When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, confessing our sins and acknowledging Jesus’ victory over death for our salvation, we are granted life eternal with our King. That’s seriously cool stuff.
The same, however, cannot be said of electronics. There is no ‘life eternal’ for electronics although many, if not most, people act like there is. Let me explain, I expect there isn’t a single homeowner out there that doesn’t dread the inevitable death of the water heater, refrigerator, air conditioner, etc. We all know it will happen so if we’re smart, we’re already planning for replacements in terms of budgets or insurance.
When it comes to computers, however, everyone I talk to seems totally surprised when their hard drive fails and they haven’t backed up their data. Confess, it’s happened to all of us, including me. Why are we so stubborn about backing up our data when we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that hard drives live a very finite life? I don’t know about you but in my experience, it only takes one drive failure accompanied with complete data loss to learn the lesson…back up your data!
I recently dropped my cute, pink portable external hard drive on my beautiful hard wood floor. While I love both, they didn’t love each other! Something inside my hard drive was knocked loose and my computer could no longer read from it. In the end, I was able to recover all of my data but it re-taught me a valuable lesson that I won’t soon forget: Back up everything and do so daily!
I have a lot of redundancy built in to my backup routine that may be considered overkill by most but since I’ve been taking digital pictures for five years, upwards of 10,000 images annually, losing those images would be far too devastating to articulate. My kids are 5 and 7 so those years of images represent the greatest changes in their development. To say I would cry would barely scratch the surface.
So how do you go about making regular backups to your data? There are several options from which to choose so surely there’s one that suits your workflow. Here are the main backup methods available:
1. CD/DVD:
Most computers these days have a DVD writer included and for those that don’t, external DVD writers are very affordable. I use high capacity DVD’s to store data that I won’t be accessing very often but can’t risk losing. For instance, all of my family images get saved to DVD’s and stored in the fireproof safe. As technology improves, I’ll need to be certain to upgrade this media, though, to keep up. Remember those 5¼“ floppy disks from way back when? Long term storage on one of those would be useless now as there’s no way to read the data. CD’s and DVD’s, however, have been proven to be a safe and effective way to store data long term. The disc’s ability to hold the data’s integrity will outlast the disc’s position in the marketplace. Just be sure to transfer the data to the disc’s replacement as technology improves.
2. External Hard Drive, Part One:
I’m breaking this category into two sections because it seems a good place to explain how I put this tool to use in my own workflow. Computers die. When a computer dies, you loose access to your internal hard drive. While there are ways to work around this, they usually require skills or hardware not available in your own home, which means it’ll cost you a fair amount of cash. No one wants that. For this reason, I generally make the following recommendation: Place only your Application files on your internal hard drive. Application files are going to be the files necessary to operate your computer and its programs. Then, keep all of your personal data files on a portable external hard drive that’s backed up daily. Not only does this multiply your storage space, but also protects your data files from computer failure. This is also handy when you upgrade your computer. No more messy and time consuming file transfers!
3. External Hard Drive, Part Two:
I have been using desktop external hard drives for years now and couldn’t imagine my workflow without them. I recently purchased a 2Tb RAID 1 which I absolutely adore! That’s Geek for ‘really big, double redundancy backups.’ Is my geek showing?
The cost of external hard drives has dropped so dramatically that you can get a great drive with plenty of storage space in the neighborhood of $100. If you’re on a PC, most of these drives also come with the software to schedule automatic backups on a regular basis, just make sure that you plug it in or it won’t work! If you’re on a Mac, Time Machine will perform automatic backups to whichever drive you specify.
If you’re on a laptop then, yes, I do recommend both a portable hard drive and a desktop hard drive. Why? Portables get dropped (refer to #1), spilled on, lost, stolen, etc. Remember that in this case, the portable is not a backup disc; it’s a primary disc that needs its own backup routine.
4. Online Storage
There are a variety of companies that offer storage space on their servers for backup purposes. I have never used any of these services simply due to cost. When researching these great options, just make sure that the space you purchase will accommodate your needs. For the amount of data that I need to store, purchasing external hard drives is a more cost effective approach but most users wouldn’t have the same need for storage. Also, make sure that you check and understand the fee structure in terms of access to your data. You don’t want to pay for the space only to discover that there’s another fee to access your data when you need it!
Another consideration with online storage options is that you will need Internet access for it to work, both in the backup procedure and the recovery procedure. In this military lifestyle, that may not always be reliable.
Whichever method you choose, just choose one and stick with it. Remember to do your backups daily and don’t forget to plug in your drive or it won’t work!
To suggest more Tech Tuesday topics or to comment on this one, you may reach Tracy here.
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