FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-30-05: Don't Use CD-RWs for Year-End Backups

Another year is drawing to a close, which means it’s time for your year-end backups. (For more detail on end-of-year backups, see my December 2004 backup reminder.)

Strictly speaking, year-end backups aren’t really backups; they’re archives. You make copies of all your important computer files from the year in question to store with your paper files. You need to keep anything relevant to your taxes (like your Quicken or QuickBooks data, bank statements, invoices from vendors, invoices to clients, and so on) for seven years.

That means that if, six and a half years from now, the IRS wants to see those files, they’d better be able to read the CD or DVD you put them on. (Or, yes, tape, if you’re really that kind of masochist. We do know that tapes, if not in use, can last 30 years and still be readable.)

Inexpensive generic CDs work fine for short-term backups or anything else which you consider disposable, but if you want the disc to be readable even one year from now, make sure you use high-quality brand-name CDs and DVDs. Otherwise they may start to rot, and when you take them out of their jewel cases, you’ll be able to see through them.

And yes, jewel cases do provide the best protection against scratches and dust, though you can get away with plastic or paper sleeves if 1) you can seal them and 2) you’re not putting the disc in, say, an overstuffed archive box where the surrounding papers will exert the pressure of 20,000 leagues under the sea.

And, finally, don’t use rewritable CDs or DVDs for archival purposes. First, you don’t want to write over this data, so there’s no point. Second, you’ll be wasting your money: rewritable discs are always more expensive than write-once discs. Third, if the disc has been written to numerous times before, it will be more vulnerable to data loss in the writing phase and won’t last as long in storage.

And finally, CD-RWs are not compatible with all CD drives, particularly those on older machines. Though it’s unlikely that you’ll be trying to read your year-end backups seven years from now on a Windows 98 machine, it’s possible that you’ll need to get into your archives one year from now on an older machine that you’re using while your new, top-of-the-line computer is in the shop for repairs. As “Dr. Gizmo” advised in Wednesday’s Syracuse Post-Standard:

The ‘RW’ method was added to the ways CDs work long after the technology of recording CDs was invented, and could not have been more troublesome if the inventors of the CD had decided to use hot peanut butter as the method of making rewriteable CDs.

The pits etched by the recorder's laser on a CD-RW are much smaller than the CD standard calls for. Most old CD drives and many current home and car CD players can't figure out what's on a CD-RW.

Don’t take chances with your important business and financial records. Copy them onto good quality media, put them into jewel cases, and store them in a safe place away from your office.

Then you can ring in the New Year with confidence.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-23-05: Pick Any Two

I just found a link to a two-part MacWorld series on OSX backups. The articles are excerpts from Joe Kissell’s e-book Take Control of Mac OSX Backups. Part one includes a handy table which compares the risks and trade-offs of different approaches to three major objectives: saving money, ease of use, and data safety.

Joe makes a very important point when introducing this table:

“You know the old saying: ‘Cheap; good; fast—pick any two.’ The same goes for backups. I can tell you how to do them effectively or how to do them quickly and cheaply, but the less time and money you’re willing to spend, the less safe your data will be.”

Before moving on to more specific subjects such as remote backups and backing up iTunes, Part two starts with a discussion of backup schedules:

“If you use your computer heavily every day, and often install new or updated software, you might opt for weekly updates of your duplicates and daily updates of your archives. On the other hand, if you use your computer only occasionally, the schedule could become once a month for duplicates and once or twice a week for archives. Under no circumstances do I suggest backing up less frequently than once a month or more frequently than twice a day—the risk is too high in the former case and the aggravation too great in the latter.”

To my mind, that reinforces the need to back up at least as often as you get this reminder.

You can buy Take Control of Mac OSX Backups (version 1.2) for $10 at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html.

MacWorld articles:

Part 1: http://www.macworld.com/2005/02/features/takecontrolexcerpt1/index.php
Part 2: http://www.macworld.com/2005/02/features/takecontrolexcerpt2/index.php

Merry backups to all, and to all a good night!

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-16-05: A New Approach

After some serious reflection, I’ve decided to take a new approach to the FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder. I’ve been writing this newsletter since July of 2003. It started as a very short reminder with some basic information about why it’s important to back up your computer. It’s grown—too much. Some of you do actually read it through every week, a compliment I appreciate, but I’m not at all sure that a 1200 word e-zine is a greater service to readers than a 400-word e-zine.

Between the e-zines and the blogs, I’ve got far more to read than I can keep up with—and that’s just the relevant and interesting stuff. I have reason to believe that most of you are in the same position, and get far too much e-mail. When you probably don’t have time to read it, and I know I don’t have time to write it, what’s the purpose of the format I’ve been using?

It’s not that I think backing up your computer is going to be any less important in the years to come. (In fact, with the new Data Retention Act in the EU, backup will only be bigger and bigger business—buy stock in storage now.) But you don’t need a 1200-word article to back up your computer. A subject-header-only message would work just as well for the reminder function of the Backup Reminder Newsletter.

The past year has taught me that not only would I rather write about computers than try to fix them, there are things I’d rather write about than computers. I’m not a Real Geek and never will be. I’m not even a technical writer. From a business standpoint, it makes much more sense to focus my energy elsewhere, specifically my column on The Business of Writing (published on WomensRadio.com and republished in my Author-ized Articles blog) and my FileSlinger™ Favorites tips for independent professionals.

So I’m going to try a new approach to this e-zine: keep it short. I may experiment with making short posts to the blog during the week when I discover newsworthy items (such as the passage of the Data Retention act or the acquisition of LiveVault by Iron Mountain) and then collecting those into the e-zine. And I’m open to suggestions about what you’d like to see. Also, I especially like featuring real stories from readers and others, so if you have one, send it along!

