WhatIsYourDataLossVulnerability

A friend of mine just spent a week trying to recover his data after a disk crash. He was only partially successful. Another friend paid $350 to a business that recovers data from hard drives.

If you are like me, you have valuable personal information on your PC, such as financial, correspondence, music, databases and on and on. Much of the data is irreplaceable.

Are you just rolling the dice everyday and hoping your hard disk doesn't fail?

Many of us are IT professionals. We (should) know that disk drives have a large MTBF, but they do fail and usually at the worst time. I suspect that IT professionals are no better or worse than anyone else when it comes to backing up their PC's data. Prove me wrong.

How are you mitigating the risk of losing the data on your PC?

If you aren't, why not?

SteveSmith 2005.01.26

How are you mitigating the risk of losing the data on your PC?

I hardware mirror my primary drive. And do nightly image backups to a third drive. Maximum exposure 24 hours. Cost me $250 more than just the primary drive and another $40 for the image backup program.

SteveSmith 2005.01.26

How are you mitigating the risk of losing the data on your PC? I'm not. If you aren't, why not?

A combination of laziness and inertia. Used to be that the medium for backing (floppy disks) was so much smaller that to be effective, I would have had to separate what is important to backup from what is not.

Now, disks are cheaper. Especially now that I'm buying them as an employed professional instead of broke college student. It doesn't make much sense not to have at least a second drive and do full copies.

ShannonSeverance 2005.01.26

I don't back up everything, but anything I care about I do try & remember to copy from my laptop to our desktop over wireless network. My partner, on the other hand, is a free-lance historian whose current in-progress book is on the desktop. She does a complete backup of her folders to CD every night, and takes the backup to bed -- almost literally. It's on the bedside table to be grabbed if we have to flee in the night. Every once in a while, she also does an 'offsite' backup -- a copy that goes to her mother's place or my desk at my current client. Recently she has also arranged to rent backup space with an outfit where you upload to their server via the web. This is still being worked out. The first time she tried to upload, the job ran all night and finally crashed the computer and our Internet connection after claiming it had another 4500 hours to run. She does have a lot of files, but...

Wow! It's crystal clear how important that data is to her. SteveSmith

FionaCharles 26-Jan-2005

Hmm. I'm still using CDs, and separating the important from the rest. There's a kind of "scorched earth" strategy in play - I've suffered catastrophic crashes, or I've changed PCs, at what I guess is a roughly constant rate of every other year or so. Through all this the two things I've held on to, continuously, is my archive of email conversations, and five year's worth of source code. The rest comes and goes.

I'm probably going to buy a second hard disk and imaging software. Thanks for giving me that nudge.

LaurentBossavit -- 2005.01.27 (Just Backed Up)

I use a zip drive and back up a small number of files. I use the rule if I haven't used it in a year it's probably not important. I don't keep much on my machine that is critical, important, or even desirable.

By the strict definition of recoverable data storage I am vulnerable.

Saving data onsite is insufficient for disaster recovery. Data must be stored offsite and geographically separated to prevent a local geographic problem from wiping out your backups as well. Living in Nebraska, I am subject to the additional risks of windstorms, thunderstorms, or tornado. The risk of tornadoes requires the geographic separation.

Until now, I hadn't really given offsite backup much thought. Thank you and Fiona for causing me to think about it. SteveSmith

In this respect I am not backed up and thus vulnerable.

CharlesAdams -- 2005.01.27

Mulling over this, I have an interesting kind of problem with backup - what counts as data and what counts as program ? There's a core of things I work with on a regular basis - calculator (I'm lousy (and lazy) at mental arithmetic), browser, various programming languages I'm currently playing with or learning in earnest, Usenet reader, mail reader, RSS feed reader, ssh/telnet client, ftp client, text editor, currently some ear-training software. Then there's a lof of ancillary stuff. Reinstalling all that when I change PCs or hard disks is ''the'' major hassle.

''Really'' backing up would be a design effort, consisting of a carefully maintained disk image with the programs I use regularly, deleting or adding as programs move into or out of that category; a secondary disk image, backed up incrementally, with my "data"; and a regular schedule of reinstalling from backup, to get rid of the "deadwood" programs and non-important data that accumulate over time. Just like housecleaning - you get to decide what's structure and what's temporary junk, and that's always a judgement call.

It would be worth it. There are complications: unfortunately, there is no consistent "data discipline" among the programs I use, some store their data where I tell them to, other squirrel it away in some obscure system area, and so on.

LaurentBossavit

Laurent, I have a large amount of programs. Like you, I hate reloading them and then applying the updates. I did that once a couple of years ago during a move to a new PC. Oh. My. Goodness. Never again. It took an entire weekend before I was back up and running.

In the event of a virus or disk failure, I want to recover everything to a known point in time, which for me is 2:00 AM. I'm bagging ZZZs at that time so that's when I run my incremental backup. It's automatic.

Part of what spurred me to do the backup were my digital pictures. I didn't want to lose them because they can't be replaced.

And, yes, I have virus protection. But hackers are clever.

SteveSmith 2005.01.27

An approach for backups would be to perform strict configuration management on the operating system and applicaiton software system disk(s). Upon any install, no matter how trivial, perform a full backup before and after each install. That way one would have a complete history of the O/S and application software and can revert to any point safely.

CharlesAdams 2005.01.27

My entire system backs up automatically every night (and so does Dani's). It's all on a disk, and though I've never yet had to recover the whole thing, I have often recovered files and folders that somehow got trashed. And, since we have two homes, I have an off-site backup 100 miles away, though it's not very up to date in the winter, when we rarely go to the cabin. I also have a second computer in the same room which gets copies of some critical files from time to time, but not so systematically. Then, of course, there are paper copies of various books in progress. That's the important stuff to me. - JerryWeinberg 2002.02.11

Jerry, I would like to know more about your automatic overnight backup system. Is it a commercial product? Is a description of it available on a web site?

DwaynePhillips 12 Feb 2005

Retrospect, by Dantz. I d it and found that Dantz has recently been purchased by EMC, Steve's company, which is logical, I suppose. It seems to be available for Mac (which I use) and PC, which I think is what you use. - JerryWeinberg 2002.02.12

I use a Buffalo Linkstation and a utility called SecondCopy. On Macintosh machines, I use something called psync. -- WillSargent 5/11/05

Since this discussion started, a few weeks back I bought an external disk drive and "PCBackup". It seems to work.

DwaynePhillips 14 May 2005

Updated: Saturday, May 14, 2005