Cheers for Carbonite (and Some Vacation Musings): FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-08-08

This week’s guest contributor is Confident Marketer Sue Painter, but first a brief update from Yours Truly.

The Ur-Guru and I have been traveling a lot over the past few weeks. As an incurable geek, I haul my laptop with me on all these trips, and I’ve been bringing Vesta (the Buffalo MiniStation DataVault) with me to make backups on. In fact, Vesta lives in my laptop case, since I don’t really use her when I’m at home.

While we were driving back from the Russian River Valley, the Ur-Guru noticed that his MP3 player was acting up. It insisted that every song was a bad track and wouldn’t play anything. (I considered connecting mine and forcing him to listen to podcasts, but I restrained myself.)

“You could try reformatting it,” I suggested, “but you’d lose all the music.”

He gave me his best “Do I look like an idiot?” stare and said “Who is it I’m marrying again? Did you think I wouldn’t have backups?”

So when we got home, he reformatted the player, copied the music back onto it, and all was well.

Now, on to Sue’s story about Carbonite.

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I use and LOVE Carbonite for backup. No horror stories here, just really hated constantly backing up to CD’s which got disorganized and half the time didn’t work. Plus, I never got around to it in any scheduled fashion. Somehow I ran across an e-ad for Carbonite, checked it out, did a 30 day trial, then bought it. It’s a big, whopping $45 per YEAR and you can back up a second computer for $20 (or at least, that was the deal I was offered). It constantly runs in the background of your computer and gives you 24/7 backup.

Slight downside: it makes my computer run a bit slower, but I solve this by a quick click to put Carbonite on 24 hour pause, do my work, then “unpause” it before I go off to bed. Overnight, it backs anything up I’ve changed that day.

I have had to use it—my Palm Pilot died a horrible death, with all my appointments for the rest of the year, and the backup file on my computer got corrupted, too. Total panic (I am booked nearly a year out with client appointments so my Palm is my lifeblood) but I just clicked on the little icon and got everything restored to my new Palm, no problem.

I clicked on my Carbonite icon and it brought up my entire Palm calendar on the computer screen, same as I would do from my computer files. What I like is that Carbonite is for total non-techies like me—it brings up a screen that looks EXACTLY like your desktop, you click on what you want to restore, and boom, it’s done. Could not be simpler.

Once my calendar was there on my screen (stop, my heart!) I simply hot synced it back to my Palm. I could scarcely believe it was so easy! And yes, give me back floppies—I really hate CDs and can never make them work. (ARG...)

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There you have it—another satisfied Carbonite customer. (David Jackson wrote about Carbonite in February 2008.) A backup is useless if you can’t restore your data, so it’s good to hear that it’s easy to get things back, and few professionals can afford to lose their business appointments.

Next week we’ll hear from the Data Doctors.

Technorati Tags: Carbonite,Sue Painter,David Jackson,Data Doctors,online backup,DataVault

What the Top 10 Data Disasters of 2007 Teach Us: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-14-07

Every year Ontrack Data Recovery posts a list of the top 10 data disasters they've had to clean up after, and every year I write something about them. I noticed a big difference between the 2006 and 2007 lists, though. Four of the 2006 Top 10 disasters were damaged laptops, two were external hard drives, and three were internal hard drives from desktop machines. Only one of last year's dramatic tales involved data stored on something other than your typical spinning-platters hard drive: the SD card in a camera that wasn't as waterproof as advertised.

In 2007, only one dropped laptop made it onto the list. Instead, Ontrack was busy rescuing data stored on USB sticks and inside of cameras. There were also three external drives, up from last year, and one set of nearly-melted CDs.

So what can we learn from this change, apart from the fact that Ontrack can recover data from all kinds of storage media?

The first lesson is that data is easier to lose than ever before, because it's more portable. USB sticks are extremely handy devices, but because they're small, they're easy to lose--or to put through the wash or drop into the baby's applesauce.

