FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-28-03: Seeking the Holy Grail

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

I know, I know—this is a week late. And no, I don't actually have anything better to do on Thanksgiving morning.

The reason this is late is the same reason I didn't back up my own data last week at this time: I was visiting my family in Cleveland. The laptop came with me, of course, but bringing the ZIP drive would have required another piece of luggage. And I had only a dial-up connection while I was away, which is not very useful for doing extensive online research into backup esoterica.

In my last newsletter, I promised to provide information on the difference between drive mirrors and drive copies. For drive mirrors, see more below.

So here I am back at home searching for what may be the Holy Grail: a backup or copy of your hard drive that you can use on another computer.

Drive imaging software like Norton Ghost creates a "clone" or "mirror" of your hard drive onto an external hard drive or a set of CDs/DVDs. This means that if something goes wrong with your drive, you can restore the whole thing from the mirror rather than starting your installation over from the OS (last clocked in at 11+ hours).

This is a very good thing. However, there's one little problem with this: you can only restore a drive image onto the same hardware you made it from, or an exact duplicate.

This doesn't help much if you have a physical drive failure and you have to send your hard drive (or indeed your entire machine) back to the manufacturer for a week or so to get a replacement. You can't restore your drive image onto the computer that you rent so you can keep working while your main machine is gone, unless it happens to be an exact duplicate of the original, which is fairly unlikely.

The ideal thing would be to have a backup of your hard drive that you could connect to another machine, or use in place of your original hard drive, and run just as if you were using the machine which just got fried or stolen.

Unfortunately, reliable authorities inform me that this is impossible, at least with Windows. (And before you Mac people get too excited, the same is true for Macs.) In essence, if we want that kind of simplicity, we need to start running Linux, which I'm not ready to do.

Okay, so what's the next best thing?

Make sure you have all of your data backed up in a format that doesn't depend on the hardware or OS you're using to access it. Normal methods of making CDs and DVDs (and ZIPs and floppies, though both are becoming increasingly less common) work fine for this. So does just dragging and dropping files like Word documents or images onto your XHD through Windows Explorer.

You may also be able to access the files you have in your drive mirror from another computer if that computer has your drive imaging software on it. But before you rely on this alone, check it out—take your software install disks and your XHD over to a friend's computer, plug it in, and try to access the data. If you can get your files out, you don't need to make a secondary backup (though you might want to anyway).

And what about drive copies? A drive copy utility is designed to help you upgrade from one hard drive to another—usually internal hard drives on desktop computers. Many of the drive mirror software programs have a drive copy utility. Making the copy involves opening up your machine and switching around some connectors. At the end of the procedure, you take the old drive out and use the new drive instead, and the only difference you notice is that you now have more storage space. This can save you time when you're upgrading, but you probably don't want to do it every week as a backup technique, and again, it assumes that the rest of your hardware will stay the same.

I did see one very tempting combination hardware/software product, the CMS ABSplus, which claims you can actually stick it into your laptop in place of your existing drive in the event of total drive failure. (Kids, don't try this at home—at least not if your warranty is still valid.) Indeed, its own advertising makes it sound almost like the Holy Grail discussed above, since it claims you can access your files from any computer. Whether it's actually superior to other drive backup/XHD combinations remains to be seen. If I give in to temptation and purchase one, I'll be sure to tell you all about it.

More backup news next week,

Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-14-03: Non-Computer Backups

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It's time for the weekly mish-mash of backup musings. It's also time for you to go and make your backups if you haven't done it yet.

Running out of CDs? Office Depot is having a buy one get one free offer on Philips CD-Rs this week. They're also offering a rebate on APC battery backup UPS/surge protectors. In case I haven't mentioned it before, you should definitely have one of these to protect your equipment from power surges, rolling blackouts, and bad wiring.

I was reminded this week that it isn't only computer data that should be backed up. You should have at least one copy of any really critical paper, videotape, or audiotape. (I was reminded of that because I finally made up an Advance Health Care directive and in fact had to make 6 copies of it, for my agents, doctor, and family—such a thing is no good if no one knows you have it.) I have scanned some of my IDs, like my driving license, social security card, and passport, as well as making paper photocopies.

Naturally you're safer if you don't keep the copies with the originals.

Another kind of backup that it's good to have is the right kind of insurance. If you have a separate office or employees, you probably already have a Business Owner's Policy, Professional Liability Policy, and Worker's Comp policy. (Lucky you.) For the rest of us, there is the Home-Based Business or Home Office policy, which provides coverage for business property (on and off premises), business liability, loss of income, relocation, and the destruction of valuable papers. Some policies cover the loss of computer software and/or data. (Various computer insurance policies I've had over the years have done that.)

Next week I'll tackle the difference between drive mirrors and drive copies.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-7-03: FTP, Labels, & Mac Backups

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

I've been shifting files from my ancient Mac PowerBook over to my new(ish) Windows XP machine in order to put them onto ZIP disks and be able to take the PowerBook (still completely functional apart from a damaged floppy drive) to the computer recycling people.

In the course of going over these files, I came across something that might interest y'all: a Technostress questionnaire which I used to use when teaching Intro to IT at the University of Warwick. If anyone wants a copy, just ask.

I believe I was actually making backups when one of my floppies got stuck in the PowerBook's floppy drive. It was my attempt to get it out that unseated the drive cable. (Apple does not advise you to open up your Macintosh. Neither do I.) I was preparing to move back to the US and had also quite recently bought a new PC and had a lot of information to transfer. After the floppy drive broke, I had to move everything by e-mailing to myself or uploading it to an FTP file server and downloading it again. (This was all by dial-up, too.) It's a trick you might want to keep in mind in case one of your removable disk drives starts acting up—though most computers these days take more than one kind of media.

Speaking of problems with disks and drives, a geek friend sent me an article about yet another potential threat to your data CDs: homemade CD labels. Despite the fact that these are supposedly designed to be put onto CDs, the author of the article discovered that the glue had eaten through the top layer of the CD and down into the dye layer where the data is stored, and the CDs were completely unreadable.

I have put labels on my CDs for some time, and so far none of them appears to have taken any damage—but they are all less than 2 years old. Personally, I'm wondering what Avery and Fellowes have to say about this.

The other thing that this final cleanout of my old PowerBook prompted me to do was consider the fact that about half of you on this list are Mac users, and many of my comments so far have been generally Windows-related. So I thought I'd do a little checking into Mac backup software.

From what I can see, the main drive-imaging program for Macs is Dantz Retrospect. Iomega Automatic Backup and Apple's .MAC get honorable mention in the search engines. Like Windows programs such as Norton Ghost, these are designed to allow you to restore your system—software, data, and all—in a very short time. I haven't tested any of the Mac programs personally—comments are welcome.

Next week I'll talk more about restoring from backups.

Thanks for reading!
Sallie