Hard Drive Swan Song

Greg Hess of Crossbow Design has posted a recording of his hard drive's death throes. Note the whimpering sound at the end.

If you ever hear your drive make noises like this, turn it off immediately before you lose even more data.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-28-06: Back Up Your Presentation

I have to be in San Rafael at 7:15 this morning to give a presentation about podcasting. (I’m not speaking until 9:00, but I still have to be there at 7:15, because the event starts at 7:30.)

My presentation is part of a workshop about using the internet for marketing, and all three presentations rely heavily on technology.

And where there’s technology, there had better be backups. At last count, one presenter was bringing two laptops as well as a second projector. I’m bringing my own laptop, just in case, though at 17” and too many pounds she’s not especially portable. I’d be amazed if the third presenter isn’t also bringing a laptop, just in case.

And, of course, I have multiple copies of my presentation. I sent one to the Executive Team member responsible for running the projector. I have one on a USB key sitting next to me as I type. Then there’s the original on the C drive of my laptop, including all the images and the second file with my “out-takes.” Karen’s Replicator copied that whole directory onto my external drive as soon as I booted up this morning; SyncBack had already copied it onto my second internal drive during the computer’s long, otherwise idle moments printing the handouts.

And if that weren’t enough, I have my entire presentation on my website, including a self-playing PowerPointShow. (If you want to see it, go to the presentation page.) Of course, the lack of wi-fi in the hotel’s meeting rooms would make accessing that a trifle challenging, but nevertheless, I’m confident that whatever might go wrong this morning, lost data won’t be part of it.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-21-06: Mozying on with Backups

This past week I had an appointment with a client to set up a backup system. He wanted both to be able to create drive images (particularly important, as his computer came without proper system install disks) and to keep his most important data backed up automatically.

For the system backups I recommended Acronis True Image and an external hard drive. When I arrived, however, my client hadn’t yet purchased the drive, so we had to postpone that part of the setup.

There was, however, no need to postpone getting the most important data backed up; it was just a matter of deciding on the best method.

The client had intermittently made CD backups before. The computer, which is about a year old, had a good CD/DVD burner, and the critical data would easily fit onto a CD. The only problem is that things like Quicken’s automatic backup won’t write to a CD, so it’s not possible to use optical media for set-it-and-forget-it backup.

As I’ve said before, I use a freeware program called Karen’s Replicator to back up my most important files to my external drive every time I boot up my machine (and sometimes in between, if I’m working on a really critical project and feeling paranoid). But without an external drive, or even a second internal drive, that wasn’t a good option either.

That left online backup systems, and I’d just gotten several new notices about Mozy, which offers 2 GB free online backup in exchange for receiving a bit of spam. One thing I like about this service is that its creators have a sense of humor. I believe I’ve quoted their list of alternatives to Mozy before:

• Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store them at your brother-in-law's office.
• Pay $200/year for an online backup service that uses old, mediocre software.
• Buy a $200 external hard drive and hope your office doesn't burn down.
• Do nothing and don't worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating "I'm in my happy place, I'm in my happy place.")
• Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend's server over his DSL line.

My client also has a sense of humor, and liked that, but the practical attraction was a simple setup procedure. Sign up for an account, download and install the program, and then run it. Mozy automatically scans the machine for certain kinds of files and creates a pre-configured backup, but you can add or subtract any files you want.

The program did a pretty good job of locating and identifying important data, including the Thunderbird mail profile. The only thing it missed were the FileMaker Pro databases, which we added in another panel. Then we just had to decide what time of day Mozy should run the automatic backup.

Once we’d selected all the right files, we had about 100 MB to back up. We hit the start button and got a progress screen with an estimate of 90 minutes to completion, though that dropped down to about 60 minutes very quickly. The program encrypts the data (using 448-bit Blowfish, which is several times as secure as any online shopping transaction you make) before sending it out to Mozy’s backup services, which adds a bit to the time.

Though Mozy claims to have open/locked file support, I’ve always been wary of trying to back up open files. There’s just more room for error. It’s better to close out all programs and just let the backup run. Since watching backup programs run is up there with waiting for paint to dry in the excitement department, it’s a good idea to schedule automatic backups for times when you aren’t normally using the machine (say, during your lunch break), or start manual backups just before you go out.

100 MB is not very much data, but with an upload speed of 300 kilobits per second over standard DSL, it still takes a while. Mozy has a Plus service which offers 30 GB storage for only $4.95 a month—but think a bit about just how long it would take to get that much data onto their servers. Downloading it again is much faster, but the maximum download speed most of us in the US are going to get is 6 megabits per second. (Over in Europe, the Ur-Guru gets 20 megabits per second download speed, but still only about 3 megabits upload speed.) With 100 MB of data, that’s reasonable; with even 2 GB, you’re in for a very long wait if you back it up all at once.