The SD cards used by digital cameras and other portable devices are even smaller, so easier to misplace. (The 1 GB card that the Ur-Guru got for his MP3 player was so small it practically required tweezers to insert.) At least people are in the habit of thinking about cameras as fragile, and there are probably a lot of ways to seriously damage a camera without actually doing any harm to the data on the card.

USB sticks, on the other hand, often take the form of key chains, and people drop or throw their keys all the time, when not actually sitting on them or tossing them to the bottom of a bag. Flash drives are far better equipped to survive being dropped than drives with moving parts, but that doesn't make them invulnerable.

As for ordinary hard drives, their lives are full of danger. ION Backup's Howie Hard Drive series of videos shows a human-sized hard drive dodging traffic at rush hour, hanging out with the punks after school, and escaping the office. In 2007, Ontrack rescued data from drives that were infested with ants, dunked in acid baths, and soaked in WD-40. (No, that was not all the same drive.)

The moral of the story is, as always, treat your data with care. In particular, be kind to your backup drives. Carry external hard drives in padded cases. Consider keeping USB sticks on lanyards or clips so they can't fall onto the pavement or into the sink. (Come to think of it, this might be a good idea for your cell phone, too--my mother dropped hers in the dishwater once.) And always check your pockets before doing the laundry!

Read the complete 2007 Data Disaster List.

Technorati Tags: Ontrack,data disasters,USB sticks,SD cards,Howie the Hard Drive,ION backup

Finally Restored: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-30-07

When I told the Ur-Guru what I was planning to write about today, his response was: “Seagate sure is getting a lot of exposure through you. :-) Hate to think what you'd write and how much if they sent you a full 100TB RAID rack.”

I'd hate to think where I'd put a 100 TB RAID rack, myself. Never mind what I'd do with it. I'm already running out of room for external drives, and I had to buy a new USB hub to keep them all connected and powered. I'm the wrong blogger for enterprise-level hardware and software, and most of my readers—the ones who send feedback, anyway—wouldn't know what to do with it, either.

But a Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive was something I did know what to do with, so when Jay Pechek (that's pronounced like “paycheck,” for those who care) of Seagate offered me one back in 2006, I jumped at it. And it worked perfectly for a year, whereupon it died rather dramatically. (You can read all about it in my “Sounds You Never Want to Hear” post from 9/21/07.)

Jay sent me a new Maxtor Shared Storage II drive (and a couple of OneTouch 4 drives for good measure) and I sent the dead one back to him so he could have the engineers see whether they could get my data back.

The inside of the MSS-II is actually two 500GB drives, and you have two options for formatting them: “spanning,” which gives you a 1 TB drive, and “mirroring,” which gives you a 500 GB drive in duplicate. I had set the old MSS-II to mirror, because I thought the extra protection against drive failure was more important than the extra storage space, and while you can back the MSS-II up onto a USB drive, I didn't have a USB drive big enough to back it up.

It turned out I'd made a good decision, since one of those drives did die, and the purpose of using RAID (which is what “spanning” and “mirroring” really are) is to protect against physical failure of the disk.

Except there was a little problem, notably the complete impossibility of opening up the MSS-II in order to switch the drives around. What's supposed to happen when the first drive fails is an automatic fail-over to the second drive and a few warning lights to let you know that one of your drives isn't working. But before that can happen, the software that controls the boot sequence of the drives has to get a signal that the drive is dead, and it couldn't get any signal at all from the drive. (That's why it was making those nasty clicking noises.) So it didn't work.

Because of that, and because I now had a 500 GB OneTouch 4 drive I could use to back up the new MSS-II, I have set the new MSS-II to span. And this was a good thing, too, because the Seagate lab was able to retrieve my data from one of the drives. Jay shipped it back to me as a shared folders backup file on a 750 GB OneTouch 4 Basic, which is black plastic all over instead of black plastic with brushed aluminum.

My first attempt at restoring the data didn't get anywhere, because the MSS-II wouldn't recognize the drive, even though it was properly formatted. A second attempt, made with some coaching from Jay, worked perfectly. It seems that even though the administration interface for the MSS-II has an equivalent to the Windows “Safely remove hardware” button, you have to power it down and restart it before it will recognize a new USB drive.

Anyway, once we'd done that, I clicked the “Shared Folder Backup” button, selected “restore,” and then chose the backup set I wanted. (In this case there was only one, which Jay had called "BackupBlog.") I then had the choice to restore the items to their original locations or to a temporary folder in the “public” share on the drive. (Each computer connected to the MSS-II has its own "share," which is accessible only to that computer, but all of them can use the "public" share.) I chose the temporary folder, and away we went.

Jay advised me to close the web-admin interface for the MSS-II and just wait until the light on the OneTouch Basic stopped blinking, because copying almost 350 GB of data takes a long time, even over a high-speed USB connection, because shared folder backups are compressed and each file has to be, as it were, re-inflated, before it's copied.

It was finished by the next day, though, so I was able to start consolidating the data. The fastest part was moving things that belonged in the “Public” folder into their proper places. As it happened, I'd had many of those things backed up elsewhere, but there were a few I was missing. I filled in the blanks and deleted the duplicates.

Restoring data to the different private shares is more time-consuming, because that data has to be copied over the network even though it's all staying on the same physical drive. (Jay may be able to explain why this is; I can't.) In addition to that, I have to go to my housemate's computer to copy data back into her share, and start up Star, my more-portable laptop, to copy data back into her share. And while the MSS-II is capable of transferring data at 1000 kbps, my router can only do 100 kbps—and Star's wireless card can only manage 11kbps. That's considerably slower than USB 2.0 hi-speed, which does about 360 kbps.

To make the job more finicky yet, unless I want to keep everything in a lump called “restored,” I have to copy files into their appropriate locations and decide whether I want to use the restored version (dating back to August of this year) or the current version. I'm discovering that as time goes on, my enthusiasm for tidily consolidating all of this data decreases, and I can see why automatic “de-duplication” is such a selling point in enterprise backup solutions.

On the positive side, doing the consolidating frees up space and means that I only have to look in one place if I need to restore a file. On the negative side, it takes a lot of time, and because there's still a ton of room left on the MSS-II, I don't have to do it. I probably will, though, even if I don't do it right now, because I tend to be compulsively tidy about my data and file folder structures.

Besides, I now have a spare OneTouch drive, but I can't convert the original OneTouch Plus (Mama Bear) for use as a Windows drive until I've restored all the data that was backed up there and go through this consolidation process again. Not that I'm really sure what I'm going to use Mama Bear for, but it makes sense to use the Basic drive to back up the MSS-II, because of its larger capacity.

So I'd probably better stop writing and get back to consolidating my data.

Technorati Tags: Seagate,Maxtor,OneTouch 4,Shared Storage II,deduplication

Worst Practice Warnings from TechRepublic: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-06-07

Among the many backup-related items which landed in my inbox this week was a link to a collection of articles from Tech Republic called “Worst Practices for Disaster Recovery.” It particularly caught my attention as I’d just had a new client say there was no disaster recovery strategy for his entire 650-person company—at all, never mind just in IT. (Fortunately for me, providing one is not my job.)

Disaster recovery goes beyond just restoring lost data. To quote Wikipedia:

Disaster recovery is the process of regaining access to the data, hardware and software necessary to resume critical business operations after a natural or human-caused disaster. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) should also include plans for coping with the unexpected or sudden loss of key personnel. DRP is part of a larger process known as Business Continuity Planning (BCP).

