Backups

John Schinker has a post that talks about the reliability of hard drives. I read the study by the Google people, and I can vouch for their results. I may not have the thousands of drives that they have, but my percentages of failures is similar. I look at it this way. If it is a hard drive, it will eventually fail. If you are lucky, the failure will be in the distant future.

I don’t chance things. I have one computer that does nothing but backups. During the night, it runs Cobain Backup and gets all the important information from my machines, my wife’s machine and the servers. The backups are saved onto a USB drive which is swapped out once a week. I have three 250 GB USB drives. One is always connected to the backup computer, one is waiting on the shelf and one is at my office at UF. I am happy to report that in twenty years of using PCs, I have only lost a significant amount of data one time… in 1989. Almost twenty years ago, while I was in graduate school, my main hard drive died. I lost about a week’s worth of data. That’s when I started doing regular backups. Since then, I haven’t lost more an hour’s worth of work on the rare occasion that my computer locks up in the middle of a project.

I have had some catastrophic drive fails, one of them being a few months ago over Christmas break. My web server which houses this blog, and many other important things, lost the main drive. Since the computer I was using was really old (vintage 1999), I decided to replace the whole thing. I was off line for a week or so while I scraped together some “not nearly as old as the last server” used parts to build a new (circa 2003) server. Once I had a working machine, I was back up and running in a couple of hours. Everything was just as I had it before.

When I talk with my students about backups, I always get the same thing. “What is a backup?” Most of them have USB flash drives. Anything from the lab usually gets saved to those portable drives. Beyond that, I haven’t had one student with a plan in place to backup important files.

Considering that a blank DVD costs less than 50 cents, everything created by a student during a four-year degree could be backed up many times for a few dollars. The media costs almost nothing. The data saved on it could be priceless.