Once you’ve gotten backed up, you can log into your account at Mozy through your web browser and see how much space is used and when your last backup was. This is also where you go to restore files, either by folder or by backup set. (Backup sets are things like “IE favorites,” “Financial Data,” and “Email and Contacts.”)

So far, Mozy Free looks good to me as a solution for those who want something simple, automated, and off-site—and whose critical data is compact enough to travel upstream in a reasonable period of time.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-14-06: Backup to the Future 2

Yesterday the Ur-Guru and I drove down to San Jose to speak to a group of high school students about backups at the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology. (Well, I spoke; the Ur-Guru played Vanna White for me and wrote things on the flip chart.) NYLF/Tech gathers 1200 bright students from around the country and puts them through an intensive week of seminars and site visits. What I’m doing there along with the creator of Firefox and the folks from NASA and Cal and Stanford and SETI, I’m still not entirely sure, except that no one more illustrious wants to talk about backups.

This year’s presentation was a slightly revised version of last year’s, including some scary statistics, a couple of video clips, famous photos from Drivesavers.com, and a few questions that I put to the students. I also contrasted the types of backup systems that someone like me and someone like the Ur-Guru need, and provided a few tales from the trenches. (The speaker from SETI had just told me a story about how the IT department at Stanford managed to wipe out an entire year’s worth of research for a project she was working on some years ago. She had to re-create it from hard copy and hard work.)

I started by doing a live version of the poll on the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog: I asked how many people in the room had backed up their data within the last year, the last month, the last week, and finally the last day. By the time I got down to “Who backed up yesterday’s data?” only one hand went up, though one student pointed out that not everyone there had brought a laptop. Everyone had made backups within the last year, though, and most backed up onto external drives or other computers, or onto the Internet. No one mentioned optical media or tapes.

After exclaiming over the photo of the multi-screen display in the Ur-Guru’s home office and the diagram of which machines he backs up where (all via the network), the students gasped over the figures I use to illustrate just why backup is so important. They seemed particularly shocked that the average cost of re-creating lost data is between $2000 and $8000 per MB. It sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But the Ur-Guru says that you could add another zero, even two, onto those numbers if you were talking about lost source code for custom software of the kind he develops for his clients. (Source code, for those not familiar with it, is what programmers write. It’s plain text without formatting, so it takes a lot of code to fill 1 MB of disk space.)

I tend to walk into the room expecting all these kids to know more about computers than I do, not just because they have a specific interest in technology but just because they’re kids and they’ve grown up with computers. But I’m beginning to think that this isn’t actually true, except when it comes to games, IM, and the specific uses of computing that teens excel in.

I may not be a real geek, but I have been researching and writing about backups every week for three years now, and I have more experience with business applications for technology. So next year (assuming they ask me back, of course) I’m planning to include an overview of backup types, which I avoided in my first two presentations because I figured they’d know all about it already.

Apparently not. When I divided the room into four groups and asked the first group to come up with a backup solution that their grandparents could and would use, their brainstorming led them to invent the one-button backup drive. Not one of the 7 or 8 knew that such a thing already existed. (Warning: make sure someone configures these properly to start with, or pressing the button won’t do you much good.)

Asked about getting their peers to make backups, the second group decided force would be superior to persuasion—that their fellow teens needed to be intimidated into backing up. How long they’d stay scared is something else again. Not only do young people have a certain belief in their own immortality, but most of them don’t face the same kind of financial consequences that businesses do. They can download their songs again, after all, and if they already turned in their homework, they might not care if it’s gone.

Group Three had to devise solutions for small businesses like the corner grocery and the local auto mechanic. They took more time discussing the problem and came up with a practical combination of external drives, network backups, and transmission of files up to the International Space Station overnight while the business was closed. (You can’t get too much further off-site than that, though I’d hate to see the upload and download times.)

The fourth group worked on backup solutions for their schools, paying attention to the need to ensure that student data and faculty data stayed separate and to avoiding situations like the one where both the main and backup server were kept in the same poorly ventilated closet. Cool rooms and monitoring software to ensure that someone would be notified if problems developed on weekends were part of that solution, as well as software that would back up each student’s or staff member’s data as soon as s/he logged into the system.

Then they started to open up and get creative. “I wanted to write a virus that would automatically back up all the data on the computer,” one boy said. Another suggested a program that starts deleting files if you haven’t backed them up for 7 days, with a notice saying “This file has just been deleted. You did have it backed up, didn’t you?” That seems just a bit harsh to me, but I’ve heard of companies that started taking employee data off the network after six months, and if the employees haven’t made their own copies, too bad. I think the idea actually has some promise, if, rather than deleting the files, the program would simply make them inaccessible until the computer user runs the backup software.

