All your Hard/USB Drives Are a Ticking Time Bomb Part 2

I have to be honest with you folks, usually when i write some of these articles, i am biased with something which i felt had worked pretty well for me and wanted to share it with the world.

These scenarios i am about to illustrate have some direct product associations for a reason: i have seen them work in one way or the other. i welcome the idea of constructive criticism and correction on any of the items i amy have been referring to.

In Part 1 of this doom and gloom HDD scenario, i hope i didn’t put you off! The idea was to have “the audience” really connect to what i have experienced in the fast changing of tech.  So without any further introduction and metaphors, let me continue the backup journey by showing you in various ways of-protecting your data.

I have to be honest with you folks, usually when i write some of these articles, i am biased with something which i felt had worked pretty well for me and wanted to share it with the

world.  These scenarios i am about to illustrate have some direct product associations for a reason: i have seen them work in one way or the other. i welcome the idea of constructive criticism and correction on any of the items i amy have been referring to.

In Part 1 of this doom and gloom HDD scenario, i hope i didn’t put you off! The idea was to have “the audience” really connect to what i have experienced in the fast changing of tech. To make a close approximation of what your will need, most hard drive manifactures will have the following postings on their packaging to storage guide you :

This is a typical listing of a 1 Terabyte drive (which is 1000 Gigabytes)

• Up to 285,000 digital photos
• Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)
• Up to 25,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
• Up to 76 hours of Digital Video (DV)
• Up to 440 hours of DVD quality video
• Up to 120 hours of HD video

So without any further introduction and metaphors, let me continue the backup journey by showing you in various ways of-protecting your data.

Scenario 1

What can i do on the cheap / your still not totally redundant but its a good start

For Macs:
1. Get an external USB hard drive bigger than your internal one

2. Turn on TimeMachine (OR TIM)  by clicking on this icon 
3. The rest of the screen instructions will carry you through

If sounds this simple, thats because it really is that simple!  By default TM is backing up your machine
every  hour on the hour intervals. Seriously its that easy!   (more on TM)

For Windows (2000 / XP / Vista / Windows 7)  
1. Get an external USB hard drive bigger than your internal one
2. Get a free tool called Cobian Backup

This free tool and allows the user to set intervals and spacing for the target files or the entire system files.

Pros and Cons of this approach:
Regardless of your a PC or a Mac, this fee or the cheap approach has its limits:

Pros:     Easy to setup and use  / free software  and no licensing costs
Cons:    The biggest flop with this is its all centralized in one  backing up hard drive.

Outcome:   if this one external drive fails (which it will one day with usage) you have lost all your backup of years and years of accumulated data.

Recommendations:
1) Try adding a scond external USB drive to your setup so you can at least backup the backup. (under a Mac you might need to tinker with iDisk to build a manual 2nd drive / in Windows just ask Cobian to back up a 2nd set of files to the 2nd USB drive)
2) Try to be selective of the files and folder you absolutely want to back up rather than just backup everything.
3) If you can spend a bit more money for the single drive consider getting the MyBook Essential for windows and Mac users.

All your Hard/USB Drives Are a Ticking Time Bomb Part 1

To all tech enthusiasts and non alike, who end up opting for the latest PC or Mac:  before you jump into that shiny new machine…..did you know that all your existing stored data is on a collision course with time!  Don’t take my word for it check this or check out the the following snippet from Wiki input of drives:

“The mean time between failures (MTBF) of SATA drives is usually about 600,000 hours (some drives such as Western Digital Raptor have rated 1.2 million hours MTBF), while SCSI drives are rated for upwards of 1.5 million hours.^{[citation needed]} However, independent research indicates that MTBF is not a reliable estimate of a drive’s longevity.^[53] MTBF is conducted in laboratory environments in test chambers and is an important metric to determine the quality of a disk drive before it enters high volume production. Once the drive product is in production, the more valid metric is annualized failure rate (AFR).^{[citation needed]} AFR is the percentage of real-world drive failures after shipping.”  Adapted from Wikipedia

To my surprise, half the time (especially folks with a ton of media and active family photo memories) never consider the consequences of their existing digital universe.I don’t mean to sound snobby on this but seriously folks, when was the last time you took stock in reviewing your digital content? Take that brand spanking new HD Camcorder you bought? or when the Mrs. had just finished taking a ton of those away vacation HI Resolution pictures at the park? ask yourself a simple question:

Did you Back up all this Digital information?

Sadly the one down fall of the digital platform is its simplicity to use! YES because its so simple “point and shoot” action, we seldom remember to back this stuff up. It used to be that once someone has finished shooting pictures or DV camcorders, there was this incredible task of going to your local picture development lab and print the photos and negatives. On the camcorders you had to convert the stuff to a VHS tape or move it to your computer.

Guess what we don’t do this stuff anymore! Either because we are too lazy (me included) or just gotten comfortable with the idea that modern technology is somehow perfect and all my previous memories is safe!

I will say that things have (me being a 15 year veteran of tech consumption since the early 90′s) improved drastically but the old rule of backup still applies to everything, Why!

Believe it or not,  all you current methods of backing up media including:

1. Single (WD MyBook style) hard drive drives have a finite shelf life 2. That new HD Hard Drive based camcorder also has a shelf life
3. The USB flash disks (that are overly used nowadays)
4. Those DVD’s blank and backup archives

All these methods are no longer applicable by themselves. The General rule of thumb for backup is (adapted from Leo & Alex )

As Alex Lindsay says, “if you don’t have more than one copy of something, it doesn’t exist.”

If data and digital information really matters in your life (not just photos but other life changing documents like:  house titles, car leases, passports, graduations, estate will etc.) then you must devise a backup strategy which insures redundant data.
Once you figured out the approach, then you won’t think about this activity for a very long time.
Furthermore, On that day when (and lets hope this day never comes) you loose all your data or machine-you will thank yourself for having it stored in otehr places or other mediums as Online Backups or Bluray disc format media.

i know what your thinking, all this stuff costs money!
i totally agree on this notion! it does. But then you again you pay for car insurance and health insurance costs money too!

For some of you digital content mangement might not be an intricate part of life. For the rest of you of you i hope you consider your everyday computer usage; especially if  your computing habits include:

1. Downloading movies and paid for content via iTunes
2. Home movies and family photos (if you have more than 500+ photos stored somewhere)
3. Casual and professional writings (even for offline blogs and traditional print media)
4. Running a website or a blog
5. Keeping up research materials as a consultant
6. Keeping professionally accumulated documentation and work you put together over the years
7. Storing you designer or video production projects
8.  Running a  home business and require redundant record keeping
9.  In academia e.g Teaching Assistant or a PhD research student
(you cant say the dog ate my research anymore!)

The list goes on and on. But the basic premise is: if you can’t afford to be without a piece of data, then simplely you need a redundant  and easy method to a backup process/system.

To give you a snap shot of what might sitting on your drive right now consider the image below:

See anything familiar!  Follow me on the second part of this article where i try to build a backup process of almost evry type of scenario and budget.  Happy Computing

P.S if your in a real hurry and have a 2Mbps internet connection, then give any of the following a try for free: