Never Losing Data
I'm a picture whore. I have over 50 gigabytes of pictures. Yes, I know. It's ridiculous. Some of these pictures I would just utterly bawl my eyes out if I ever lost. Some are family photos and some are photos that I just will never ever be able to download again if I lose them.
So, needless to say I'm quite concerned about protecting myself from data loss. When my hard drive crashed back in April, I was upset, but I knew I had only lost about 2 weeks worth of material because of diligent backing-up.
The fact of the matter is, every hard drive will eventually break. It's really really true. Consumer hard drives are not designed to last forever, and the chance of your hard drive lasting forever, especially if you use it a lot, is virtually nill.
If you go by that mindset, if you never back up your hard drive, you will eventually lose it all. It's that simple.
Plus, there's this thing called computer maintenance. Every hard drive needs to be reformatted occasionally to keep your system running at optimum performance. Eventually, whether of your own choice or fate's, all your data will be deleted, and you'll need to have a copy somewhere else.
Sometimes, your hard drive doesn't even have to crash to lose data. Sometimes files just get corrupted. It's unpredictable, unexplainable (by me, at least), and it happens. All the more reason to keep second copies of your files.
Generally, you should always have at least 2 copies of your data. Of course, the more the better, but you don't have to go overboard either.
1.) Buy an external hard drive (or a secondary, separate internal).
Partitioning your main drive isn't enough... if the whole drive crashes, you're going to lose it all, as well as when you reformat. I recommend mirroring your main hard drive completely onto a second drive. Keeping a carbon copy of your data on a second drive is the easiest way to back up.
Hard drives can get relatively expensive, though they're cheaper now, and I recommend buying one that is, at the very least, as big as your main drive. If you can buy bigger, that's great, because you never know if you'll get another drive you want to back up or ever need a temporary space to dump files if your main drive gets too crowded.
There are free/shareware programs that will automatically backup your hard drive for you. Deja Vu is a program for Mac OS X that I adore. There will be similar programs for Windows most assuredly. You can set a time at regular intervals for this program to copy over your data to the place you specify (in this case, the external/secondary drive). There are even settings so that if you delete a file on your main drive, it'll keep the old file. It's really handy if you accidentally delete something and realize the next day that you need it back. (This is also why buying a larger hard drive is recommended) I'd recommend having the program copy your data at least once a week, once per night would be even better. Now you don't even have to THINK about backing-up. It just happens while you sleep.
Of course, the dangerous things about hard drives is that they have moving parts. Moving parts break. Although the odds are unlikely that both your second drive and your main drive would fail at the same time, hey, Murphey's law exists.
2.) Back up your data on CDs/DVDs, possibly in addition to a secondary drive
CDs and DVDs are another excellent way to backup your data if you can't afford the cost of a second hard drive. In fact, even if you have a second hard drive, I STILL recommend that you back things up onto CDs and DVDs, simply because they can't break like hard drives can.
Okay, they can break. They can snap and crack (hard to do accidentally, but I have done it before by throwing my purse on top of one) and much more easily, getting scratched.
Sometimes scratches bad enough to render a disc unusable are fixable, but usually they're not. Your best bet is to just take good care of it, keeping it in a case, and also out of sunlight and in cool, darker places. The shelf-life of consumer optical media isn't really known, but it's likely it'll outlast the importance of the data.
CDs are SO dirt cheap now there's really no excuse not to backup at least your family photos and important documents. DVD burners and media are also coming way down in price recently, and since single-layer dvds store 4.4 gigs on a disc, you can back up a whole lot at once.
So, if you have a file backed-up on both a second hard drive and a DVD/CD, your chances of losing that file are next to none. It may be overkill, but I feel really great knowing that my family photos are in 3 places-- my main hard drive, my secondary drive, and on a CD.
3.) Although zip disks and USB keychains and etc are good for very temporary backups and transferring data, they really really suck at holding data longterm. I can't tell you how many zip disks have gone corrupted on me. Don't plan on keeping data on these, ESPECIALLY if it's the only copy you have of the data. It's simply not a good idea and they're not reliable.
