Your hard drive just crashed and you lost everything…

10 years of family photos, movies, spreadsheets with all your sales figures, email, music and more were instantly consigned to nothingness. Worst of all, much of it was irreplaceable. And now it’s gone—as in gnashing-of-teeth and rending-of-garments gone.

Usually when this happens I get a panicked call and I’m asked if there’s anything I can do to recover the data. My first question, of course…

“How old is your last backup?”

You already know the answer, don’t you…

“I never backed it up.”

Here’s the thing, I don’t blame you one bit…

For years, I’ve watched hard drives crash and people lose really valuable stuff. Computers have gotten faster and drives have gotten bigger. We’ve developed cooler new tech that allows us to capture and store more of our life on disk and so we put ever more valuable data on our computers every year.

The problem is that backing up our computers has always been a soul-crushingly boring, complex and irritating process. And even if we did take a stab at it, we discovered that frequently, to our great dismay, when we actually needed the backup we thought we were successfully making, it wasn’t there because of the, wait for it… “weird glitch” that inevitably happened and caused the backup to fail, or be unusable. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen that.

So what if I told you that backing up your computer is no longer such a pain? In fact, it’s easy to make it almost impossible to lose a file ever again. Would you believe me? No? Well I accept your challenge and I’m going to prove it to you by the end of this post.

First, Let’s Be Perfectly Clear

Before I show you the tools I use to guarantee my data’s safety, there’s one thing I think you really need to know as a consumer of computer technology.

All hard drives fail. It’s just that sometimes, a drive lasts long enough to become obsolete and shelved as a dust catcher before it causes you eternal suffering.

Here’s a better way to think about your hard drive…

Most hard drives will give you about 3 years of useful life, some a little more, some a lot less. The problem is, you never know which drive you just purchased.

And you can’t rely on the MTBF! I’ll explain…

There’s a little thing called MTBF and you’ll see that written in the small print on the hard drive itself, or the box it came in. It means Mean Time Between Failures and it frequently has a huge number after it. That number LOOKS big, but it’s actually an average of how many hours many other hard drives like this one have lasted before they failed. Or is it… ?

Divide by 24 and again by 365 and it usually comes out to about 114 years. What?!! Didn’t I say drives might last 3–5 years?! Yet the manufacturers are giving us some very optimistic, dreamy estimates of drive life, apparently.

It turns out that the MTBF ratings are possibly grossly inflated and are yet another reason you can’t use that as a reliable estimate of hard drive life.

On top of that, you can’t determine that a drive is OK even if it’s passed a certain minimum burn-in period and it’s still working. According to a hard drive study done in 2007 by by Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson of Carnegie Mellon University…

“…results were contrary to the widespread IT belief in burn-in, where most problems with any drive (or electronic device, really) will be experienced at the very beginning of its life cycle (Schroeder and Gibson called this the “infant mortality effect”). Instead, the study showed that failures start off in the first few years and grow, rather than starting after a wait of five years or so, which was expected.”

But That’s Not All…

Environmental factors such as excessive heat or cold, cigarette smoke, actual time powered on and frequency of dropping from a ten story building onto a concrete slab will all change the MTBF rating; sometimes dramatically. (See also, Hard Disk MTBF: Flap or Farce?)

POINT: The manufacturer’s suggested lifespan of your hard drive is based on a statistical average and is NOT a guarantee. Some hard drives last longer before their first failure and sadly, some last a much shorter time and then die a horrible, flaming death, with nasty, big, pointy teeth. This usually seems to happen in the middle of your very first backup.

So again, it’s not a question of IF, but WHEN your hard drive will fail. And that, my friends IS a guarantee. How can I know this? Well that’s easy. In this case entropy is on my side and I challenge you to go up against that giggling warthog of doom any day.

And if your hard drive is encroaching upon the 3–5 year age range, you’re gambling with some mighty bad odds against you.

So what can you do? Here’s my basic plan for backing stuff up painlessly and automatically every day.

The Backup Trifecta

1. Local automated backup to a second external (or internal, your choice) hard drive.

Get a good external hard drive that is double the size of the internal drive you’ll be backing up. If your internal drive is 500 MB, then get a 1000 MB drive. I find the MyBooks to be reliable and well priced. My Book (Western Digital) External Hard Drives

Additionally, you will need an application that will automatically copy your data to this drive. If you’re on a Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard you can use Time Machine, but you will still want to make a bootable copy of your drive in addition to this.

In order to make bootable backups for the Mac I recommend the application Super Duper ($27.95) or if you really can’t afford it, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner (free however I’ve used both and prefer Super Duper for ease of use.).

For Windows, the most recent version of Acronis® True Image Home 2010 (free trial) should do the trick (earlier versions did not create a true, bootable copy of a Windows hard drive). For a free backup alternative for Windows you might try XXClone.

2. Backup to a secure, offsite system over the Internet

Use a secure, online backup option like Mozy. This will backup your entire drive automatically in the background and it’s easy to restore even after catastrophic hard drive failure.

3. Backup key files and settings to a third online destination.

I use Apple’s mobileMe as an easy way to back up key files (Address Book, Mail settings, browser bookmarks, etc.) Note that Windows users can also use mobileMe and it’s not just an iPhone sync tool. Alternatively, you can get similar functionality by using Google Sync Services, however be forewarned, it will be considerably more complex than Apple’s mobileMe and my goal here was to make things as easy as possible. Also note that I haven’t tried this so YMMV. If you try it and have good luck with it, let me know.

BONUS (Insurance)

And finally, the extra insurance that brings it all together and pushes the success probability over the top in your favor… (yeah, OK, so it’s really a quad-fecta, but come on that sounds dumb so let’s just call this a bonus, shall we?)

