What’s your data backup solution?

Everybody knows you should back up your data regularly. One of the most common things I said to students when I was teaching was ‘Save early, save often.’

There are many horror stories of people loosing precious data, like a fellow student when I was learning programming who lost his project.

We were both working on our Java project for our programming major. I had just completed mine and was documenting it, and he was putting the finishing touches to his code, checking for bugs etc. It had been a really good session for him, he was on a roll. He had gone hard and written he entire program in one go, without saving it. As Mr. Murphy predicted, just as he hit the save button the computer crashed. He lost everything.

I’ve been there done that also, unfortunately.

I had just finished a whole bunch of bug fixes, updates and improvements to my MySQL interface software, and it rocked! Just as I was finishing it the phone rang. It was my sister, and we started chatting about stuff. While we were talking I began to hear a strange ticking noise coming from the computer. At first I thought some dust or something had got into the fan. But then, it all went black – no more hard drive. I not only lost my software, but everything else on the hard drive. At about that point I thought ‘ Hmmm…. I wonder if I’ve backed any of that up anywhere.’ The short answer was ‘no.’

I managed to get some of the data back thanks to the wonderful people at Quay Computers here in Wellington. But it was a hard lesson to learn – other people are not the only ones who need to save often, save early. I need to do it too.

So I got an external hard drive and began doing irregular backups on that. It worked fine, sort of. I’ve since had numerous OS failures (thanks Vista!!) where I’ve had to reinstall and then get my data from the backup drive. So at least I haven’t lost too much during that process. But it was always cluncky and I never did it often enough.

So I came up with a cunning plan, thanks in a small part to my father. He was going overseas and needed a way to store and carry video and picture files. Potentially a lot of data. We ended up buying a portable hard drive – the Western Digital Passport portable hard drive. At 120gig it had enough capacity, and being powered via USB made it easy for him to carry around and plug into a machine in an internet café and download all his pictures. It’s nice and small so it does not take up a lot of room in his luggage etc. it worked flawlessly for him, so I thought I’d give it a go as well.

Where this is better than my old hard drive is that it is powered via USB, I don’t have to plug it in and turn it on. It just turns on when I turn my PC on.

I also don’t have to decide what to back up. It knows what files have changed and what is new etc. all I have to do it click the .exe to launch the synchronisation software and then forget it. All my selected folders, including email, browser favourites, music etc are al encrypted and copied to the hard drive.

It’s a very simple elegant solution that means no mater what happens to my OS or my hard drive, I’ll always have my data backed up. And as a bonus I can just plug the drive into my laptop and carry on working on the same files, including all my development files, which is a huge bonus.

So when you’re thinking about how to back up your data, have a good look at an external portable drive. They come in many flavours and sizes and most offer encryption. I’d recommend getting one the is USB powered as it saves having to remember to turn it on etc and you can set your PC to run the synchronisation software on startup.

But not matter what strategy you use, make sure you DO have a strategy, and that your strategy works.

And always remember – save early, save often.