Those of us who are sole proprietors don’t necessarily think a lot about business continuity and ensuring that someone else could take over and keep the business running if we were incapacitated. Maybe we should, but then again, my business is built on the personal relationships I have with clients, and there’s no guarantee they’d want to continue working with my successor if I had one. (Okay, okay. I’m making excuses.)

Like Wikipedia and Tech Republic, I’m going to focus on data protection. Most data loss is caused by human error, and simple file backups can save the day if you accidentally delete something you meant to keep. Nevertheless there are fires, floods, thefts, and small children, any one of which might destroy your entire office, or at least put paid to your hardware along with your data. The possibility of a disaster is the reason for making off-site backups.

In addition to your data, here are a few other things to keep in that safe-deposit box:

1. A list of your hardware specs, and/or the receipts for your insurance. If you make complete drive images, you need the same hardware to restore them to.
2. Install CDs for your most important software.
3. Passwords, particularly those you need to access online backups.
4. Instructions for restoring your data, if you’re not familiar with the process.

Now, on to those Worst Practices.

The first thing that will prevent you from recovering your data is not making regular backups. That one is pretty obvious, but unless you’ve got an automated backup schedule, it’s easier said than done. That’s the reason I started writing the Backup Reminder, after all: because one of my clients kept forgetting to make backups.

In order to get your business back up and running, it’s not enough to be able to recover data from six months ago. You need the projects you’re working on now. Take a look through your documents and ask yourself “How much would it cost me if I lost this?” and “How long would it take to do this over?” Decide which things are critical and make sure you back them up daily. There’s plenty of free software which will do that for you, like Karen’s Replicator and SyncBack Freeware for Windows and SilverKeeper for Mac, not to mention online services like Mozy.

Next on the list of Worst Practices is “Save money on backup media.” This actually a warning against not buying enough backup media. You need enough tapes/disks/drives to make at least two full backup sets. And there are only so many times you can re-use a tape or a re-writable CD/DVD before it wears out.

The other danger in “saving money” is buying cheap no-name CDs and DVDs. These are much more likely to degenerate within a couple of years. (See the 9/26/03 Backup Reminder for more details.) It can also be dangerous to put labels onto CDs; the last I heard, you’re only supposed to write on the innermost plastic ring, where there isn’t any data. I do think, however, that if you buy CDs which are coated for printing on, it should be safe to write on the tops with a soft-tipped pen. (More on labels here.)

The next worst practice on TechRepublic’s list is “Don’t look at your logs.” You may be asking “What logs?” Many software programs keep “logs” recording the success or failure of the backup. Some programs will only tell you if the backup fails, but they’re usually still keeping track. If you don’t know where to find the log, check the install directory for the program. For instance, if I go into Program Files\System Tools\Mozy\Data, I find a text file called mozy.log. It’s full of things like this:

23Mar2007 05:28:22 mozybackup.exe: Mozy Remote Backup service is starting...
23Mar2007 05:28:23 mozybackup.exe: Client operating system is 0 0 5 1 a28 2 0 10100
23Mar2007 07:45:12 mozybackup.exe: Starting backup
23Mar2007 07:45:12 mozybackup.exe: Latest client version is 1.8.0.4
23Mar2007 07:45:15 mozybackup.exe: Retrieving manifest from servers...
23Mar2007 07:45:25 mozybackup.exe: Fetching encryption type from Mozy servers
23Mar2007 10:12:12 mozybackup.exe: Finished backup with code: 0x00000000

Fortunately, there’s actually a handy little “Mozy status” icon which tells me when my files were backed up last without my having to actually look at the logs, but logs are important. In the TechRepublic article, Peter Herbener recommends looking for error messages, checking to see if anything obvious is missing, making sure the number and size of files back up seemed right, and checking the start and end time of backups.

