From 2004 to 2008 I was lucky. During that time I didn’t have a single hard drive failure at home. The law of averages caught up with me this past summer. Within a span of thirty days, three of my hard drives, including the hard drives of my two main computers crashed. All the data was gone. Not even SpinRite could bring it back.
Here is the good news. I did not lose anything. All my important data was safe on backup disks. Every night, while I sleep, all my important files (document folders, databases and web site) are archived on external hard drives. I have three different external hard drives, so I always have multiple generations of archived files.
My friends haven’t been so lucky. In the last month three different people have given me computers with dead hard drives. The hard drives have pictures, personal communications, financial information and other files the owner must have back. None of the files have been backed up anywhere.
Take a look at the last slide of the embedded PowerPoint. It shows that 4.7 gigabytes of data can be saved to one twenty-five cent recordable DVD. Almost every computer made today has a DVD burner. Using a burner and a quarter-dollar blank DVD, most of your files could be saved. In fact, if you buy a 50 pack of DVDs, you could backup all your files once a week for a year for a total cost of $12.50.
There are many ways to backup your files. The simplest way is to drag your Documents folder onto a blank DVD. If you have pictures, music or video files, you may have more than 4.7 gigabytes of data. In that case, use multiple disks. I can backup everything important to me using ten blank DVDs. Burning ten DVDs takings more of my time that I want to devote to backups. That’s why I use external hard drives.
Another tool I use is Mesh. This free tool from Microsoft lets me synchronize my files across multiple computers. It’s a “real-time” backup. When I change a file on my home desktop, my office desktop automatically gets the updated version of the file too. It is an automatic off-site backup.
USB flash drives are also convenient backup devices. Important information can be duplicated on one of these portable drives. Most of my students use USB drives in the computer labs. I have only seen a handful of these drives fail and those were mostly due to physical damage. On the other hand, most of my students have lost a USB flash drive at some point (dropped it somewhere, left it in the lab, etc). Once again, if all your files are on one drive (hard drive, external drive, USB flash drive) and you lose that drive, all your files are gone.
Given all the digital data we have, personal backups are more important than ever. If you don’t have an established backup routine, establish one today. You will thank yourself later.