Backup Early and Backup Often
I was reminded of the need for backups once again today. One of the folks I work for had a hard drive that wouldn’t boot. We dropped it in as a slave to the “clone” machine we use to do bit by bit cloning of drives for e-discovery, and for a little while it seemed like we might be able to get the data from the bad drive over to a good drive. Unfortunately, that process errored out as we went rather quickly from a drive that wouldn’t boot, to a drive that was completely unreadable. Of course, they didn’t have any backups of all those family photos and movies that were stored on the drive.
Now he’s looking at the choice of paying a whole lot of money to someone with the proper tools to try and recover that data from the physical drive or it being gone forever. Not good choices any way you look at it.
It got some of us discussing home backup strategies. Personally, I keep a backup of all our photos and other important files on an external USB drive, but I’m keenly aware that while that lessens the chances of data loss, it is still possible. Should both drives fail in short order, or if something should cause damage to my home office, I may be in just as much pain as someone with no backups. I’ve been keeping an eye on some other tools to add to the overall backup plan, such as Windows Home Server, and online storage. I’ve also been considering burning the photos to DVD and storing that at the office. I guess you could call Flickr my online storage right now, but only a small percentage of my photos show up there, and they show up in reduced quality from the original. I wouldn’t really want those to be the only photos I wind up with, but I guess it would be better than nothing.
I know there’s some folks out there with similar concerns. What are your backup plans? Any of you using online file storage as part of your backup plan? What has your experience with those services been? If you had a client who took a lot of photos, maybe a few home movies, etc. what would your recommendation be for their plan?
Let us know, after you go do a backup, of course. 
August 14th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
I just started trying out Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk. At $0.15/ gig of space used, I can afford to pay 3 to 4 bucks a month to store my whole music and photo collection and all my other important documents.
August 14th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
This may be a little more paranoid / redundant than is really necessary for home use, but I came up this while figuring out the best method for my employer’s backup.
I’ve got a Truecrypt volume that I use to store sensitive data. I only open this volume when I need to access it. Prior to unmounting the volume, I always run an incremental backup on its contents w/ Retrospect. Once backed up, I copy both the volume and the Retrospect files to an external hard drive and also to an off-site backup server. The Retrospect volume is also AES 256 encrypted.
I learned a few hard lessons about securing a backup. I lost some PDFs when the files became corrupted within the Truecrypt volume. Not sure when it happened, but I had made backups of the Truecrypt volume in the past and thought that would be enough. That turns out to be a blind spot in my strategy. Every backup copy had corrupted files.
Now, I run the Retrospect backup on my files while the Truecrypt volume is mounted so that I still have something to work with, even if the volume is corrupted.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
    I have two 200 gig USB drives that I keep a copy of my “important” backups on, and I’ve set up an old computer on the network with FreeNAS, a cheap Raid-1 card, and a pair of 500 gig Seagate Barracuda drives. That’s for automated backups. AND, about once every three months, I make a DVD-R of most of my stuff, and dump it in the safe-deposit box. No, I don’t back up my music on the DVD. There’s too much. And all of my stuff is ripped from my CD collection. Unless the house burns down…
    I had a drive failure about 8 years ago. It was agonizing. Never again will I lose everything on a single event!!!!!
August 15th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I’ve used Mozy for online backups for a few months now, and MozyPro at work for offsite backups, and it’s been great! It’s a great way to be a good, lazy geek (who wants to burn CDs or remember to run a backup to a USB drive they turn off to prevent lightening strike damage?). It’s excellent and after the initial upload, fast, and bandwidth can be throttled. The home (Mozy) version is free for up to 2GB across 2 computers, and $5/mo per computer for unlimited storage, plus they keep 30 days of diffs in case you need to revert.
The link to Mozy above gets you an extra 250MB on top of the 2GB for using me as a referral. All I get is an extra 250MB added to my existing free account, just like you. For free, it’s worth trying! You have the option of using Mozy encryption keys, or if you’re paranoid, at install you may generate your own client-side key which you need to back up offline yourself, because even Mozy can’t read your data if you go that route. I wrote several posts on my blog about getting the pro version (priced per computer and per GB but still reasonable) up and running, including the first post I linked to above about MozyPro.
The added benefit, other than the ability to be more lazy, is that the backups are off-site. House burn down? At least your data’s safe! I don’t work for Mozy, just a happy customer (free at home for now, small paid account at work for the ultra-important info).