Use an online file synchronization application like DropBox to automatically synchronize your files and make them available on any computer you use.

I love this web application! This is great not only for backing up stuff, but keeping files synchronized across multiple computers and locations. You can also securely share huge files that you would never e-mail.

This post has gotten a LOT longer than I anticipated. The point though to sum up is this, use a series of backup measures to multiple networks and media and you are almost guaranteed to never lose another file to chance.

Hope this was useful and, as usual, if you have questions, leave them below in the comments and I’ll be sure to answer.

All the best!

–Zack

Note: I updated this post on 28 September 2008 to reflect new options and better prices.

I’ve been needing a new external hard drive myself for a while now and after considerable research and deliberation, I selected one that did the trick. This drive is by Fantom and the reviews are consistently very good. The company also appears to be very responsive to faulty, or defective products.

The first drive is about $15 more than it’s USB 2.0 brother, but I absolutely wanted the Firewire option for doing video work and high speed transfers, so it’s worth it by far. It has BOTH USB 2.0 and Firewire 1394a (400) interfaces.

The drive is very quiet and cool with the only complaint from a very tiny minority of folks being the bright, blue LED light on the front, but frankly, that’s a non-issue for me. If it’s in your bedroom facing your pillow, well then you may have a problem, but now c’mon, are you serious? It’s next to your pillow … ?

The second drive is double the capacity at 1 Terabyte (approx. 1000 gigabytes) and an outstanding drive for backups or video or anything else that needs a lot of space and speed. It has top ratings and an unbeatable price. It has only eSATA or USB though so watch it if you need Firewire.

Check them out and please comment back if you decide to get one and have any thoughts about it …

May your tech forays be fruitful!

–Zack

Fantom Titanium-II 500GB 3.5″ External Hard Drive [with Firewire interface]

Fantom 1TB 3.5″ Silver GreenDrive External Hard Drive

There’s a new scam that claims the IRS owes you a refund. It looks fairly official. I’ve posted a link to the article and recommend familiarizing yourself with it.

Click to read the article …

Sometimes you just need a fast, cheap computer and you need it yesterday. And when I say cheap, I mean cheap; I mean as little as you can possibly pay, but still well built and with support that actually answers the phone.

We’re assuming here that a Mac is out of the question for various reasons.

This is a box I can recommend. Check the reviews. I think this one will be the right answer. I’ve gotten Acer products on a number of occasions and been very happy with the product and their support on the rare times I’ve had to call.

ASUS Eee Box EBXB202-BLK-X0023 Intel Atom N270(1.60GHz) 1GB DDR2 Intel GMA 950

And if you need a low-cost, high quality LCD monitor to go with that, check this out. I think you’ll be more than happy with it (this monitor is NOT intended for high end color critical design work!) But it will be fantastic for 100% of what 99.9% of folks who use a computer need a monitor to do.

Hanns·G HW-191DPB Black 19″ 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor Built in Speakers

Your comments are most welcome!

–Zack

Updated: 3 November 2009

I needed some more basic CDs for burning and found these Verbatim CD-Rs which are very reliable and burn at their rated speed of 52x, unlike many other brand-name CDs which we shan’t mention.

About $20 for a spindle of 100 CDs. (Note that these are your standard shiny surface for labeling with a Sharpie or similar pen, not for printing from a custom CD printer, if you have one of those; most folks don’t.)

Verbatim 94554 700 MB 52X 80 Minute CD-R, 100 Disc Spindle with Reinforced Packaging to Minimize Breakage

If you DO have an inkjet printer capable of printing on CDs, you’ll want to get these instead:

Verbatim 97019 700 MB 52X 80 MIN DataLifePlus White Inkjet Hub Printable CD-R, 100-Disc Spindle Tape Wrap (White)

I’ve been going through it. I’m planning on doing the entire 16 hour transformation about 10 days from today and I can’t wait.
There are some podcasts that really make it even easier to wrap your head around how this works and what you can expect—also hints and examples. Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders also covers Getting Things Done and just about anything else you might want to know about organizing and productivity.

I’m really looking forward to a huge change in the way my life works by using this.

If you find yourself frustrated by the overwhelming list of stuff you have to and want to do, you should definitely give this book a thorough review.

Check it out here:

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

OK, back when I bought my digicam I researched it all for 3 months and finally chose the Canon Powershot 7 MP (megapixel) version. Then they came out with a 10 MP version and I was bummed, but not too much since it was a lot more expensive.

Well now the IMPROVED 10 Mpixel version of the old 10 Mpixel version is out and it’s cheaper than my original 7 MPixel Powershot! Sheesh. At least you can take advantage of it and I can live vicariously knowing you got the best deal I’ve ever seen on the Canon digicams. Get it, you’ll love it.

Canon PowerShot A2000 IS 10.0 MP Digital Camera

If you haven’t started using this for reviewing your web site’s stats (are you crazy?!?), you should. Immediately. It used to be called Urchin and cost a small fortune. Now it’s free so there’s no excuse to be suffering along with that old AWstats anymore.

Google Analytics

After some digging, I found a decent UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) that should keep your computer, cable modem, router, monitor and maybe a USB hub up and running during the next power outage for at least 30 minutes. It has a max battery run time of 170 minutes under minumum load and has gotten very good reviews at Newegg.

Yup, it supports Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can pick it up here (click the image below):

CyberPower Intelligent LCD Series GreenPower UPS CP1500AVRLCD 1500VA 900W 4 x 5-15R Battery/Surge Protected 4 x 5-15R Surge Protected Outlets UPS — Retail