Do You Backup Your Data?
Forrest M. Mims III
The media
release that is still receiving national attention
began, "NASA personnel continue to sift through
37-year-old records in their attempt to locate the magnetic
tapes that recorded the original Apollo 11 video in
1969. The original tapes may be at the Goddard Space
Flight Center, which requested their return from the
National Archives in the 1970s, or at another location
within the NASA archiving system. Despite the challenges
of the search, NASA does not consider the tapes to be
lost." NASA is confident it will eventually
locate the missing Apollo tapes, which filled hundreds
of boxes. Yet if ever was needed a warning about the
importance of backing up your data, this is it. For
if NASA can misplace the most historic video imagery
ever made, so can you and I.
We all know someone who has lost computer
data. Indeed, I suspect everyone reading this has lost
some form of data at some time.
I have lost data by accidentally saving
a new file over an old file with the same file name.
More than once my computer has lost data for no apparent
reason. Then there are the occasional keyboard and mouse
lockups that end up causing lost files that were working
at the time. Folks who don't use a battery-powered backup
power supply know all to well what happens when the
main power fails.
These data losses are usually limited
to just a few files. A fatal hard drive failure is far
more devastating. So is a lightning strike, power surge,
fire or theft.
My son Eric, who is a network administrator
for a university, is familiar with everything that can
go wrong with hard drives and the various strategies
to safeguard data. Because of his experiences and those
of a few friends whose computers were zapped by lightning,
I'm fairly paranoid about backing up my data.
For the past year my computer has had
a pair of 250 megabyte drives set up in a RAID 1 configuration.
This arrangement causes the two drives to be mirror
images of one another. Should one drive fail, the computer
should continue functioning normally.
The RAID 1 arrangement should allow
me to keep working if one drive fails. But what about
lightning, fire or burglary?
A surge protector should protect against
lightning damage. And various security precautions should
keep the computer and its drives safe. But just in case
something goes wrong, a third 250-gig drive sits next
to the computer, to which it is connected by a USB 2.0
cable. Retrospect software allows me to quickly back
up the primary RAID 1 drives to the external drive,
which I do at least once a day.
The external drive is my portable office
when away from home. It plugs into a laptop to provide
all the data and photos stored on the main machine.
If you do not have an external hard
drive, you can store your files on a CD or DVD. But
nothing beats the convenience of a removable hard drive.
Such drives were once a luxury. Today their prices have
dropped substantially, and you can buy a compact drive
with a capacity of 100 megabytes or more for well under
$200. This may sound high until you consider the value
of your files, especially if many photos are stored
on your drive.
NASA is still looking for those missing
Apollo tapes. You might want to keep that in mind if
you don't have a solid backup program for your data.
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