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Loading ...Backup and storage - when two copies are not enough.
combatus
Losing important files is one problem that is still a thorn in the side of the PC industry. While many factors like hard drive’s failing or a super deadly virus attack are over-hyped somewhat (I’ve only had one drive actually fail in the last 10 years) so long as there is a possibility of losing data, backup is essential.
I consider myself to be pretty good at backing up. I have one large drive in my PC where all my programs, files and photos are stored and I sync this with an external drive every week or so. I’ve lost data once or twice when fiddling around with RAID arrays or formatting drives when installing Windows (completely my fault of course) but on the whole it’s been fine.
Until a few weeks ago…. I was reinstalling Windows and when I ran into problems with a new motherboard recognising a hard drive I decided to try another. I tried both my back up drives – neither of which worked as it turned out to be a faulty board, but in the process I had swapped the data between the two and back again.
All seemed fine – I got a new board and everything installed as it should. Then a few days later I was looking at some photos and found that some wouldn’t open. On further inspection and advice from various forums it was decided that they had become corrupted!!! Not uncommon either apparently and the reason for this was transferring them from one drive to another, in particular amongst large amounts of data (the folder I transferred had all my videos and photos – over 15GB).
Luckily I only lost a handful of photos but this proved to be a dilemma. If when transferring a few files from one drive to another this kind of thing can happen, my back up procedure isn’t enough, as indeed any two drive system isn’t.
I considered a RAID 1 mirror array but then that’s not totally safe from something like a power surge and clearly with watercooling in the system as well, the chance of a bad leak is always there too.
Luckily Custom PC had just reviewed a few online storage companies and after a bit of discussion on the forums I signed up to a site called www.Mozy.com where for about £2 a month you have unlimited storage. I tried a few services before signing up but this proved to be the quickest and the only one where you can easily restore files via several methods (including getting DVD’s sent to you) as well as restore the files+folders in their original organisation and hierarchy – not just individual files.
It takes an age to upload the few gigabytes of data I already had, but once it’s done it’s done. The only downside is that you can only upload from one PC – to do so from another will cost you another subscription. You can however transfer a subscription from PC to another but you have to delete the original backup.
Of course you can just make sure you keep the data on the drive in question and don’t move it like I did and not bother with online storage but what about a fire? Unlikely yes but a possibility.
So this is pretty much solved for me – not only does online storage offer 99.99% security but combined with a basic backup at home it should be all you need and for less than the cost of an 80GB hard drive per year you get unlimited storage. Some other services are free and there are new ones being setup all the time so there might be better ones than the one I’m using.
Funny, the HD in my PC died the other day as well, so I’ve been thinking about backup too. Problem I have with online storage is speed - I save a bunch of my photos on Flickr at full res, and after coming back from a weekend away, uploading a hundred or so takes absolutely ages - and also the privacy issue. I’ve had online accounts hacked into before, and it’s not a pleasant experience. Imperfect as it is, it’s back to multiple hds for me… Although I’ll probably be backing up the whole disk rather than just individual folders.
This is the thing, it does take absolutely ages, not only does it heavily encode it first (I was using my laptop at the time) but then with an upload speed of around 300-500kbps it took ages to upload everything. Took about 4 nights to encode and upload 9GB! (had to stop it during the day as uploading at max speed makes my net connection unusable. I’ve decided to just store my “essential” stuff on there. Everything else I have a copy on another drive like you say.