Backin' up the data

Placing an order for another external hard drive (runs off the USB port). I just read a newspaper article last night, pointing out that for home users, backing up your home computer is now more important than others: all your home movies and family photos exist on your hard drive, and (often!) nowhere else.

I have three levels of backing up. At the lowest level, I (on most nights!) take a look at which folders I've made changes to (e.g. updating a ''To Do'' list, writing a letter), and copy those folders from the main internal hard drive to the secondardy internal hard drive. This covers me against a hard drive crash; everything is still on the other drive.

My next level is about once a week I copy the entire hard drive -- well, actually just my photos, word processing documents, etc.; not the actual programs, since I have those on CD-ROM -- onto an external hard drive. I keep this in a locked desk drawer: I cut a small hole in the back for the USB cable and the power cord. This covers me against burglary, since if someone steals my PC, the external hard drive will (hopefully!) be left behind.

And finally: One of the rules of archving is to have a copy stored off-site. And thus, my ordering of the new external hard drive. In Aussie prices, it's AU$135 (US$101) for 100GB. (Might be able to get cheaper, but this is a good brand.) Like my current external hard drive, it's big enough to hold at least three copies of all my data, which means that I can have several versions of the backup -- just in case the copying process gets interrupted somehow [e.g. a power outage]. Of the two external hard drives, at any given time one will be at my wife's parents, and one will be at our place. Thus, in case of something tragic happening -- our entire home office falls in to a sinkhole -- there will still be a semi-recent version somewhere else.


I used to back up to CD-R -- but it literally took 30+ CDs to do a full backup, which took most of a day (I had to keep coming back and switching CDs). Dumping to an external hard drive is easier.


General rule: Backing up your data is cheaper and more reliable than paying some technician to try to salvage your data. ;)


--GG