The fourth Worst Practice is not testing your backups. Testing every backup of every file every day isn’t really practical, but you should definitely check the first backup you make with any new program. Herbener’s tips for testing are:

• Test with tapes (or whatever media you use) from your regular backups.
• Don't just spot test a couple of files. Make sure you can restore entire directories, servers, or applications.
• Do a test restore to a different computer or server.
• If you can afford it, have the same model of tape drive at another location. Test it to make sure it's really compatible! If you can't afford that, at least make sure you know the exact model of your tape drive and know where to get one in a hurry.
• Make sure to keep a copy of the install disks for your backup software with your backups.
• Make sure to document the procedure for restoring or reinstalling applications, especially any special tips or tricks. Put this into a text file in the application so that it gets backed up with everything else.

I’d make sure to print that text file, myself, because having it backed up won’t matter if you can’t remember the procedure.

Top Ten Reasons to Back Up Your Data: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-17-06

OnTrack Data Recovery has just published its third annual Top 10 list of “most remarkable data loss disasters.” Naturally, these are OnTrack’s top 10 successes; I don’t imagine they’re any more eager than the rest of us to publicize their failures. In many of these cases, backups would have saved these people their data recovery fees.

Most data loss occurs for mundane reasons, like drive failures and human error. It’s not that rare for people to drop laptops or cameras, either. (Heck, mine came close to having a foot-thick fence post run through it.) If you drop them from really high up, like a helicopter or a mountain peak, you might qualify as remarkable. And by now merely driving over a computer hardly raises an eyebrow: you have to drive over it with an airplane.

Some of these computers and hard drives suffered truly bizarre mishaps, and the funniest cases are those of self-inflicted damage. In 2004, a man tried to flush his laptop down the toilet. Another tried to repair his hard drive by sticking it in the freezer. In 2005, a woman attacked her computer with a hammer. (That was also the year of “The dog ate my memory stick” and “The cockroaches got my laptop.”)

This year’s top ten list doesn’t feature any deliberate computer abuse, though the professor who used WD-40 to stop his computer from squeaking was apparently suffering from academentia. And just why a hard drive should seem like a good place to leave a banana, I don’t know. It’s clear that the reason data recovery experts suit up isn’t just to protect the data.

Of course, none of these things is funny if it happens to you. It’s even less funny if you have to send your drive to a place like OnTrack and they can’t get your data back. So remember: don’t take a hammer to your laptop without backing it up first.

2006 Top Ten

2005 Top Ten

2004 Top Ten

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-26-06: Disappearing Partitions, Part II

This week (as I prepare to dash out to a 7:30 AM meeting) we return to the saga of my brother’s attempt to recover data from his failing external drive. Last week, you may recall, the recovery program (which I mistakenly identified as Final Recovery) had been running for 48 hours and was 1/3 finished. Now that a week has passed, I asked my brother what kind of progress he’d made. Here is his answer:

I ended up running the Recover my Files program. When I first installed and tried to run these two programs, it seemed that the system would freeze and/or not recognize the corrupt drive. After awhile of that mess, I decided to quick format the drive, hoping that it would be recognized and trusting that the programs would be able to recover files anyway.

That did seem to help, but Final Recovery still appeared to hang. Perhaps I didn't let it run long enough to register that it was working.

Recover my Files has a status bar that showed activity right away, so I let that one run.
After 5 or six days, it showed that if had located 14,000+ files and was 80% finished searching the drive. Because it hadn't picked up any new files for a day, I stopped the search before it was complete. After another day, it had restored a few thousand files at least. But I haven't had time to really go through what it saved. I can tell that there is a lot missing and that there are a lost of recovered files that seem to be corrupt. So it looks like I will lose a fair amount of data (mostly image files).

Before this happened, I had been accumulating all of my images onto this disk to facilitate an eventual backup to DVD (looks like I was dilatory). This means that many of the files had been copied from other drives, and it looks like I will be able to recover a large number of files that had been deleted on those drives too. All in all, I might be able to save 50% or more. Some of the lost files are on CD or online storage, perhaps another 10-15%. The biggest loss is of raw (.crw .cr2) image files; .tif and .jpg files seemed to have been recovered with better success. But I'd toss all of those to save the raw files.

