BACKUP is not a dirty word. To build a decent backup scheme is secondary only to setting up your system.
Today I want to spread before you all, my increasing number of readers. The different ways to save & protect your data and the importance of having one or more decent copies of your important files. There are different backup schemes for different system, from the lonely computer to small & medium businesses with 2 to 20 computers with or without servers. I will never repeat myself enough, all system need a decent backup scheme! I will only touch data backup & not system redundancy.
In one of my first blogs I spoke about “Saving the Memories“, aka backing up your family pictures. You can find there a lot of the same problems & some of the same solutions for single computer users. So please visit that blog to partake unique solutions for protecting your photographic memories.
Any data that is stored only on one media is susceptible to evaporate and never be seen
again! Electronic storage is intrinsically volatile and as opposite to paper can disappear at a finger click. In the daily cases I see in my line of work, there is lot of lost Data. Specifically there are too many persons that are coming to me with their dead disk in hand, mostly the result of computer heat stroke caused by bad fan or environmental stress (see my prior post about computer & dust, or my post about the right Computer case). They need their data to be retrieved! In the best case scenarios the disk has only bad sectors and the data can be easily copied to a new media, but in most of the cases, the disk suffered a malfunction, needing special recovery techniques. In some cases, I even need to send the disk to a Data Recovery specialist, which may or may not, for a substantial fee, recover the very important needed files.
So, what is a minimal backup? A minimal backup scheme is; storing your data on two or more electronic media, the copy or copies should not be used for any purposes other than accessing it in case of need. That is all, that’s Ilan first & only important rule, that’s the secret, always have one or more up to date copy of your data, anywhere possible.
Where can we store those important copies?
- Backup Cassette Tape. I never believed in this kind of backup media, the tape reader is
very costly, you are never completely sure that the tape is in good condition. Tape storage condition is very important; you can’t just put it in your attaché-case, any working mobile phone close enough can erase it. Do you know that any backup tape has a maximum rewrite cycle, the manufacturer prints the number of time you can write data on the tape before it is no longer confident that the data will be safe! For your information in most brands the max read/write cycle is between 20 to 50. Has I said in the first sentence I do not like it, having used tapes in the past & having lost data because of it, I do not advise using tapes. - Copy the Data to DVD. It is a slow process, the DVD deteriorate very easily. Leave it
one week on your car dashboard and try to access it! Its life expectancy, in the best of conditions is about 5 years. Give or take 5 years. If you have more than 4.5 GB of data it become problematic to know where is the data you want to retrieve. - Copy the Data to a Disk On Key. Better, It does not easily deteriorate but can be very easily lost or deleted by mistake, it might be too small to contain all your Data , especially if you deal with graphical medias like pictures & movies. To have many of them could become bothersome, as in the DVD, hard to find the requisite Data and is not a good price performance solution
- External USB disks. They do have a better storage capacity, but they are the absolute least reliable. Just drop one from your table and see for yourself. You have to remember that for the data to be secure it is better to disconnect it between backup cycles.
- Store it in the computer. Well don’t count on Laptops, they are to easily dropped or lost unless it just contain a copy to show around. The desktop computer is a good choice, but the Hard disk is quite delicate. It has a life expectancy of 3 to 5 years and too much heat can lower that to mere months, so you have to check it often & replace the backup disk every few years, other than that, if done well, it is one of the most cost/performance solutions.
- Network Attached Disks & Backup dedicated servers. They have a great storage
capacity, they are always on so we can version the files & keep deleted files for a long time. They are independent from your computer so viruses, fault or defects will not impede them. two main Disadvantage with NAS is that it is not protecting you from local geographic catastrophe like fire, Flood or wind. The second problem is that the price is too high for private users or small businesses up to 4 computers. - Cloud storage. Cloud storage is the new buzz word. Lately all the major players are trying to lead in this domain; Ashay, drop box, Microsoft & Google to name the main ones, plus a myriad of less known companies like Syncplicity, SugarSync, TeamDrive & others try to get in on this as well. Beware of P2P cloud storage services like Symform
that uses your own computer to store other people data, letting you save bigger amount of data but using your internet access bandwidth as well as your local disk. As soon as you exceed the basic free storage amount (between 2 & 7GB), the price performance ratio become lousy, however there are some operators out there like Justcloud, that offer unlimited storage for very basic fee, time will tell if this business model hold any water. there are more caveats, don’t forget that you are limited by your upload speed for the daily backup & even more so for the first data transfer. When I uploaded some of my data to Skydrive, it took me 2 days to copy 17GB. Another problem is that most free cloud storage does not give you a private encryption solution. Meaning that your data can be accessed & read by anyone from the storage company, opposed to encrypted data that can be read only if you have the decryption key, in this case the provider point it to you quite firmly that if you lose your password, the data will be lost!!!!
In this last section I recounted all the different medias that can be used to store & protect your data. As you can see, there is not any one solution that give us full guaranty of protecting our pictures, all our business office files & database, or the original very big & heavy Photoshop graphics files or video editing rushes and final takes.
The answer to that is Layered Backup Schemes that uses all or some of the aforementioned platforms. This however I will address in my next week blog.
