Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Buy yourself a backup storage if you are a responsible computer user
I write this post after a few years of experience dealing with my own and other people's computers. It is absolutely crucial and necessary to have any form of backup where you can store your personal and business data such as pictures, music and other documents which represent a certain emotional and financial value to you.
When you have just one computer at home or in your business and everything is running perfectly your mind does not recognize a certain danger which can appear at any moment of your computer's life. One day you open your computer and your hard drive is dead or just about to die. If you do not have any backup you are in trouble not because your data is lost forever as this is almost impossible, but because the data recovery is a very expensive process and you have no warranty that your data comes back to you in 100%.
The easiest way to secure yourself from this problem is buying a big memory stick 32GB or an external hard drive which can be attached to your computer to update your external storage.
Comparing costs of both processes is very simple:
1) extra hard drive or memory stick costs up from £15 to £80
2) professional data recovery minimum £200
Everyone who's experienced a hard drive recovery process knows perfectly what I am talking about. And to those who never have this issue I can only say that prevention is much cheaper than emergency.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Good advice.
One of the features of Macs that Apple doesn't make nearly enough of, is Time Machine. It's a piece of software included with Mac OS X that completely automates backup. It requires an external hard drive of course. When I first plugged in my external drive (happens to be a Western Digital) and fired up Time Machine, I was amazed.
This is Apple at its absolute best, in my opinion. What they've managed to do is make extremely sophisticated backups, extremely easy. More than this, when you need to retrieve a previous file or folder, the process is a pleasure to use. It's verging on fun.
Time Machine is there for the hopefully remote problem of total disc failure. That hasn't happened yet. But I hadn't expected that its also useful on a more regular, ad hoc basis. It's a big reassurance.
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Permalink Reply by DrWhams on
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I'm quite a fan of Acronis True Image Home for Windows, which will backup your entire system, plus also it has a Time Machine style facility of restoring to a specific point in time.
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Permalink Reply by Marek on
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Dear All
I am glad that this discussion about the backup and hard drives runs very well and so many people can read this and be aware that their computers are not immortals and also have two dimensions - technical and emotional. From that moment when we start storing our pictures and personal documents these machines stop being just souless machines but became our very important family members without our conciousness.
We people rely on these machines and call them heartless devices but leaving fruits of our work and storing our family and friends pictures we made them more important than we even think. When hard drives die and there is no more copies of our documents and data we feel that we lose something very very important. This original post need to be repeated many times during existance of this website so there will be less cry and sorrow amongst computer users.
Almost every piece of data can be recovered by professionals but the price of their service can scared almost everybody who is so despareted and determined to return their previous status quo. There is no jokes and smiling faces when they ask for £300 or £400 just at the beginning. This price for business is not a big problem but an ordinary home user has much more difficult decission to take.
I repeat this many times and make my computer clients aware of this danger when I meet them face to face but I hate these moments when there is no other copy of the data and thousands of family pictures are not recovarable with simple hard disk transfer.
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In a sense, we're coming full circle with computing. When the personal computer revolution began in the late 1970s, mainframe engineers from the likes of IBM were horrified at all the stuff that was being shorn from computers in order to make them small, cheap, simple, independent and unconnected.
Included in the long list of things stripped out were security, networking ability and back-up. The whirling spools on mainframe's one saw at the time was tape back-up.
What worried the engineers was the lack of redundancy in the new cut-down systems and the "single-point-of-failure", i.e. a fault at any one place would upset the whole apple cart.
With the Internet, networking has been added back and increasingly, back-up provision also.
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Permalink Reply by Marian Leatherby on
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Marek thank you for this very helpful article.
Excuse my ignorance, my question is, with a memory stick like you suggest, can you make it automatically save changes, or how does that work please?
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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(1) ...and dont forget to update it - every day/week/however much you don't mind losing.
(2) No-one can recover data when the burglars have been. An extra backup disc elsewhere is more peace of mind.
(3) Any suggestions for easily managed backup software for PC? I've looked at a few freebies but they dont look too friendly. Something that would check my backup drive and my internal drive, recognise any changes and punt them across. I can copy folders of photos easily enough but its all those fiddly changes to other docs that can get forgotten.
(4) and yes I have had hard drives fail. It does happen. And chip failure so the machine dies, and last time this happened I somehow lost my email archive, so it's good to save that to another disc too.
(5) Computers get replaced. It's handy to have the contents on another drive, so you dont have to pay The Tech Guys £60 to to copy your data. I have every file (apart from those emails) I've ever written, a dozen machines later, but then I'm a terrible hoarder. The old ones are smaller...
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As I mentioned earlier, I'm a big fan of Acronis True Image Home. It's about £20-£30, but it's pretty robust and easy to use (and powerful if you need the extra control). It's pretty automatic and will do what you need.
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Some very critical reviews of this out there. And it looks like it does more than i need and creates strange proprietary files. I just want data checked and copied, not whole HD with all software, I can reinstall that by hand, if a major crash I'd probably buy a new machine. Still googling.
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I've been using it for about 4 years and it's been very reliable for me. I'm a software developer by trade, so I take my choice of software very seriously. It also comes with a recovery suite, which most backup apps don't. A few years ago I was bothered by proprietary formats, but that really doesn't bother me any more (with many tools you can't create Zip files over 4Gb). You can also configure it to just copy subsets of files rather than whole disks. Myself, I've got a very complicated backup regime that it deals with just fine:
- Whole disk image gets backed up once a month as an incremental with a full backup every 6 months
- Photos backed up every 3 days
- Photos backed up to an external hard disk once a week
- Documents backed up every day
- Whole system backed up onto a different hard disk every few months that I take to work
- etc
I used to faff around with zip files, but I gave up on as this was much easier and gave me the granularity I need.
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Permalink Reply by Stuart on
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Agree that Acronis True Image is good but the new (2011) version is an absolute pig's breakfast in terms of user interfaces for anyone who's not a software expert developer/IT expert. Utterly counter-intuitive (for the layman). I think that's what most of the negative feedback reflects.
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(1) Time Machine is totally automatic and once set up, you can forget about it. Setting up is so easy, a child can do it. It'll go on working as long as the computer is on, the software is switched on, the external is plugged in and on. Nothing more to do.
(2) Burglars could steal a local external hard drive it is true, which is why some form of off-site backup is desirable. They can't steal that, although you could forget the user name and password.
(3) Apple has got back up completed nailed with Time Machine. No extra cost; a standard part of the world's most advanced operating system, Mac OS X since version Leopard.
(4) Macs ain't perfect though. Hard drives can and do fail in them too, despite the superiority of the UNIX-class operating system that runs on them.
(5) When you need to retrieve a file or folders, Time Machine is a pleasure to use. This is how backing-up should be: simplicity and sophistication.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I use Crash Plan as belt and braces - that way all the important stuff is covered in the event of fire/ theft.
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