The Tiger's Roar is a monthly newsletter, published by Tiger Computer Services, and designed to provide relevant and to-the-point technology information to English speakers living in Israel. This month we will discuss the importance of backing up your data.
True Story #1: I am in my senior year in university finishing my B.S. in Computer Science. It is 2AM in the "Zoo", the computer room where all the Comp. Sci. students gather together to work on their computer projects, sometimes all night long. Suddenly, I hear a shriek, then expletives which I don't care to repeat, then crying.
Had someone been murdered by a serial axe killer? Had an earthquake struck? Nope, none of the above. My friend Donna had just lost 3 years of research and painstaking work, which she was in the middle of assembling into her senior project, one of the requirements for graduation. The shriek came when she realized that she had no backups of her work, and that she had taken for granted that the university's servers (shared disk space) would be sufficient for safeguarding it. She was wrong, and now her work was gone, never to be recovered again.
In the end, Donna did submit a senior project and did graduate, but she had to start again from scratch, with only 3 months left before the end of the academic year, and she ended up getting a B- instead of what almost definitely would have been an A or an A+, not to mention the basis for a future book.
True Story #2: It is about a month ago, and I get a call from a frantic customer who has dropped his laptop. "OK, we can fix the laptop," I said, "but what about your data? Did you back it up like I told you to?" "No. Is there any way it can be recovered?" "Well, we'll have to see."
In the end, it could not be recovered. The hard disk had literally cracked in half, and not even a specialized data recovery lab could do the job. My customer ended up losing 3 years worth of business documents, and thousands of pictures, including those of his daughter's wedding and his young grandchildren. (Yes, some things are priceless.)
Lesson to be learned: If you don't back up your data, it is like driving in a car without a seat belt. Maybe nothing will happen for a while, but when it does, it is going to be a disaster.
[[ YOU MUST HAVE YOUR DATA BACKED UP. END OF STORY. ]]
If you are one of the lucky few who has no really important documents, not a lot of pictures, and music that can easily be replaced, then ignore the rest of this month's newsletter (except for my ad at the bottom, of course.) But if you are like most of us -- in this computerized day and age -- who have half their lives on their desktops and laptops, including things that are priceless and can't be replaced, then
you must have your data backed up.
If you do not currently have a data backup plan, then
you must come up with one within the next month. If you do not, you might as well be jumping out of an airplane without a secondary parachute.
The are a couple of options for backing up your data, and I will now list them in the order of what is, in my opinion, the least desirable to the most desirable.
[[ OPTION #1: BURN TO CD OR DVD ]]
This was
the option up until a few years ago, before disks-on-key and external USB drives became popular and reasonably priced. If you are burning to CD or DVD, then this is better than nothing, but I strongly recommend that you consider one of the other options listed below.
Burning to CD / DVD is a slow, time-consuming process. There is a restrictive limit to how much data you can store on a single disk (approximately 800 MB for a CD and 4 GB for a DVD). This means you will probably have to burn multiple disks. As opposed to other options, burning to CD / DVD is usually a completely manual process (i.e. you must remember what you did and did not back up in the past). Finally, CD's and DVD's are easily damaged through scratching, warping due to excessive heat or moisture, or accidents such as dropping or even writing on the wrong side of the disk in magic marker. If a disk becomes damaged, then the data will become completely or partially unreadable.
[[ OPTION #2: EXTERNAL (USB) HARD DRIVE ]]
The price of external hard drives, which connect to your computer through one of its USB ports, has dropped significantly in the past year. You can now get a decent 500 GB (gigabyte) drive for under 400 NIS, which should be more than sufficient to back up all of your important data. (If you have under 64 GB of data -- which many people do -- you might even consider the cheaper option of a disk-on-key.)
Backing up your data to an external USB drive eliminates many of the disadvantages of burning to CD / DVD: it is relatively quick, you can store all of the data on a single drive, and there are software programs available to automate the entire process. (For instance, many models of Western Digital drives come with such software included for free.) In addition, data, once stored on an external drive, is relatively secure, and can survive being dropped or banged around a bit.
All this being said, there are still some disadvantages to external drives. Your drive can be damaged, lost or stolen -- especially if you carry it around with your laptop (as so many people do): if your laptop bag gets lost or stolen, your external drive goes right along with it. If there is a fire or flood (God forbid) in your house, your external drive can be damaged with the rest of your computer equipment. Finally, if you choose the disk-on-key option, keep in mind that they are quite small and can be easily misplaced or lost if you are not careful.
