FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-31-06: Missed Backups

There once was a woman whose laptop was new
And she had so much storage, she didn’t know what to do.

It’s true—I’ve gone from a 20 GB internal hard drive to 160 GB in two internal drives, and it’s pretty mind-boggling to have all that space. Having two drives, and internal storage larger than my two external drives combined, requires a new approach, and I haven’t quite figured out my new backup routine.

That’s not why I missed last week’s backup reminder, though. I put in a 12-hour day on Thursday, had to get up at 5 AM for a 7 AM meeting on Friday, and promptly collapsed for three days. I feel especially bad because one of my Loyal Readers said she’d forgotten to back up as a result. (Worse yet, her computer started acting funny last night.)

What I’ve done so far is to install the machine (it was a floor model and set up with CompUSA as the administrator), create a Ghost backup of the bare OS and then of the OS plus drivers and major applications, and re-establish my Karen’s Replicator backups to the external hard drive. (And it is *so* nice to have both FireWire and USB hi-speed—the first Ghost image was finished almost before I started it.)

I’m also experimenting with Comodo Backup to synchronize my working files onto the second internal drive (which has the highly original name of “Data”). Comodo is a free product which has a number of options but also some quirks I haven’t figured out yet, so I prefer to continue relying on Ghost and Replicator, my old standbys.

The Ur-Guru is getting to be pretty enthusiastic about the most recent version of Acronis TrueImage, though, so don’t be surprised to hear more about that in the future.

In the meantime—go forth and back up!

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-17-06: The Downside of Automatic Backups

In case any of you are wondering, Heidi Miller did find the relevant clause about retained parts in the Apple Store’s repair contract—no thanks to anyone at Apple. But while signing that contract gives Apple a legal right to the hardware, we all know that the really valuable thing about a hard drive is what we put onto it.

Which brings me to today’s backup conundrum, which comes courtesy of IT Week UK: if you back up a corrupted file (or system), then instead of having a working copy to fall back on, you just have two corrupt copies.

Now, obviously, if you know a file is corrupted or that your system is infected with a virus, you’re not going to back it up. But automated backup systems, on-site or off, aren’t that smart. Either they overwrite files completely with the newer version, or they overwrite the bytes that have changed—including changes made by data corruption or viruses. Not good.

One professional geek I know goes so far as to claim that drive images are useless, because the ones clients bring to him along with their malfunctioning computers are so full of viruses, spyware, and other problems.

As I’ve said before in this newsletter, make sure you clean out your system before creating a drive image. Scan it for adware, spyware, and viruses. (And make sure you turn off Windows System Restore before removing viruses, or you’ll risk returning to an infected state.)

Moreover, if you use disk cloning software, make sure you keep more than one image of your drive, starting with the bare operating system. This gives you a better chance of having a functioning system to return to. I keep an image of the operating system, one with the OS plus the drivers for all my peripherals (printer, scanner, handheld PC, Wacom tablet), one of the drive with major software installed, and then start making weekly images which include data, of which I keep the most recent 2-3, depending on how much space is available on my XHD.

But what about corrupted documents, the specific issue which moved Keyvyn Taylor to write his piece for IT Week? File corruptions are a cross-platform problem: I’ve experienced them on both Macs and PCs.

One option is to rename the file each time you work on it, so that you keep multiple versions and won’t lose the whole thing. This takes up more storage space, of course, but it might be worth it for important client files and work projects. The more you use and change a file, the greater the possibility of corruption.

Doing this several times a day could get to be tedious, though, and if the document is stored on a network server, you have to make sure everyone uses the same version-naming protocol, or people who need the file will have trouble finding it and knowing which version is most recent. Taylor suggests creating a plug-in for Microsoft Office which would perform this task for you. It’s an interesting idea, but well beyond my abilities. It’s probably easier than creating a backup program which verifies file structures as well as matching bytes, though.

As always, I welcome your suggestions for addressing this issue, and any stories you have about your experiences with infected backups.

Remember: the copy is only as good as the original. Backups you don’t have to think about making can have drawbacks.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-10-06: Apple's Dead Drive Repossession Policy

Yes, it’s true—Macs can suffer hardware failure. Many years ago, when I had a PowerBook, something went wrong with the RAM and fried the daughterboard, resulting in many adventures sending the machine to an authorized repair shop. I was lucky, though—my drive was unharmed and my data intact.

Trade show presenter, podcaster, and Mac user Heidi Miller was not so fortunate. When her iBook G4 died on February 16th, the drive was scrambled beyond the ability of Apple’s “Genius Bar” to repair.

A week later, when she went to collect the now-functioning computer, Heidi was astonished to discover that Apple wanted to charge her $300 so she could take the old drive to a data recovery service. That was on top of what she’d paid for the repair and the replacement hard drive.

This bizarre claim that Apple now owns Heidi’s dead drive resembles the attempts by telecoms companies to charge two and three times for the same service (that is, charging ISPs and charging users). The phrases that come immediately to mind are “What a rip-off!” and “Highway robbery!” The implication is that when you buy from Apple, you’re actually just renting from them.

It would actually make more sense for Apple to charge if you don’t take the old drive away with you, because there are usually fees to recycle anything as toxic as computer components. That would be analogous to the disposal fee mechanics charge when they replace the fluids in your car. You can’t just dump petroleum products or computer parts down the drain.

