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.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
I read John Schinker’s blog and posted the following. For those of us regular household computer users a server is not too economical right now. My wife and I have very important files/folders on our two hard drives at home that we back up 3 times a year. My wife has thousands of digital and scanned pictures of our 3 kids, 52 hours of digital video thus far (all backed up on DVDs in the safe) and I have financial records and important school documents related to my teaching. If our hard drive crashed, it would truly be a crisis in our lives. Thank God for Nero. We use Nero software to perform a full system back up. Again, it is not near the efficency or productivity as a server, but for the regular household user, one can benefit grealty from this type of software. I simply tell Nero which files and folders to back up onto DVD. Right now, I am at 9 GB of data (excluding the digital video) which is two DVDs of information. If our hard drives crashes, I just have to reload Nero and then perform and system restore with the data on the DVDs. My hopes is that one day servers become as economical as computers have become over the last several years. But until then, I am sticking with Nero Back it up.