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:
It’s great that you are helping to emphasise the fact that people need to backup their data. I’ve had so many friends and family members loose data and ask me to help them recover at least some of it. I am able to help quite often, but it would have saved so much time if they had kept multiple backups.
I have my laptops scheduled to back up a couple of nights a week to a home server, I also duplicate the the more important stuff to an external HDD, from that I take the most important stuff again and duplicate it to USB sticks, and the most critical of all gets another level of duplication to optical media.
Call me paranoid if you like. But I prefer to think of it as wise.
hi Gareth
Thanks for the quick response. Can you tell me which applications your using for managing this process of backing up you described? thanks again
My network just consists of 2 Windows based laptops with one home built server that I have installed Windows Home Server (WHS) on. I find it easy to manage, I have set up user accounts for some of my family, so we can access some or all of our data from anywhere with a connection to the internet.
All my other backing up falls down to me being diligent. Needless to say I do the manual backups less often, these depend on when I make updates to important documents or when I have fresh data that I feel is important.
I have a few pictures on social networks (facebook etc) these are not regarded by me as highly important, but they are nice to have, so I don’t really mind if they are hi-res or not and I know I have a few copies elsewhere anyway.
I also keep some copies “off-site” (at my parents place), because you can never be too careful.
[...] All your hard drives are destined to die! [...]
[...] Previous short articles include: 1. The Definitive step-by-step guide to backups 2. All your hard drives are destined to die! 3. The Family PC (The myth that lives) Conclusions: i hope after just seeing what can happen to [...]