Protect your work, your media and your memories!
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
by: John Sciacca
Backing up your data is something that everyone plans on doing, but tends to get backburnered for one reason or other. Truthfully, I was no different. Even with minor scares like my power supply crapping out and the hard drive making random clicking sounds — you know, the computer basically shooting up red flares telling me that trouble was a brewin’ – I still managed to put it off.
My procrastinating came to a head one day when my computer totally locked-up. After installing some updates and running a virus scan, not even the failsafe control-alt-delete worked. After a hard power down, the computer booted up into DOS and the monitor immediately began filling with screen after screen of code. This went on for several minutes until finally the desktop came on…totally blank!
I was instantly overcome with that watery, narrowly-avoided-a-horrible-car-wreck feeling. Had I stumbled across a virus that wiped my drive clean just for giggles? Was this the Conflicker worm rearing its ugly head? But most importantly, had I just lost my precious, irretrievable data? Every digital photo and video we’ve taken of our 2 ½ year old. My 8,000 song music collection. Eight years of Sound & Vision articles. Fifteen years of financial records. And every other scrap of data that makes up the unique 0s and 1s of what I hold dear.
Fortunately, the desktop returned to normal and my data was intact, but in those few moments, I became a true believer and I immediately ordered a hard drive, the Western Digital My Book Mirror. Out of the box, this wonder is pre-configured for RAID 1, meaning that it uses the 2 Terabytes as two mirrored 1 Terabyte drives. With some free software found on the Net, the computer now automatically performs back-ups weekly. Beyond the fear of losing data from a drive crash, I now have a small data “vault” that is easily evacuated in the case of emergency. (I live in hurricane prone Myrtle Beach.)
Spend a few seconds and consider what you’d lose if your computer suddenly had a grand mal. Sobering, no? Whether you buy a large external drive, use Network Attached Storage (NAS) or a bunch of USB drives, pay for remote storage or just routinely burn everything onto a DVD (or Blu-ray), make sure you’ve got a back-up plan in place and stick to it!