RAW files, for those who aren’t familiar with them, are uncompressed image files, the native format of my brother’s very fancy digital camera. A lot of the photos are doubtless of his children (who are adorable, if I do say so myself).

The moral of this story, as of all the stories I tell in this newsletter, is back up sooner rather than later. It’s also important to remember the difference between storage and backup. If you’re an avid photographer like my brother and don’t have room on your main drive to keep all those photos, putting them onto an external drive is a logical move. But just because the photos aren’t stored on your internal drive doesn’t mean they’re backed up. You still have to make a second copy of them, and it’s a good idea to make that backup copy to a different medium. If you’re using DVDs as your main storage method, back the files up onto an external drive, and vice versa.

All of this reminds me that I should make more DVDs, myself, even though I now have many of my files stored on two or even three different hard drives. DVDs can get scratched or suffer from rot; hard drives, as we know, can fail in countless horrifying ways. By using more than one kind of backup, you’re insulating yourself against more possible problems.

Next week I’ll talk about why people don’t back up—even if they’ve suffered catastrophic data loss in the past.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-17-06: A Potent Reminder

'Tis a swamped sort of morning for me, so I’m going to be brief here and point you to another source of backup-related information.

For most people, a drive failure is just a disaster. For New York Times “Circuits” columnist David Pogue, it’s raw material--and something to get on TV with. After his adventures with DriveSavers, he did a piece for CBS called “CPR for Your Computer’s Hard Drive,” in which he describes several celebrity hard drive failures. You can watch the video by clicking “watch” at http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/sunday/main3445.shtml (toward the bottom of the page).

As if that wasn’t enough mileage to get out of one story, Pogue’s latest column describes his tour of DriveSavers’ “Museum of Bizzare Disc-asters.” It’s highly entertaining—and simultaneously sobering. Hop on over to Pogue's latest "Circuits" newsletter and check it out.

But back up your data first, just in case these spectactular disasters give your computer any ideas.

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 11-25-05: Give Thanks for Your Backups

The United States celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday with the usual exuberant overindulgence in turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Before you head out for the nation’s biggest shopping day, take a moment to be grateful for your backups.

Even though backing up your computer can be a tedious process, and it might be annoying to have all that storage space taken up with your drive images and file copies, or to be sending tapes and CDs offsite, or to be paying monthly fees for an online backup service, those backups are sparing you from far greater inconvenience and expense. Like insurance, backups can mean the difference between staying in business and going out of business.

I’ve talked to three people in as many weeks who’ve had serious computer failures. One colleague was thinking he ought to clean up and back up his Entourage database (which held all his mailing list information as well as his business contacts), but didn’t have time before going out of town. When next he tried to use the database, it had become hopelessly corrupted. Last I heard, the computer was off at DriveSavers (www.drivesavers.com). His chances of getting his data back are good, because there’s no physical damage to the drive, but the price will be high, and the timing was terrible.

There’s never a good time to have your server go down, discover that half your RAID 1 array has been dead for months, and *then* find out that your tape backups have also failed. Running a business which handles hundreds of transactions a day without a computer is no one’s idea of a good time. The dead server is in a white room at Lazarus Data Recovery (http://www.lazarus.com/) and the owner of the afflicted business is looking at alternative backup solutions.

A few days ago I was talking to a friend on the phone and she mentioned that she really would like to get a new computer soon. No sooner had the words left her mouth than her motherboard failed, though it wasn’t until she took the machine to the shop that she knew the problem wasn’t with the drive. Fortunately for her, she had backups of almost everything, no more than a week old—and she has a lumbering old computer that she can use to access those files while the main machine is repaired.

