Not enough space: The dicey game of storing, backing up files

About five years ago, a technical disaster struck Fernando Santos: His computer hard drive failed. The San Francisco resident lost everything on it and had to reformat his drive. "I lost a lot of nice pictures," said Santos, 20.

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• fuchikoma - Sep 03, 2008
  • Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
  Very true. I am a technical support analyst, but don't let the title fool you, I've been using PCs for about 22 years. I've lost files to crashes because as a kid I just couldn't afford backups. I've lost 15 year old files!
  
  Now I back up certain files to an external hard drive, but all of my "media" (non-program) files are mirrored - my PC has a pair of disks that hold the same data in what's known as "RAID 1." It's a cheap conumer level solution that may not be usable if my PC itself died, but it's SOMETHING, and mechanical parts are most likely to fail.
  
  Ideally... I could encrypt an external disk with something like TrueCrypt, using a nice speedy algorithm, then back up everything to it (or them?) regularly, and store them in a post office box to keep them off-site in case of natural disasters or... I don't know... freakish unheard of electromagnetic discharges?
  
  But fundamentally:
  - Use media with a long shelf life. Not CDR/DVD-Rs, they use photochemicals and some may lose data in 3-5 years. Seriously. It's hit me too.
  
  - Backup regularly. "It's ok, I have a copy of that file from 2003!" ...no.
  
  - Off-site storage. If at all possible... and if you have anything you don't want the world to know, encrypt it. Doing so is free, and only a tiny nuisance these days.
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• starannihilator - Sep 03, 2008
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  All good advice. I'm in the storage industry, and for my personal stuff, I backup with ... they say..
  Cost Effective Online Data Backup http://www.amerivaultez.com
  plug />
  
  It is cheap, easy but robust if you wanna get into it, automatic... umm it's online backup. Dunno what else to say. Lots of settings, as well as backend reporting for admins.
  
  I really did my homework and this is basically MozyPro (or whatever the best one is) resold by a company known for support and recovery / DR. I look at it as getting personal service instead of automatically generated FAQs and stuff. Though you can get those too, lol
  
  They have a server version too, if you are going to use it for work (or whatever).
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• mike352 - Sep 03, 2008
  • Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
  I don't see the point of this article - it just complains about the state of things - it doesn't suggest any course of action or what might be on the horizon. It doesn't even suggest making the average consumer more aware of the necessity of backing up their data - all it says is that "backing up data is still too complex a task for most consumers".
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• Oderfla - Sep 03, 2008
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  @mike Fortunately we have a fairly concientious group perusing these articles and two out of four so far have suggested alternatives.
  
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• DoctorKnowledge - Sep 04, 2008
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  This data problem is very real. At NASA one day, I wandered into a room full of reel-to-reel tapes a guy was working on. He said it was the complete (and only!) record of one of the moon landers. Sometimes, he said, when he put a tape on the machine, it just turned into confetti. He was trying to save what little was left.
  
  Also, one option not mentioned above: If it's really important, print it to cotton paper, using a B&W laserjet (not an inkjet). I have many things I otherwise would have lost due to problems with storage media. Put it on cotton paper, and stick it in a bank vault, and your g-g-g-g-g grandchildren will be able to read it with zero problem.
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• Jarek - Sep 04, 2008
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  There are possible data correction methods, which are resistant to error density fluctuations.
  They rather have to (?) need a lot of computation to cope with hard cases, but it's not large price if we want to recover archive.
  I'm describing one approach here:
  http://www.scienc...?t=34353
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• Noumenon - Sep 04, 2008
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  See, this is why cavemen carved there stuff in stone and didn't waste time on technology,... ironically they didn't have anything important to record.
  
  Seriously though, the key is redundancy like a Raid HDD setup even if done manually, (cloned backup to multiple drives.). The article didn't mention this obvious solution (?).
  
  Those who don't do regular backups in 2008, probably don't have valuable data anyway, and many who do are warehousing reruns of Lavern & Shirly.
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• Mayday - Sep 04, 2008
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  I disagree with the article's primary point that the barrier is complexity. The act of backing up, either to disc or an external drive is not complex. It is pretty much drag-and-drop. The real barrier seems to be cost, both in time and money.
  
  Memory has remained very expensive on a user file-unit basis. True, actual megabyte cost has fallen, but the user file unit size (digital images, music files, videos, etc) is outpacing the actual megabyte price slide.
  
  For example, I'm going from a 7mp camera that records jpgs to a 13.5mp camera that records RAW. That's going from 2.5mb per photo to over 35mb(approx). So I'm falling well behind in the cost-to-backup battle.
  
  It's a neccessary cost that I'll absorb. But I do wish that someone would hurry up and do the math: Getting the cost of memory down(I mean WAY down) will dramatically increase the across-the-board market penetration of all things digital.
  
  Cheap cheap memory in the pathway to a true digital revolution.
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• lowbatteries - Sep 05, 2008
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  No mention in the whole article about "cloud" storage, like Amazon's S3, or high-capacity Blu-ray, or even extremely fault tolerant RAID drive setups, ZFS pools, all this becoming much more available to the average user. Skip the article and just read the comments - they're more useful.
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• CreepyD - Sep 08, 2008
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  As far as photo's go, it's not all about the megapixels. Buy a cheap 5MP camera and an expensive 5MP camera, and the pics will be very different. 3MP is way big enough for A4 printing on a decent camera. 13MP is silly unless you want huge posters.
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