Heidi persuaded the store manager to cancel the $300 charge, but so far no one in Apple’s PR department will tell her anything about this policy and where or whether she got any notification that if she took the machine in for repair, any replaced parts would belong to Apple. Other bloggers and podcasters are picking up the story. If Apple doesn’t respond soon, this could turn into the equivalent of Jeff Jarvis’ “Dell Hell” experience—a PR nightmare.

From the backup perspective, though Heidi lost the podcast she was in the middle of editing, she did have many of her files backed up onto an external drive, and she’s hoping the data recovery company can retrieve enough of the rest to make it worth the expense of their services. On the down side, her XHD was a recent acquisition and she hadn’t realized that there were whole categories of files that the software didn’t back up automatically.

The moral of this story is threefold.

First, if you use a Mac, see what you can find out about whether you really own your drive, and even if it’s dead, don’t return it to Apple without degaussing it (disrupting its magnetic fields) to make sure they can’t get at any of your data. (Computer recycling facilities provide this service for a fairly modest fee; repair shops might, as well.) Maybe they really do have a legal right to the hardware, but nothing entitles them to your data.

Second, make sure that your backup software really is backing up all of your important data. I prefer a combination of complete drive images and frequent file backups. If there’s anything I’ve overlooked in the file backups, I can retrieve it from the drive image. (But see last week’s reminder regarding the reliability of drive imaging software.) This avoids having to seek out the expensive services of data recovery companies.

Third, make sure your own policies about purchases, refunds, cancellation fees, etc are clearly stated and readily available to your customers and clients. This will help avert PR nightmares. It’s entirely too easy for dissatisfied customers to spread the word about any bad experiences they have. (The good news is that it’s also easy for happy customers to praise you on the web.)

More info:

Read Heidi’s own account of her Apple adventures

Haven’t heard the Dell Hell story? Check out Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-03-06: Unreliable Backups

Vindication is a bittersweet thing. For years, the Ur-Guru has told me, and I have told clients and readers of this column, that backing up the Windows operating system from within Windows is a Bad Idea. Copying any file while it’s in use makes it more likely the copy will be corrupted in some way, though it usually works all right with ordinary documents and images, at least if you’ve saved any changes. Software is something else again. These days most programs install bits of themselves all over your computer, and you can’t just drag the .exe file onto another disk and expect it to work. And I can’t speak for Linux, but the Windows and Macintosh operating systems are now extremely complex beasts.

This is why I prefer Symantec (Norton) Ghost 8 for my full system backups. Ghost 8 runs in DOS. That means that Windows isn’t running when you use Ghost 8 to back up, which in turn vastly increases the reliability of the backup. I’ve restored machines from Ghost backups many times with complete success. The only hitch was that it was designed to be run from floppy disks, and modern laptops rarely have floppy drives. Oh, and it didn’t always want to recognize USB or FireWire external drives, though I had no problems with my FireWire XHD on my previous laptop. (My current laptop doesn’t have FireWire.)

When Ghost 9 came out after Symantec bought DriveImage, I didn’t upgrade. DriveImage had a good reputation, and I recommended it to clients without floppy drives (prior to the new Bart-PE CD which runs Ghost 8 but is, shall we say, somewhat ethically complicated), but I didn’t want to use a product which tried to back Windows up from within Windows, and that’s what Ghost 9 is. (The Ur-Guru wrote me paragraphs of outrage when he tested it.)

Why am I bringing up all this history? Because IntroAnalytic just released a new study involving DriveImage (the pre-Symantec product), Norton Ghost 9 (whether Ghost is billed as “Norton” or “Symantec” seems to depend on whether it’s the consumer or the corporate version), Acronis TrueImage 7, and Microsoft System Restore. System Restore (which has actually been useful to me in the past) rated the lowest: IntroAnalytic gave it 0%. But of the third-party products, Ghost 9 came out at the bottom, with only a 75% chance of successful recovery from a major computer error (non-functioning OS). Drive Image came out on top, at 90%.

They didn’t test Ghost 8, presumably because their aim was to compare products which operate from within Windows and work with external hard drives. They also didn’t test Dantz Retrospect, but I found Retrospect decidedly underwhelming anyway.

Where does this leave someone just embarking on a backup plan? In an uncomfortable position, given that Drive Image and Ghost 8 are no longer sold by the manufacturers. In order to get the most reliable software for making a full system backup, you have to go hunting around on eBay and other places where used software is sold. If you can’t use diskettes or just need to be sure Ghost 8 will recognize your external drive, you then have to create a Bart-PE CD (or get someone like the Ur-Guru to create it for you).

And remember—whatever backup software you use, you need to test your backups. If you can’t bear to take the plunge and do a test-restore of your whole machine, try restoring one or two files. This will at least assure you that the image is not corrupt. (One drawback of Ghost is that if you span a Ghost image over CDs or DVDs, a single damaged disk renders the entire image unrecoverable. I learned this the very hard way.)

Read IntroAnalytic’s press release at http://www.introanalytic.com/BackupResearchMediaRelease.pdf

The DM Review editorial staff reprises the press release: http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1049420

Comments on the study from Chris Mellor at TechWorld: http://www.techworld.com/storage/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=3&entryID=152