It was sluggish, and was exhibiting some strange behavior.
I was… distracted. I should have reacted sooner to assure myself that all my important files were backed up. When I finally did, I did a really bonehead thing and wiped out my backup hard drive so I could do a fresh backup of my files.
<hangs head in shame>
Bonehead, I tell you.
I even had an automatic backup system in place, but my sudden desire for an elegantly structured backup took over, and while I was doing said backup, my secondary hard drive — my media drive which houses all my pictures, video, and music — crashed. Hard. So hard I had to remove it from the computer’s chassis in order for the computer to actually start.
It took me just over a month to recover my data. Pictures of my son. Videos of his first steps. My wedding pictures and videos. In that month I had tried everything for recovery. I was even prepared to spend hundreds of dollars to send the drive to a quote-unquote “expert” when a friend made a suggestion that ultimately — combined with another technique I was trying — saved 99% of the data. Luckily for me the 1% that was lost? Music files ripped from CDs in storage in my office closet. Easily re-rippable.
I spent over a month tearing my hair out to recover data that should have been safely backed up in the first place. It was a big eye-opening lesson for me to be more vigilant about my personal data backup. We are in the process of designing our own home server (my husband’s new pet project) complete with software that has built in redundancy in case of hard drive failure, but what about keeping data safe from water or fire damage? What happens if my whole system fries? I live in the land of wildfires and earthquakes, people.
Because I never again want to experience that horrible pit-of-the-stomach despair that I have lost the visual record of my children’s lives, 
I have been researching online backup solutions, and one of the better ones I have come across so far is Mozy (usable by both PC and Mac users).
Mozy, which can be set up to do automated backups, has a free option, but it is only good for 2G of space. If you got any music or video involved with your backup you know that 2G is nuthin’. The free service would be good for important non-media documents, I would think. For a more robust backup, you can get unlimited online storage for just under five dollars a month. Unlimited. Had I been using Mozy when my hard drive decided to kick the bucket I would have been able to retrieve all my data that same day.
Even with that month of panic, I was lucky. Lucky I have enough software smarts to come up with some retrieval solutions and lucky to have a friend with some hardware smarts to round it out. Not everyone had those kinds of resources available to them, and not everyone has the ability to set up an automated home backup system. That is where the online storage solutions come into play.
What kinds of backup methods do you employ? Do you tend to treat your work data differently from your personal data? I’d love to hear about your data backup solutions.
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With over 25G of active files, backing up with version control for us is still a major undertaking. Since we skipped the 10.5 OS (I would have had to upgrade our time-tracking software and they keep making it worse, so I dug in — we are moving to 10.6 very soon, though), I have not had a chance to try out Time Machine, but I have heard it’s wonderful. For us right now it’s still an exercise in dragging the entire active file folder over to an external hard drive day after day. We have a bunch of external hard drives, and their names are Young Fred, Old Fred, Big Fred, and Giant Fred. Yellow Submarine anyone?
I use SOS Online Backup (recommended by PC Magazine and the Wall Street Journal), in addition to the safety measures I use at home. That way if disaster strikes, everything I need is safe and sound far, far away.
Good thinking! With as many gigs as we back up every day, though, safe and sound AND far away isn’t always the best option for us. We regularly burn the gazillion DVDs and send them offsite. And in the case of earthquake, I grab my kid and our external hard drive back-up and I get the H out.
We are always exploring more ways to stay backed up. I love hearing how others manage it. One of our clients used to wear her thumb drive around her neck and kept her work-in-progress on it. Funny.
SJ — I’ll have to check out SOS Online Backup — Thanks for the recommendation!