FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-30-04: Microwave CDs

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It's time to back up your data again. It's also time I thought of something really original and new to say in this reminder notice, but all I have for you this week is a tidbit on how to destroy your data...which, of course, you might want to know, given what's happened to our right to privacy.

The Ur-Guru was watching "Unscrewed" on his laptop last week and I caught a segment about ways to make sure your data is totally destroyed. A few were rather fanciful, such as the liquid nitrogen combined with a sledgehammer.

However, almost everyone has a microwave, and it turns out that if you microwave CDs on the "popcorn" setting, they arc into artistic craquel patterns and become completely unusable. (The microwave appears to survive just fine.)

In general, fire is a more effective way to destroy a hard drive than water.

Data recovery centers have been able to retrieve data from computers that were buried under water or mud, but fire is much harder on a disk. (Some firefighting chemicals also damage electronic equipment.) This is one reason you should make sure your computer is properly ventilated and doesn't get too hot. Laptop users need to be especially careful: get a laptop with feet and put it onto a hard surface where air can circulate under it. (Your lap is the right height for using a laptop, but it has the wrong topography.)

I'll be back on Friday with more random backup remarks and another reminder. Until then, may your data be safe!

Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-23-04: Restoring Files with Ghost Explorer

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It's Backup Friday again—time to hook up the external hard drive, (re)write the CDs or DVDs, copy the files onto ZIP, JAZ, or floppy disks, or implement any other backup program you have.

You never know when or how a backup will come in handy. For instance, I realized yesterday that I had not made an archive copy of a client's website before starting to make changes to the pages (and uploading them). All I had to do was run Ghost Explorer and restore the original files I'd downloaded (saved in last week's whole-system backup) to a new folder, which I named "client's website archive". That way I could compare any changes to the original, or start over at the beginning if something I changed made things worse instead of better.

We all hope never to need our backups, but it's much better to have them and not need them than the other way around.

More backup ramblings next week,

Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-16-04: Backup by FTP

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

My apologies for being two days late with this reminder. The Ur-Guru, his laptop, digital camera, and GPS-equipped PDA have descended on me and disrupted my schedule considerably.

I asked him about his own backup plans for this next 6 weeks, though I realized they might not be applicable to most ordinary human beings. He told me that his mail/web/ftp server is set to back up every night automatically, and that he copies any work that he does here, or photos that he takes, to the server for storage and safekeeping, in case anything happens to the laptop. The mail is already on the server, so he doesn't have to worry about it.

Most private individuals and sole proprietors won't find themselves running a server, but almost all of us do have web sites to which we could upload pictures and other files while traveling, in order to have backups that weren't vulnerable to the hazards of the road.

You can store any kind of a file on your web server--but you may not want to put all of them in your public HTML directory with your web pages, because then anyone can find and copy them. If you think this might be a solution for you, check with your ISP or web hosting company for more specific instructions on how to put files up on your site. Earthlink, for instance, provides subscribers with an FTP (that stands for File Transfer Protocol) client (that means software program); so does Comcast.

If your ISP doesn't provide an FTP client, you can easily download a free version from TheFreeSite.com or by doing a Google search on "free ftp client" plus the name of your operating system.

And remember—the best backup routine, like the best exercise routine, is the one you can keep doing regularly.

Please send me any backup questions or tips you think of—or any questions for the Ur-Guru. And if you no longer wish to receive these reminders, just let me know.

Until next week,
Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-9-04: Backup Failure Points

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

I see I have accumulated about 40 of these backup reminders so far. I've been sending them for about a year now, and I have almost enough to start automating the delivery, though I don't plan to stop including new material where I find it.

The truth is, though, that backups are not sexy, and everyone hopes never to have to use them. Setting up a backup-restore system costs money, having to restore from a backup costs time, and there are what seem an endless number of possible failure points along the way.

