Living with Regret

Many of my articles deal with researching and the effect it has on the company's dealings with clients. Now, I feel that another issue has to take the forefront: system and assets back-up. I have had the worst luck lately when dealing with computers, company data and the need to back things up. Working at a Web firm, it's easy to take backing up for granted because everything already has two copies: all the articles, client assets, help archives, etc. exist both on our local drives as well as on the Web servers. But this is the exception to the rule as most businesses don't have such redundancy in place.

I still can recall my personal data loss tragedies... One day I accidentally erased my first PC's 500MB drive trying to retrieve a paper I wrote for history class. Another day I lost all my documents, media and impressive collection of ms-dos based games to a suddenly defective drive. The memories haunt me...

Thanks to continually dropping technology prices, a back-up array or separate storage solution has fallen within reach of the average home user. Still, people are losing their data in their own personal tragedies every day, simply because data back-ups only gets serious consideration about five seconds too late.

A while ago, I consulted with a company on a new computer setup. Under normal circumstances, this should have been a simple, straight-forward, "Buy, Back-up, Program and Go." Unfortunately, their current computer was using Windows '98 and its drive had crashed an hour before I had gotten there. Once a Windows '98 drive has spun its last sector there's simply no hope. I had the unpleasant honor of explaining that their data and projects had gone to 'a better place', all because they hadn't taken my suggestion to pick up a 80GB back-up drive for an easy $70.

The data of any business is a precious commodity, and working without a back-up system is walking on a tightrope without a net. Thankfully, there are many data storage solutions that can meet the needs and budgets of business and personal users.

Hardware Solutions

One simple solution that a user can get either for business or personal use is a 1TB (terabyte) drive, an amount that is virtually impossible to fill without a vast media collection. While this drive is not lacking in capacity, I would be concerned that a drive failure would result in such an immense loss. Personally, I prefer to spread out all my data on multiple drives so that if one fails I have a copy of it somewhere else.

For a business or user that needs to back-up multiple computers, a networked or wireless drive may be an excellent solution. The D-Link DSM-G600 Wireless G Network Storage Enclosure allows you to place drives on a shared network. Another solution would be an attached network storage like the Iomega StorCenter 1TB WI-FI Network storage drive. The drives are already formatted and ready to go, and have wireless connectivity and network adapters for additional server storage.

For those users that need storage on a tight budget I would recommend one of two choices. A 500GB external drive like the Seagate Freeagent Desktop costs between $90-150. For the more ambitions, you can combine a 500GB hard drive (about $100 and getting cheaper) with an external enclosure (check out the Eagle Consus W-Series SATA to USB and the eSATA External Storage System (ET-CSWESU2-BK) Black).

I recently have been introduced to an innovative storage solution called Drobo, the world's first storage robot. I have to say the concept looks promising, I wish that I could get my hands on one to play with. Based on information from their site, here are some pros and cons of the Drobo:

Pros:

• You can swap drives (SATA only please) in and out of Drobo and data is automatically and redundantly redistributed to protect from drive failure. This is like RAID only better: I don't trust RAID based systems because of their rigid nature. With RAID, adding or removing a drive requires a full reboot and, depending on the RAID configuration, a single drive failure could still corrupt the whole array.
• No babysitting required, the Drobo takes care of itself.
• There's no loss of productivity between files and data while drive swapping.

Cons:

• The Drobo's price of $499 and up is a significant roadblock to becoming an early adopter. Keep an eye out for this price to start dropping, however, as the technology spreads.
• It only comes with USB 2.0 connections, eSATA and standard networking capabilities would have been welcome features.

While using an external drive is sufficient for many purposes, some users are turning to software solutions that help automate the back-up process.

Software Solutions for Macs

There is an integrated solution that ships with every new Mac called Time Machine. Time Machine makes a full copy of your computer's data when it is initialized and then simply records the changes made to your data. Its automation is paired with a fun, intuitive user interface that let's a user 'fly through time' to find the file that was deleted, edited or saved over. Thanks to its excellent integration within OSX and other peripherals like Time Capsule, Time Machine is the likely choice for backing up Macs.

One other possible solution is MacBackups which does online, offsite back-ups of your Mac.

Software Solutions for PCs

Nero offers a back-up feature in its Nero 8 software. It can automate the back-up process and allows for manual back-ups as well

Norton Ghost is also an excellent option. It's not a tradition back-up program in that you have to restart and load PC-dos in order to make your back-up. The benefit to this approach is that it can restore your entire computer with your programs intact rather than simply your documents.

I hope this is a resource that can help make your back-ups easy and painless, but no matter what, please, PLEASE, back up your files!