Well that's it. It's all common sense, really. Of course, I'm also not an expert on backing-up drives or on dvds and stuff. If you have any corrections or anything to add, let me know and I'll edit it in.
So, needless to say I'm quite concerned about protecting myself from data loss. When my hard drive crashed back in April, I was upset, but I knew I had only lost about 2 weeks worth of material because of diligent backing-up.
The fact of the matter is, every hard drive will eventually break. It's really really true. Consumer hard drives are not designed to last forever, and the chance of your hard drive lasting forever, especially if you use it a lot, is virtually nill.
If you go by that mindset, if you never back up your hard drive, you will eventually lose it all. It's that simple.
Plus, there's this thing called computer maintenance. Every hard drive needs to be reformatted occasionally to keep your system running at optimum performance. Eventually, whether of your own choice or fate's, all your data will be deleted, and you'll need to have a copy somewhere else.
Sometimes, your hard drive doesn't even have to crash to lose data. Sometimes files just get corrupted. It's unpredictable, unexplainable (by me, at least), and it happens. All the more reason to keep second copies of your files.
Generally, you should always have at least 2 copies of your data. Of course, the more the better, but you don't have to go overboard either.
1.) Buy an external hard drive (or a secondary, separate internal).
Partitioning your main drive isn't enough... if the whole drive crashes, you're going to lose it all, as well as when you reformat. I recommend mirroring your main hard drive completely onto a second drive. Keeping a carbon copy of your data on a second drive is the easiest way to back up.
Hard drives can get relatively expensive, though they're cheaper now, and I recommend buying one that is, at the very least, as big as your main drive. If you can buy bigger, that's great, because you never know if you'll get another drive you want to back up or ever need a temporary space to dump files if your main drive gets too crowded.
There are free/shareware programs that will automatically backup your hard drive for you. Deja Vu is a program for Mac OS X that I adore. There will be similar programs for Windows most assuredly. You can set a time at regular intervals for this program to copy over your data to the place you specify (in this case, the external/secondary drive). There are even settings so that if you delete a file on your main drive, it'll keep the old file. It's really handy if you accidentally delete something and realize the next day that you need it back. (This is also why buying a larger hard drive is recommended) I'd recommend having the program copy your data at least once a week, once per night would be even better. Now you don't even have to THINK about backing-up. It just happens while you sleep.
Of course, the dangerous things about hard drives is that they have moving parts. Moving parts break. Although the odds are unlikely that both your second drive and your main drive would fail at the same time, hey, Murphey's law exists.
2.) Back up your data on CDs/DVDs, possibly in addition to a secondary drive
CDs and DVDs are another excellent way to backup your data if you can't afford the cost of a second hard drive. In fact, even if you have a second hard drive, I STILL recommend that you back things up onto CDs and DVDs, simply because they can't break like hard drives can.
Okay, they can break. They can snap and crack (hard to do accidentally, but I have done it before by throwing my purse on top of one) and much more easily, getting scratched.
Sometimes scratches bad enough to render a disc unusable are fixable, but usually they're not. Your best bet is to just take good care of it, keeping it in a case, and also out of sunlight and in cool, darker places. The shelf-life of consumer optical media isn't really known, but it's likely it'll outlast the importance of the data.
CDs are SO dirt cheap now there's really no excuse not to backup at least your family photos and important documents. DVD burners and media are also coming way down in price recently, and since single-layer dvds store 4.4 gigs on a disc, you can back up a whole lot at once.
So, if you have a file backed-up on both a second hard drive and a DVD/CD, your chances of losing that file are next to none. It may be overkill, but I feel really great knowing that my family photos are in 3 places-- my main hard drive, my secondary drive, and on a CD.
3.) Although zip disks and USB keychains and etc are good for very temporary backups and transferring data, they really really suck at holding data longterm. I can't tell you how many zip disks have gone corrupted on me. Don't plan on keeping data on these, ESPECIALLY if it's the only copy you have of the data. It's simply not a good idea and they're not reliable.
Well that's it. It's all common sense, really. Of course, I'm also not an expert on backing-up drives or on dvds and stuff. If you have any corrections or anything to add, let me know and I'll edit it in.