This week I read a white paper by LiveVault online backup and recovery service about "Why Backup Is Not Enough." Ultimately, of course, it's an ad for LiveVault's own service and for Managed Service Providers in general, and promises to automate backups, updating them every time any file is changed, store them in its secure facilities, and get you CDs or Network Attached Storage to restore your systems in the event of total failure.

Which is all well and good, but (as a contact at San Bruno ISP and technology solutions company A-Street pointed out) relies on a consistently high upload speed, which essentially means a T-1 connection. Home office users, even with cable or DSL connections, have much slower upload than download speeds, and backing up your entire hard drive over the internet is going to be painfully slow. He described A-Street's own preferred solution, a networked Linux box installed at the client's office and set up to use backupPC at night. (When he gives me more details, I'll pass them on.) But personally, I'm not in a position to install any kind of dual-power-supply RAID storage. Where would I put it? And it would be as vulnerable to fire, flood, earthquake, and theft as the backup system I'm using now.

His comment on the backup system I'm using now is that the problem with drive images such as those created by Norton Ghost is that the system you've backed up might already have been infected by a virus, spyware, adware, or other problem-causer, so what you restore is destined to crash soon or will need serious cleanup.

The foolproof, no-brainer backup system which can get you up and running on any hardware is, as far as I can tell, the Holy Grail of backups. It goes back to that business of backups not being sexy. Despite the fact that being without backups can mean lost time, money, and business, most R&D seems to go into special effects, graphics, video editing, and the like.

In my opinion, almost any backup is better than no backup, and the more backups you have, the better off you are. Some on-site, some off site, some on rewritable media, some on permanent media—and check them out before you have to actually rely on them.

Back up your data today.

And if you find that Holy Grail, let me know!

Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-2-04: Backup Links & Tape Backup

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

This week, in addition to the usual reminder to back up your data and/or hard drive if you have not yet done so this week, I have a couple of links to backup-related resources for anyone who wants to pursue this subject in greater detail.

ZDNet (publisher of a variety of computer magazines) maintains a large database of news articles as well as a library of white papers, webcasts, and case studies (mostly produced by hardware and software vendors). For many of the latter you need to register not only with ZDNet but with the sponsor of the white paper or webcast, so it can take a bit of time filling out forms and answering surveys in order to be able to look at the content. There is no charge for registering either place, however.

ZDNet Backup News

ZDNet Backup White Papers, Webcasts, and Case Studies

After noticing a webcast entitled Tape Backup 101 (sponsored by HP), I spent a few moments pondering the subject of tape backups, something with which I am not intimately familiar. I remember hearing about them first when I was an undergraduate and doing all my computing (which basically amounted to e-mail and word-processing) on the IBM mainframe. If, when you graduated, you wanted a copy of your data, you had to ask for it on tape. I never did, thus leaving behind both my senior thesis and a couple of novels—but I am not sure how I would have gotten the files off of the tape and into a usable form when I arrived at my Macintosh-based grad school department anyway.

Back in those days, all of my computer documents could be kept on one floppy disk, anyway. Even at the time I left grad school in 1994, it took only a handful of disks to hold my enormous (but unfinished) dissertation, my (unpublished) novels, my Quicken data, my e-mail, and my contact databases. So I was a long way from needing to make tape backups.

The disadvantage of tape as a backup medium is obvious to anyone who has ever compared a CD to an audiocassette: you have to move through it sequentially in order to find anything. Nevertheless, for many years tape was the only conceivable medium for backup of really large quantities of data, because nothing else had the capacity. Even home offices might have them, and certainly universities and corporations did.

These days most home and home office users are more likely to use external hard drives, CDs, or DVDs for backup. They are easier to search and harder to erase accidentally than tapes. But tape is not dead: many companies use it for archiving their older backup materials even if they have network storage arrays for their shorter-term backups. So while 3.5" diskettes seem to be going the way of their 5.25" brethren, it appears tape will be with us for a while yet.

Send me your backup questions and I'll do my best to answer them—but if you want a tape system installed, I'll refer you to someone else.

More backup news next week,
Sallie