[[ OPTION #3: ONLINE AUTOMATED BACKUP SERVICES ]]
This is what I use to back up all my data. Online services such as Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) and Mozy (www.mozy.com) really are, in my opinion, the best option. For about $50 (USD) per year per computer, you get a safe, secure, automated backup of all your important data.
These services work by transferring all of your important files across the internet to the company's remote servers (computers). If your personal computer is ever lost or damaged, you just log on to the company's website, provide your username and password, and recover all of your data to any computer you want. The advantages of such services are:
1. Your data is extremely safe: First of all, it is far, far away from you. While you might like the feeling of having a USB drive or a pile of DVD's sitting right next to you on the desk or in the cabinet, the fact of the matter is, your data is far safer when it is far away from you. If your house gets robbed, your laptop gets stolen, or there is damage from flooding or dropping, your data will not be affected. Nope, it will be sitting quietly somewhere on the other side of the world.
Another point to keep in mind is that companies such as Carbonite or Mozy are -- unlike you -- experts at storing and protecting data. This is their job, and it is what they do best. For instance, Carbonite actually does not keep just a single copy of your data, but multiple ("redundant") copies stored at different ("distributed") data centers around the world, some of which are underground and protected even from earthquakes and nuclear war (well, in theory at least.) If one data center fails, then -- no worries -- your data exists in multiple copies elsewhere, and you will never even feel the difference.
2. Your data is automatically backed up: That's right, you barely have to do a thing. You pay the backup service their money, download the program, press go, and the program takes care of the rest for you -- automatically and behind the scenes. Most of the time, you won't even know the backup program is running. (The only thing you may have to do, from time to time, is tell it which files you want backed up, if they are not in one of the standard folders such as "My Pictures" or "My Documents".)
3. Your data is transferred securely: If you're worrying about transferring sensitive documents such as your bank statements, your plans for a new business, or your great grandmother's secret recipe for shoe-fly pie, then don't. Files are transferred and stored in encrypted format. For instance, Mozy's website boasts, "We protect your files with military-grade encryption -- the same security online banks use during data transfer." In fact, chances are, your data will be far more secure sitting on one of their servers than it will be laying around your house on your hard drive or disk-on-key.
So what are some disadvantages of online backup services? First of all, they do cost money. Fifty dollars (USD) per computer per year is not too bad, but if you have many computers in your home or office, then the price can add up. (And don't think you can trick them into backing up two computers using one subscription. I tried it. It doesn't work.) Secondly, you have to be careful that the backup program is indeed backing up everything you want it to. For instance, Carbonite will not back up the videos in your "My Videos" folder unless you explicitly tell it to. While telling it to do so is just a matter of a few simple mouse clicks, you still have to remember to make those clicks. Finally, there is that somewhat queasy feeling of not having your backed-up data nearby. Yes, it might be more of a feeling than reality, but it can still make us a bit uneasy. (One solution is to make multiple backups of truly important data -- one using an online backup service, and another using an external USB drive or disk-on-key. This is what I do with my most important data.)
However, despite some of these (minor) disadvantages, it is this third option that I most strongly recommend.
Whichever option you choose, be it burning to CD / DVD, saving to external USB hard drive or subscribing to an online backup service, make sure your backups are being done regularly and that if you use an online service, your subscription is up to date. Let us learn from the mistakes of others, and not end up screeching in the middle of the night, like Donna.
[[ ANNOUNCEMENTS! ]]
- Tiger Computer Services is now offering a new service called "Bill Adjustment". It works like this. We will contact all of your technology service providers (home phone, television, internet, cell phone, etc.) and, using our expertise in talking to them in their language, we will identify opportunities to lower your monthly bill, that you might have overlooked or not even known exist. In some cases, we have been able to save our customers as much as 50% off of their monthly technology bill. When our work is done, you will receive a complete, detailed analysis of your current technology situation, with suggestions, tailored to your particular situation, for saving money in the future. The cost of this service is 125 NIS plus 1/3 of the money we save you over the course of one year. In short, you can't lose: if we are not able to save you any money, you only pay us the 125 NIS. Call us at 050-708-1599 to get started.
- In closing, as always, I would like to remind all of our customers of the importance of having regular maintenance performed on their computers. This means making sure that Windows updates are installed, that the Windows (or other) firewall is turned on, and that an anti-virus program is installed, and up to date. Also, you should always have all of your important data backed up. I highly recommend arranging a checkup for your computer once every 6 months, even if it seems to be working well. This will prevent expensive and time-consuming problems in the future, not to mention the loss of important data.
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