Can You Survive a PC Disaster?

Crash of the Hard Drive

For those of you that follow my rants on a day-to-day basis, you may remember that on Christmas Day 2007, my hard drive crashed. That was a first for me and it made me sit up and take notice. If this has ever happened to you I know exactly how you feel.

In my case, at first I thought that I did not lose any vital documents. I thought my damage was minimal with my only loss being 2 weeks worth of email. As it turns out I also lost about 40 hours worth of computer code for a client contract that I was working on. That was a significant setback and I had no one to blame but myself.

For those of you that do not know, I am a computer programmer by trade, specializing in pocket pc/windows mobile applications. Anyway I will talk more about that in the future but suffice to this cost me a lot of time and money.

Still, I consider myself lucky. Lucky that it was the Christmas season when this happened. If I had not been on a bit of a vacation, my losses would have been significantly worse.

Complacency Costs Money

This was so like me. I had been manually backing up my hard drive to an external 300 GB drive. You know what comes next don’t you? With manual backups comes complacency. I just took for granted that everything would be OK and that I would never have a problem. That was a BIG mistake.

I knew I needed a plan to prevent this from ever happening again.

In The Beginning

The big factor that came into play was that I had to develop an automated backup process that was economical, effective, redundant, and easy to use. I had to make sure that I would never lose any data again.

You see I try and do everything I can for as free as I can. The more free stuff I can use the better. My only policy is, whether the product is a freebie or cost money, it has to work and work well.

My Plan

Although it may seem simple enough and just plain common sense…ask yourself “Am I prepared for all situations?” If not read on and learn what I have done to ensure that You never get slapped with data loss again.

Save Regularly While Working - The Micro Level of Backing Up

If I am working on some development code and everything freezes and I have not saved in a while I could lose all the new code that I had written. This happens all too often so I have gotten used to saving regularly.

Explore the software that you are using. Some, like MS Word, have automated save procedures built in. Don’t rely on that extensively…nothing beats you taking a couple of seconds to click the save button. This is a habitual procedure and you have to force yourself to do it.

Backing Up - Managing Data at the Macro Level

If you have been manually backing up your hard drives, it is time to consider automating the process. Feel free to continue doing the manual process but If you do not have an automated process in place you will lose data. I guarantee it!

Backing up to an External Hard Drive

I use a free piece of software that works great. It is called DriveImage XML. To automate it I configured my Windows Task Manager to run once every day. It generally takes about 2.5 hours to complete so I do it in the evenings when I am generally off-line. Read my article titled: “Is There a Ghost in Your Machine” to learn about this freebie software.

Where Are Your Backups? Are they Safe? Even from Little Johnny?

This is important. Are your critical documents really safe just being backed up to an external hard drive? What happens if your house burns down? What happens if you have your external hard drive and PC connected and little Johnny spills his grape slushie all over them?

We never think that something like that will happen to us until…well…it happens to us.

Online Automated Back Ups - Free to try

If you are like me and have data that is just too important to lose then you need to consider using an online automated backup service. One like Carbonite.com. What got me hooked was the ease of use. They let me have a free trial to test their service. I didn’t even need a credit card. After the trial period I paid them $49.95 for 12 months of automated backups. That is under $5.00 per month and Carbonite will let you store an unlimited amount of data from your hard drive.

The Shameless Plug

Yeah yeah…I know…You may be thinking that I am doing this to make a buck off sending you to Carbonite. I do make a small commission of $1.00 - $3.00 for each lead…but that is not the real reason. I use them to give me peace of mind. Their product is solid and their service impeccable. If don’t make the lead money I don’t care. I would appreciate the stipend for you trying the product, but not going to sweat it if you just go to them directly. The important thing is you need to back up your data online somehow.

Go Easy On My Resources Carbonite

I have approximately 20 Gigs stored with them. It took a few days to do the initial backup but after that it only uploads new files or files that have been changed. If you feel that it is using too much of your system resources, you can set it to a low-level background procedure. That way more resources can be dedicated to your everyday computing.

I have 1 gig of RAM on my box and I did not notice any system degradation at any time of the initial backup process. And now that it is complete backed up sessions are kept quite short. Carbonite is always working and it will give you peace of mind!

Carbonite Guarantees That Your Data is Safe and Secure

Carbonite takes data privacy and security very seriously. They encrypt your files twice before backing them up securely off-site, using the same encryption techniques that banks use. Files remain encrypted at their secure data centers, so only you can see them.

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