Don’t Lose Everything

About the worst thing that can happen to you, short of identity theft, is your hard disk failing and losing all your important data.

Now just how bad this is depends on your answers to the following:

Do you have any backups?
Do you have irreplaceable documents or photographs?

If the answers are “no” and “yes” you potentially have a big problem.

And don’t forget email. I know of court cases which have been lost because email records didn’t go back far enough.

When a disk fails it can do so in different ways. Sometimes the failure is catastrophic and it never works again. Other times the disk will work intermittently.

What this means in practice is a computer which either won’t start at all or one that starts sometimes and not others or suddenly stops working after a few minutes.

In all cases the thing you shouldn’t do is panic. A failing disk may only have an operating life of a few minutes. So it’s best to get help before doing anything else.

What you shouldn’t do is reinstall the operating system. That is the fastest way to lose all of your data and if the disk is failing it will probably give up the ghost for good measure.

I had a laptop disk which went wrong a couple of years ago which would work for a few minutes at a time when it was cold. Now, I had backups, but some things that I wanted were not regularly backed up. This was annoying but over a period of a couple of days I was able to copy off the missing files a few at a time. In the end I lost not a single file.

If you have seriously valuable data it may be worth sending the disk to a data recovery lab. These can be very expensive however.

What about backing up?

If you have important data a good rule of thumb is to have three copies to be reasonably sure of not losing it.

Possible backup technologies:

Disk - disk is the most reliable form of data storage.
Tape - relable but is expensive to set up and run.
CD/DVD - Cheap. Reliability problematic. Not suitable for very large backups.
Memory stick - Good for backing up smallish quantities. Very convenient and quite fast.

Disk drives are the most reliable form of data storage. The technology is mature prices fall constantly and some drives come with five year warranties. Possibly the simplest backup is to have a second disk fitted to a desktop machine. Next would be an external USB/FireWire/SATA disk drive.

If you have more than a couple of machines to backup you need to think about getting a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. NAS devices plug into your network and allow several machines to access files at the same time. Some allow a USB disk to be plugged into the back as the backup device. Prices of NAS devices have fallen to the point where it is possible to get a 500GB device, with a 500GB backup from a well known manufacturer for around £200.

Ideally one copy of your data should be somewhere different from your computer or network.

I know of someone who had carefully backed up their important stuff including wedding plans to memory sticks. This was really good. But when their laptop was stolen from home so were the memory sticks. So game, set and match.

Software

Assuming that you are not big enough to need a tape solution (which is overkill for many small businesses) there is a wide choice of software.

Microsoft have a free utility called the SyncToy. This is good enough for many people as long as you can find the files to backup and remember to run SyncToy regularly.

I use two pieces of software for backing up: