FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 5-14-04: DriveSavers

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

My webhost is still restoring their e-mail functions after a "massive and critical" update, so this may be a little late in arriving, but at least the backup list alias is in place again so I can send it.

The experience of having my fileslinger.com mail account down for over 24 hours has reminded me that it's important to have a backup e-mail account. I actually have several e-mail accounts. If there's ever a time when you can't reach me at sallie@fileslinger.com, try sallie@animagic.net.

What I wanted to talk about today, though, was DriveSavers, a data recovery company based in Novato. These are the people you go to when your computer has been dropped, burned, drowned, or otherwise damaged beyond repair. They've devised their own technology for getting data off a dead hard drive, and keep a suicide prevention counselor on staff to help panicked customers to cope.

Their website includes a museum showing samples of computers they've recovered the data from, and handy data recovery tips for both PC and Mac users. It's worth printing these out and keeping them handy: then you can try a few things yourself before calling in someone you'll have to pay to do those same things.

And remember—if you have up-to-the-minute backups, you won't need data recovery services. The miracles they work don't come cheap.

Stay tuned for more backup news,
Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 5-7-04: Differential DVD-RWs & reByte

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It's Backup Friday again—prepare to make your backups. In fact, go make them first, and then come back and read this. Or just make the backups and don't bother to read it—I'll never know.

So far my DVD-writer is working out very well. It's much faster now that I got a 9-foot firewire cable and connected it to the back of my XHD.

I had a discussion with the Ur-Guru about whether the backups I'm making onto that rewritable DVD are in fact "differential backups." To him, a differential backup means that only the bytes that have changed get backed up. That means each backup would not copy a whole file, only the changes to the file. That sounds pretty confusing to me, and it doesn't appear to be what's actually happening. (It's also what Microsoft describes as an "incremental backup" in its help files.)

What Rapid Backup is doing is checking for files which have changed and copying any that have a more recent "last modified" date over onto the DVD. I've got it set to run every hour, and it does so pretty unobtrusively, though it did once cause some serious slowdown when it tried to back up a very large Word file while I was working on it.

So I have on that DVD all of my most recent documents and data files, except

1. files that were open when RapidBackup tried to copy them and
2. files that have changed since the last copy session.

I like having this option because I don't have to shut my computer down in order to use it, which I do with the Ghost backups. I'm still making those once a week, though, because the ability to restore my computer just as it was is priceless. But I make a lot of changes to my documents in the course of a week, not to mention all that Quicken entry.

Okay—last week I promised you a bit of "What will they think of next?" in the backup department. This is the reByte™ system, which is a computer built for one purpose only: backing up what's on other computers.

To me, reByte seems like a geek's solution, particularly if you're going to build your reByte™ system out of an old computer. It presupposes enough space to keep a second desktop PC around just to make backups on, as well. And while it automates backups and can back up your whole network in one place, it doesn't create drive mirrors that will restore your software and system state as well as your data. The reByte™ answer to the obvious question "Why not just get an external hard drive?" is "There's nothing to install on your client PC and nothing to remember."

I'm not about to run out and get one, myself. I don't think it's a very good solution for an individual. But for a company that's got several networked computers and no existing backup system, it might be a reasonable and economical option.

More backup news next week!

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 4-31-04: The DVD-writer arrives

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

I've actually been up late two nights in a row making backups. (You must be thinking "Get a life.") My new DVD-writer arrived on Thursday. It came with Sonic Simple Backup, which I thought I'd try, so I installed it and started up a job.

It turns out that my data (documents, photos, Quicken, and Outlook) takes up almost exactly 4.7 GB, which is the capacity of a DVD.

It also turns out that if you operate a DVD-writer from a USB 1.1 port, it takes a very long time to record that much information—much longer than the backup of my entire drive to my firewire XHD via Norton Ghost. I've ordered a 9-foot firewire cable and a hub, so I should be able to take care of that problem.

SimpleBackup recorded and verified a backup, but since it didn't have the capacity to make scheduled or differential backups, which is part of what I wanted the DVD-RW for, I decided to uninstall it, reformat the disk (a much faster process than writing to it in the first place), and then install a differnt program, the freeware utility Rapid Backup, which lets me not only specify the directories I want backed up but schedule backups on an hourly or daily basis and monitor files for changes in order to make backups. So far it seems to be working fairly well, and the resulting backups appear on the disk as a file system which can be accessed via Windows Explorer.

Last night I was up late because I forgot to delete the oldest Ghost backup before recording the newest one, and had to start over.

I am told that I should make my ongoing differential backups to my XHD and then copy the whole backup to the DVD-RW. I'm sure they would be faster to write, at least at the moment—but then, it takes much less time to write a few changed files to the DVD-RW than to copy the entire 4.7 GB over.

If anyone is thinking of getting a DVD-RW drive, my experience with this one has so far been good. It's a Panasonic internal drive set in an aluminum case by Meritline.com, and the combo USB 2.0/Firewire version cost less than $200 including a rewritable DVD. It works with either Windows or Mac and with XP and OSX, all you have to do is plug it in and turn it on. It will then, as the instructions promise, "enumerate itself." (That means it shows up as a drive with a letter, in my case Drive F.) It also comes with video and sound recording software for making DVDs with. I don't think I'm going to start doing any video editing soon, but you never know—more and more of my clients want videos for demo or other purposes, and DVD is rapidly becoming the medium of choice.

I still consider my pocket-sized 80 GB external hard drive my main backup drive, and it's not that much harder to carry around than a DVD.

Tune in next week for a new twist in the backup field. Meanwhile, keep making those backups!