Backup your life
Thursday, 29 January 2009
Before you shred your first sheet, you must have a solid data backup plan. What would you do if your hard drive started the “click of death” the day after the shredding party?
I am passionate about the subject of data backups—this is the first of several articles I have in mind, ranging from the practical generalities down to serious geekdom.
How confident are you in your personal backup strategy?
I have to admit, in the many years that I have worked with computers, I have only witnessed one or two true hard drive failures. There may have been a couple of close calls, where the drive started acting flaky in time to avert disaster; but the modern hard drive is truly amazing in its durability. You can leave one running for years without a hitch, and we often do.
Don’t just think about mechanical failure, consider the following:
- What would happen if you had a disaster in your home, such as a house fire?
- How about if your laptop was stolen. Would you be able to recover the lost files from somewhere else?
- Have you considered that anyone breaking into your home would quite likely take all computer gizmos, including your laptop, desktop machine, and your external hard drives?
No, we aren’t going to set up enterprise-level disaster-recovery procedures in our home, but some basic principles can provide assurance that your life’s history won’t be lost to the bit bucket.
Never destroy a paper document until the scanned version exists in at least two places.
This one stands by itself. Once the original is gone, you can never retrieve it.
Your personal workflow should include a means of guaranteeing that you don’t accidently shred stuff before you have a good backup.
A few other points,
- How do you guarantee you don’t accidentally synchronize in the wrong direction, wiping out new local files instead of copying them to the destination?
- Have you verified that your backup files aren’t corrupt? That would truly suck to reach for the backup only to find that some arcane filesystem error corrupted their content.
- How durable is your backup media? Recordable media such as CD-R and CD-RW have a finite lifespan, and hard drives placed in storage have their own issues.
- How future-proof is your data? To get an idea of what I mean, imagine having to recover 1970s-era CP/M files from an 8″ floppy.
I plan on addressing each of these issues in depth in future articles.
No. 1 — February 19th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
[...] In my mind, your backups should be physically and electronically separated from the source data. Physical separation keeps a single head crash from taking out all of your copies. Electronic separation helps prevent accidental deletion of both at once. Don’t lose your life’s memories! [...]
No. 2 — March 12th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
[...] you have everything checked and safely backed up, you can recycle all of that paper and use the shoebox for something useful like network cables and [...]
No. 3 — May 3rd, 2009 at 8:44 pm
[...] sure your backup process is ready for the increased load. If your backups consist of burning DVDs (or worse, CDs) of your [...]
No. 4 — June 16th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
[...] don’t get a second chance. Make sure whatever you shred has been electronically captured and backed up. Is there an electronic copy safely in two [...]