The ultimate conclusion? “What we really need are self-replicating hard drives—but then they’d take over the world and replace us.”

To find out more about the National Youth Leadership Forums, visit http://www.nylf.org/.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-07-06: Geek Up for Backups

Yesterday morning I got a message from my brother—the one who lost most of his photos to a hard drive crash a few months ago (05-19-06 Backup Reminder). Unlike many people who lose their data because they don’t have backups, he’s taken some action to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“Well, I really geeked it up this weekend in an effort to avoid future data loss from HD failure. I took an old PC that was gathering dust, and converted it to a NAS by using a neat little open source program called FreeNAS. Really works great with the handful of old, small HDs I had, and seems to transfer data much faster than a USB drive. I am waiting for delivery of 2 new 300gb SATA drives that I will install in the FreeNAS device in a RAID 1 configuration, which should give me adequate protection.”

This is indeed considerably geekier than I expected my not-so-little brother to get. It’s geekier than I’ve gotten myself, though the Ur-Guru tells me it’s a relatively simple procedure if you’ve got an old computer sitting around. You do want it to be an old computer, one you’re not using anymore, because once you convert it to a NAS device, you can’t use it for anything but storage.

NAS, for those not familiar with the term, stands for Network Attached Storage, and we’ve discussed it a few times in this newsletter. The basic idea is that instead of attaching the storage device directly to your computer, the way you do with external hard drives, you attach it to your network and transfer files to it that way. There are a number of advantages to this, such as being able to back up more than one computer to the same drive and not having to keep your computer and your backup device in the same room.

For the DIY model, you can use any old PC as long as it has at least 96MB of RAM, a bootable CD-ROM drive, at least one hard drive, and someplace to install FreeNAS: a floppy, USB, or additional hard drive. My brother had an old eMachine that fit the bill, so he downloaded FreeNAS from www.freenas.org and followed the instructions in the 41-page PDF manual.

If you don’t have an old computer gathering dust, or just don’t want to attempt anything that geeky, you can easily buy a NAS device—but it will cost you. The Buffalo TeraStation (which looks like a safe and provides 1 TB (1000 GB) of storage) goes for about $800; a 400 GB Mirra Personal Server will run you about $500. Both come with backup software.

The homemade FreeNAS model does not, so my brother concluded his message by saying “What is the best way to automatically back certain folders to the network drive? I'd like some sort of set it and forget it method. Any ideas?”

Backing up to a network drive isn’t really any different from backing up to any other drive, but I consulted the Ur-Guru before sending the following response:

“Karen's Replicator should do the trick—another freeware program, the one I use for my own file backups. I've also been quasi-testing something called SyncBack to do periodic backups from my main interal drive to my secondary internal drive. In either case there's a bit of setup time where you pick the directories to be backed up and then tell it the schedule you want it backed up on.”

And if you’re tempted to think of all this effort on my brother’s part as locking the barn door after the horses have escaped, bear in mind that he’s got two young children and will be taking many more pictures. We keep generating new data all the time, which is why it’s never too late to start backing up—and why it’s never too early, either.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-30-06: Back Up While You Can Still Afford To

Backup Awareness Month is over, but that doesn’t mean you should stop thinking about backups. (Did anyone win a drive from Maxtor? Inquiring minds want to know.)

In an attempt to cut down on music and movie piracy, Spain has decided to impose a new tax on blank media: CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, even cell phones. In creating this law, the Spanish government somehow overlooked hard drives as a possible storage device for illegal copies of software and media, and elected not to impose it on the ADSL lines commonly used for downloading such material. (Here in the US, we wouldn’t need to tax DSL lines: the slow speed of our so-called high-speed connections makes downloading ripped DVDs too much trouble.)

The problem, as the outraged people of Spain have quick to point out, is that there are more uses for blank media than violating copyright laws. (There are more problems than that: the law apparently lacks any mechanism by which the money collected through this tax will be returned to copyright holders.)

The amount of the tax has yet to be set (or at any rate, to be revealed to the public), but it probably won’t be so large as to deter people from buying blank media. And if it does, the hard drive manufacturers will be sitting pretty.

It’s quite possible that such a tax will come to the US. Spain isn’t the first European country to attempt to curb copyright violations in this manner, and the film and recording industries appear to have decided that since they can’t prevent piracy, they might as well try to get a piece of the action.

So go make your backups while media is cheap!

Links:
Pierce IP Law Blog
The Register
Slashdot