Paul Hammond's Blog

I have a question for you all.

I am in the HAVE LOST bucket.  The few times I have lost data in the past have certainly contributed to my current backup strategy.  More recently though, the shear amount of important data I have has shaped my backup strategy even more.

I have a single 500Gb disk that holds my entire "My Documents" directory.  When I look at it in detail, the drive contains:

• 23,665 photos, stretching over 9 years; this includes ALL the photos and videos of my kids first 8 years of life (75.4Gb).
• 2,090 video files from my DV camera and my HD camera, also going back 9 years (172Gb).
• 15,062 MP3 and M4A audio files from my iTunes catalog (65.7Gb).
• Many MIDI and Audio files from my music composition and production.
• Documents, Financial files etc.

As you can see, "My Documents" = "Almost My Entire Digital Life".  Losing any of this data would have been depressing.  Losing all of it would be completely heart-breaking.

While I was away on business, at some point this data drive died.  Completely.  No hope of connecting it to copy off whatever I could salvage.  It was simply unreadable.  Dead.

At this point, think about how you would feel, given the above data.  Would you be a little sad?  Sobbing?  Suicidal?  Or mildly annoyed?  Thankfully, I was simply "mildly annoyed".

Restoring My Data

Twenty four hours after arriving home, I am now back up and running with very little pain (apart from the cost of a new drive to replace the dead one).  My attention to a backup strategy completely saved my backside on this occasion.  However, this failure has also made me aware of another round of tweaking that I need to do to ensure total and flawless recovery the next time this happens.  AND REST ASSURED, IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

So, what is my current approach?  I have a single drive that holds all of my data, as you have seen.  You could have multiple drives, this works just the same.

• I use the online backup service Mozy (http://www.mozy.com/) to backup most of my data.  This guarantees that I have off-site copies of my files.  An alternative service I have also used in the past is Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/).  Both have good features, and are reasonably priced.
• I use FolderShare (http://www.foldershare.com/) to create multiple copies of my most important files, or files that I use daily on my multiple home and work machines.
• I have a nightly backup that runs, which copies all of the files from the system and data drives to an external 1Tb drive.  I use a product called Retrospect that came with one of my external drives.  There is a great alternative called SyncBack that is either freeware (v3) or a very cheap option (v4).

In this particular case, it was from the 1Tb backup drive that I was able to salvage my data.  If that had failed, I would have resorted to a combination of Mozy.com data and FolderShare'd data on my other machines.  I attached both my 1Tb backup drive and the new drive to my laptop, and copied the data back to the new drive to create an identical version of what was there before.  Then I reattached the drive back to my desktop and booted up.  Once logged in, I simply reset the ownership and permissions of the "My Documents" directories to the correct settings.

Potential Flaws

There are a couple of possible issues with the above that I have been considering since the failure occurred.  Luckily they didn't occur this time, but I will be altering my approach to cater for these.

1. When the drive died, it disappeared from Windows.  The Mozy client then decided the files had been deleted, and proceeded to remove them from the current online backup set.  Luckily I can go back to older backup sets, but "deleted" files are only kept for 30 days.  If I had been away for a longer period of time, they may have been purged.
2. My nightly backup currently does a "mirror" of my filesystems, with no history.  Files that are added are added to the backup, and files that are deleted are removed.  Luckily, in this case, the software recognized that the drive was missing and skipped the backup.  If it had seen the drive and decided the files were no longer there (as Mozy did), it would have proceeded to wipe the data off the backup too.  I need to look at the options I have for my backup software to keep historical versions of files.

I mitigated the possible issues above by simply powering down the machine remotely to ensure no further damage could occur until I could be back at home there to figure things out!

Side Note 1: Windows Home Server

This incident has also made me think more seriously about buying a Windows Home Server.  One of the great features about this solution is the backup software.  It can backup complete machines, and has historical backups so you can get at older versions of your files if you need to.  Scott Hanselman did a review of Home Server that you can find here: Review - HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server

Side Note 2: FolderShare and Off-Site Backups For Family

One other thing I use FolderShare for is to backup data from various family machines.  I set FolderShare up on their machines and then invited my own FolderShare account to share their key folders.  The files get copied to my machine here.  That way, they benefit from having an off-site backup as well as duplicate data via my nightly backup.

Go And Do It.  Now.

Let me finish by saying this.  WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHATEVER YOU DO WITH YOUR COMPUTER, WHATEVER FILES YOU HAVE, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP STRATEGY THAT SAFEGUARDS *ALL* OF YOUR DATA.  Do it now.  Turn the TV off, and get working.  Don't stop until you have everything backed up, preferably in more than one place.  Your data drive could fail tonight.  It won't give you any helpful warnings before it does.  Make data loss an event of "mild annoyance", not complete despair.