So if you have backups—be grateful. And if you don’t have backups—make some, and give yourself a reason to be grateful. There are probably some great external drives, DVD-burners, and other helpful tools available at the Thanksgiving sales.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-2-05: Backups in the Air, on the Air, and Underwater

It seems like everywhere I turn these days I hear about backups. I was reading The Everything Guide to Writing a Book Proposal and there, on page 198, under the heading “Protecting Your Professional Image,” is a warning to back up. “One writer, two days before she was due to turn in several chapters to her editor, found that the diskette she had been using to store her work had been damaged somehow, and all those beautifully written chapters were inaccessible.”

Backups in the Air

Early in August, one of my faithful readers (and have I ever told you faithful readers how much I appreciate the fact that you read what I write every week?) told me about an article in Southwest’s August Spirit Magazine entitled “Backup or Else.” Spirit Magazine doesn’t have an online edition, and I didn’t do any flying in August, so I thought I might end up missing it. However, one of my useful geek connections did fly Southwest in August, and discovered that the article was in fact the same one that appeared in the September 6 edition of PC Magazine. As a computing professional, I get PC Magazine for free, and I’d actually just cut that article out. You can read it online, and I urge you to do so. Among other things, it contains two important points in the “Best Practices” sidebar:

1. “If you encounter file problems, the most recent backup of that file may have the same problems. So don’t be too quick to overwrite the older backups.”
2. “Typical consumer backup products don’t save open files. So if you never close your mail file, or you keep a status-report spreadsheet open all the time, it may never get properly backed up.”

There’s also a review of BounceBack Pro, which I want to compare to Pam’s experience once she’s finished setting up her ABS drive.

Backups on the Air

A few days ago I was listening to the Kickstartnews Revue Podcast, and what should I hear but several reminders about backups. The show’s hosts had suffered from a flooded basement which delayed their podcast production, though they were fortunate enough not to experience serious data loss. (This brought up the topic of insurance coverage and the circumstances under which policies will cover you for data loss, in particular loss of third-party data. I’ll be interviewing a colleague on just that subject for next week’s column.)

Backups Underwater

Flooded basements are common anywhere people have basements (they are rare here in California). Common causes are heavy rainstorms, pipes which freeze and break during winter (something else which is rare here in California), and sewer backups (which can happen anywhere). If you have a basement family room or a home office in the basement, then your far-from-waterproof electronic equipment is at risk. I’d recommend storing your backup media or XHD in a place less likely to get wet, say a middle floor of the house (as the attic or top floor is more vulnerable to roof leaks). That also applies to your choice of a place to put the backup server or network drive. Don’t put it next to the window, either--says Sallie whose computer is usually resting under the window all night. (Maybe I should rearrange my room.)

Flooded basements are minor-league problems compared to what’s happening in Mississippi and Louisiana thanks to Hurricane Katrina. In cases of real disasters, just keeping your backups out of the basement isn’t enough. In fact, your off-site backups better be a very long way off site.

I have to admit my own backups wouldn’t save me from a disaster on that scale, and it’s making me think I’d better create some DVDs to send to my parents for safekeeping, not to mention backing up any critical working files to my website. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, though responsible for only a small percentage of the data lost in any year, are the answer to the question “Why would anyone pay a monthly fee for online backup services when external drives are so cheap?”

Do you know someone whose data was drowned in Hurricane Katrina? DriveSavers data recovery service is offering to waive its $200 attempt fee and cut prices by 1/3 for Katrina’s victims.

Next week: “Do your backups meet the requirements of your company’s liability policy?” featuring Charles Wilson of RiskSmart Solutions.

DriveSavers in the New York Times

Among the interesting tips in this article about data loss and data recovery services is the fact that while drive reliability has gone down, drive recoverability has gone up. DriveSavers reports recovering up to 90% of the data from 85-90% of drives. Of course, they keep components of 10,000 different models of drives around so they can attempt to get your drive up and running again.

Most hilarious is the fact that the founder of DriveSavers doesn't back up his computer, for fear of putting himself out of business.

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