And whether you read the e-zine or not—back up your data. This week’s nightmare tale is a top blogger’s loss of all her e-mail since August due to a server failure. (Guess who is looking for someone else to host her blog/website/mail server?) Don’t let it happen to you.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-9-05: The Case of the Self-Destructing Database

Just to prove that Mac users can have computer disasters too, here is the story of how a colleague lost his Entourage database (and a chunk of money) but gained liberation. I’ve compiled several e-mail messages into one narrative, but think he tells the story better than I could—including the unexpected up side.

I was using Entourage X (part of Office X for the Mac) and its upper limit for its database (combining address book, calendar items, categories and e-mail boxes) was 4GB. That was the magic number for size past which it asked to rebuild.

When it tried to compress itself at my command, I ran out of disk space on a partitioned hard disk.

Double-Whammy. Each retry further damaged the data.

Drive Savers took 10 days but couldn't fix it. They gave me a range dependent upon how successful they were. I'd used them once before, and pled poverty as I was doing a non-profit newsletter at the time. It ended up costing almost $500 for restoring an old version.

I was sooooo close to running a backup when this happened it could have been backed up. I was also within hours of a long 3 day train trip where I was planning to purge thousands of files and archive old e-messages.

Blah blah blah.

So I lost recent contacts, years of old e-mails.

I upgraded to a newer version of MS Entourage that allows bigger DBs though that might just enable me to repeat my harmful behavior of saving files I never really needed, used or will use.

It's springboarded me to clean up, on and off my computer, and purge lots of stuff.

It's liberating. I wish I'd done this sooner.

The pain is gone and I have improved my backup schedule and built additional redundancies into my actions.

I am using Retrospect for backups and write scripts, then back up to removable drives.

If you have a story of data loss—or data salvation—that you’d like to share, just pass it on to me and I’ll be happy to include it. Real-life stories are much more interesting—and credible—than press releases and laboratory tests.

Ontrack Data Disaster League Table

British data recovery company Ontrack has published its 2005 League Table of the funniest and most frightening real-life computer crises of its customers, from the laptop full of cockroaches to the dog's favorite memory stick.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-2-05: A Drive Reborn

Last week I finally got an enclosure for the hard drive salvaged from my late laptop—yes, the one that died back in April. For those who don’t keep my technological traumas uppermost in their minds (most of you, I hope), the thrice-welded power connector on the main board had reached the Do Not Resuscitate stage, but there was nothing wrong with the drive.

I actually ordered an enclosure for the drive shortly after installing my replacement laptop, but for some reason it didn’t work. (It appeared to have one more socket than my drive had pins.) So I returned it for store credit and went in search of a case like the one I got for my XHD a few years ago, because the internal drive on my old laptop was the same model (albeit of a lower capacity) as my external drive, and I’d bought the drive bare and put it into the case myself.

Naturally, that particular 2.5" drive enclosure (a combination USB and FireWire model with a blue cooling light, manufactured by Bytecc) had long since been discontinued. I was hesitant to order another enclosure online without knowing for sure it would work with my drive.

Then I went and spent my store credit on an MP3 player. (For the curious, it was an inexpensive drive enclosure, traded for a very cheap MP3 player.)

Now, the MP3 player has transformed my lifestyle and indeed my approach to marketing, not to mention providing me with a free business education during “dead time” when I can’t read, all thanks to the modern miracle of podcasting. I can even use it to store or transfer non-MP3 files in a pinch (though only 128 MB of them). But buying it did mean I had a perfectly good hard drive sitting uselessly in an anti-static bag on my desk.

No longer. I got myself a slick black mesh USB 2.0 Metal Gear drive enclosure (made by PPA USA; I bought it from Tiger Direct). As you can see, it's only about 2/3 the thickness of the Bytecc.

It was also much easier to assemble than the Bytecc, and even came with its own screwdriver. The mesh makes for great heat dissipation, though I do wonder whether it will let in smaller dust particles, and no doubt it’s vulnerable to cat hair. (On the other hand, I have yet to meet anything not vulnerable to cat hair.) And it means there's no insulation against the mosquito-like whine of the drive spinning.

The drive seems to be a bit persnickety about working through a hub, probably due to power issues, but once connected to the proper place enumerated itself (I love that term) and volunteered for the post of Drive E.

The data was indeed all intact, but the truth was I hadn’t needed any of it in more than six months. Once I confirmed that there was nothing lurking there which I didn’t have a copy of someplace else, I reformatted the drive and assigned it the letter K for Keramat, the name of the laptop I took the drive from.

I was amazed to discover that this $15.99 drive enclosure came with a one-touch backup button, so I installed the BackupKing X software to check it out. BackupKing X isn’t anything to write home about, but the one-touch button did work, once I’d created a backup job to assign to it. Given that the drive lives across the room from me, one-touch backup isn’t all that useful, and BackupKing X is pretty much a straight file copy program, so once I’d concluded my experiment I removed the software.

So what to do with my newly reclaimed drive? It made sense to me to use the K drive for my Ghost backups and the X drive (my previous XHD) for my daily file backups, program installation packages, and more recent archives. That meant transferring a couple of Ghost files from Drive X to Drive K, which is very slow over USB 1.1. (The external drives, the hubs, and the cables all support USB 2.0 high-speed, but alas my laptop’s USB controllers do not.) That accomplished, I suddenly had some welcome wiggle room on my X drive, plus the added safeguard of not having all my backups in the same place.

And the moral of the story is: don’t recycle your hard drive along with your old computer, unless the drive is dead. Keep it, re-house it, and use it for backups. Not only does it provide you with inexpensive external data storage, it keeps the information on the drive from falling into the wrong hands.