How to heartbreak proof your data: The basics of backup.

Why should you back up?

You have valuable material on your computer. Pictures and videos, email addresses and phone numbers, bank account information, and silly sentimental things. And they all live on your hard drive.

It’s convenient, but it also exposes a lot of important things to loss in the same accident. This is why you should back up your hard drive.

Can data be recovered from a failed hard drive?

If you don’t back up your hard drive and something happens, you might still be able to salvage some of your files. But it’s not easy, it’s not cheap, and it’s not guaranteed.

You’re far better off having a backup system. That way, instead losing all of your photos, music, videos, and files, you only lose a hard drive. And that’s something that’s much easier to replace.

How likely are you ever to lose any data?

According to various studies, 6% of computer users lose some of their data in any given year. That’s one out of every seventeen computers. Which seems fine . . . until that one computer is your computer.

But there’s one more statistic that works against the average computer user. Nearly half of them never make backups. Never.

There are no guarantees in life. But you can certainly beat the odds with just a bit of knowledge and the right product or plan.

What are your backup options?

There are four basic approaches to backing up your data:

1. CD/DVD
   Simply copy your important files onto CDs or DVDs. This is an inexpensive method at first, but if you back up as frequently as you should, you begin to accumulate a lot of old discs with old data. Plus you have to take the time to create and burn these discs, then sort through them to find the file you might be looking for.
2. USB sticks
   Just copy your files onto a series of USB sticks or “flash drives.” This is easier than burning CDs and DVDs, plus you can carry your backup with you. But these tiny drives don’t have the capacity for a full backup, so you’ll have to use a few of them. And they’re as easy to lose as they are to use.
3. Online backup
   Pay a backup service, install their software, and let your computer back itself up automatically over the Internet. This is an easy “set it and forget it” backup method, and it puts your backup offsite which saves you from having to make a backup of your backup. But there are yearly fees and the backups could slow down other tasks you want to perform over your Internet connection.
4. External hard drive
   Hook up an external hard drive—like a Seagate FreeAgent® drive—to your computer and simply drag your files to the drive to back them up. A drive like Seagate Replica will automatically and continuously backup your entire system for you. And a system like Seagate Central Axis can serve as a backup for every computer on your network.

Does a RAID configuration mean you don’t have to backup?

RAID (specifically RAID 1) is a method of using two internal hard drives that mirror one another. So, in theory, if one of them fails the other keeps going.

We say in theory, because RAID has been known to react differently in real life than it does on paper. There have been reliability issues with RAID configurations—failures, data corruption, etc. And with both drives in the same location, whatever might corrupt one drive could easily get both—a power surge, fire, or flood.

So, in our opinion, using RAID is not a substitute for performing regular backups to an external drive.

Sources

• http://www.bostoncomputing.net/consultation/databackup/statistics/
• http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
• http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/663