Back that thing up!

March 10th, 2008

Sometimes I take for granted some of the lessons I’ve learned about computers over the years. I should be sharing these stories with you so that perhaps you don’t have to learn those lessons the hard way as I did.

Several years ago, before I made the big switch to Macintosh, I had a hard drive fail on me, and I didn’t have a back up. This was not a good thing. This can happen at anytime and to anyone. There were a couple of reasons I didn’t have a back up:

1. Hard Drives were expensive. Standard drives were only about 20 gigabytes at the time but they cost a couple hundred dollars, and as a poor college student I didn’t have that. Now you can get a 160 gig drive for about $60.

2. I had never had any other major hardware fail. The fact that hardware fails sometimes was never in the forefront of my mind.

When my hard drive died I lost a lot of valuable stuff. My entire portfolio was gone. As a designer that’s how I get jobs without it I’m lost. I did have a few files on cd and some jpeg versions of some of the files but all the originals were gone. This has all become painfully relevant again as I spent a couple hours today working on a friends computer and it turned out that his hard drive is dead. He didn’t have a backup. It’s a very sad situation. I don’t want anyone else to go through the same thing, hence this post.

You might ask why you need a backup or is it worth the financial investment. The question you should be asking is can you live if you lose those pictures of last summers vacation? What if all your financial data is gone tomorrow? How about your lovingly groomed digital musical library? If I lost any one of those things it would be the like the end of the world.

Setting up a backup strategy is really easy. It would be easy for me to talk about a Mac only strategy because that is what I’m most familiar with but I’ll just discuss the strategy in general at this time.

There a couple different ways to backup your data let’s start with the most important.

1. A duplicate of all your documents, pictures, and music. This is simple and easy and can be done on cd’s or dvd’s if you have a burner. I recommend using an external usb hard drive as it is faster and can be expanded over time. There are backup programs that you can get that can automate this process but all you need to do is once a week copy all of your important files onto your backup device. Pretty simple.

2. Bootable clone. This is the second most important backup strategy you could implement. This involves making an exact copy of your entire hard drive so that if your primary drive crashes you can just swap it out wit the cloned drive and you’re up and running in just a little while. This does require an external hard drive as you’ll need something equal to or greater in size as you primary hard drive. Backup software can usually automate this process for you as well.

3. Incremental Backup. This is the least important way of backing up your data but can be very convenient. This is a fully automated backup that happens at a specified interval (hourly, daily) in which a backup application makes an initial copy of all the data and then just updates the info that has been changed recently. This way you always have a backup of your most recent data. This is what “Time Machine” in Mac OS 10.5 does.

Now this is just a basic overview of implementing a backup strategy for your data but is not an exhaustive discussion on the subject. If you have any questions leave them in the comments of feel free to send me an email.

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