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The Fatal Hard Disk Crash…
By Alex Lam | September 11, 2007
For six months, I’ve been working on a new business proposal for a revolutionary venture. So much research has gone into this proposal - I’ve got photos, schematics, quotations, emails and blueprints which are vital to making the idea a success. I’m so excited, because I know it will succeed… no one else has ever thought of an idea like this.
Next week, I’m going to submit my proposal to the biggest venture capitalist in Asia, and based on the exchange of emails with them, they’re going to grant me funding for the entire idea.
BOOOOM! “DISK DRIVE FAILURE”
You frantically try to revive your computer, search online for all possible methods on data recovery, but you find the best solution is to restore from backups… Hrmmm… backups? Maybe the last time you made a backup of your important data was when your best friend Muthu suffered a similar fate. But since the incident 9 months ago, you haven’t given it any further thought.
Thankfully, the illustration above is a fictional one. But, it can be a very real experience for some. My wife Grace, runs her own company called Atelier Ventures, and one of her current projects is to manage a pool of video editors for a client. Most recently, she was deployed to oversee the edit for Project Runway Malaysia. They record 40 hours of footage for a single episode, and they need terabytes of storage space for their needs. One fine day, the storage device of her client was emitting the dreaded “clunk-of-death”, and lo-and-behold the drive was dead. Hours and days of work were lost, in that brief moment.
Now that I’ve painted a little horror for you, let me share with you my backup strategies for data. Between my wife and I, we’ve got a lot of data. We’re passionate photographers, love music, watching Prison Break, Heroes, etc… so you can imagine what volumes of data we contend with.
My Home PC
At home, I’ve got an average off-the-shelf PC going - this serves as my media (MP3/photos/movies) and data storage PC. It’s got 3 hard drives - one for Windows, one for data, and one purely for backups. I’ve installed Acronis True Image Workstation on the PC and it serves to backup selected folders from my data drive to the backup drive. (TIP: Be selective. Don’t backup stuff that you can live without - I don’t backup my movies, I can get them again). I’ve set it to run a full backup on a Saturday night, and differential backups on all other days.
A full backup means, it backs up everything I told it to. A differential backup is a lot smaller in size, and only backs up what has changed between the full backup and that day itself. Why don’t I keep doing full backups? Because they’re huge in size. And why do I do a full backup every week? Because I feel more assured with a new full backup weekly, over having a single backup since the start of time, and a differential one that has changes from 999 days ago.
My Office Notebook
With my office notebook, I run Handy Backup using synchronisation mode. I set it to backup my data periodically (nightly, or weekly - you decide) via the house wireless LAN to the Home PC, on the backup drive. At least, I’ve got a copy of my emails, documents stored somewhere else.
Off-site Backup
What if there’s a fire, or a flood? Okay, you’re the worry-wart type, huh? Maybe I am too, just slightly… Once a month (okay fine, maybe once in two months), I will burn data from the backup drive MANUALLY onto a few DVDs that I keep at my parent’s house. At least, I know the data is safe somewhere else, in the event of an “act-of-God”. And what if your whole suburb experiences a catastrophe? Oh brother… let’s not go there.
Alternative Backup Software
Alright, some may not want to fork out money for backup software (though I think it’s a worthwhile investment!).
You can explore some of these freebies out there.
Final Words
Plan ahead, and do it now - BEFORE any catastrophe occurs. Don’t be a Dilbert…
Topics: Biz Productivity, Tips, Tricks and Howtos |
September 26th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Yes! Backups are definitely important. A friend of mine recently got her laptop stolen on a train (she travels more than an hour one way in Europe, and stacks her laptop in the overhead compartment). It’s in a business class coach where people wear suits… and someone stole her laptop from the compartment. Fortunately, she created backups of all her documents in an external drive. Unfortunately, that external drive was in the same laptop bag.
December 10th, 2008 at 8:10 am
[...] For those who are not convinced about backups, read an article I wrote some time ago here. [...]
December 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Try 77backup.com, it’s an online backup software tha tcontinuously saves your data on a secure server over the internet.
It’s not for free, but it’s like insurance, in case of trouble, it not so expensive anymore…
if interested : http://www.77backup.com
Carlos