Not enough space: The dicey game of storing, backing up files
September 3rd, 2008 By Troy Wolverton
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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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.
Cost Effective Online Data Backup http://www.amerivaultez.com
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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).
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.
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
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.
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.