I used to do a lot of home remodeling while living in the house I was working on. Everything was covered in dust for years. Overtime, the cooling fan on my computer sucked a good bit of that dust into it. Ultimately, the dust got into the hard drive and ground it to a horrible halt.
This was my first hard drive failure and I started some rudimentary repairs. Which went nowhere. I ended up taking it to a computer repair shop. They shook their head after a couple of attempts to read it. Their only solution was to ship it away to a company that specializes in forensic analysis of hard drives. A short phone call with them revealed that they couldn’t guarantee any success but it would cost a couple of thousand dollars for them to try. Did I mention this was a small 40gig hard drive?
This was when disk space was expensive and backing up to a hard drive was a bit cost prohibitive. Needless to say this was also before online backups. My files were music, photos and some documents. Most of which I couldn’t get back, at least without a lot of time rescanning photos, reripping CDs and retyping in some data. That is if any of that was available. I don’t think I’ll ever know what all I really lost but it was a lot.
Soon after I started to copy my data to DVDs, Thumb drives and now the high capacity external hard drives. A quick walk through Costco will reveal that data space is really cheap.
The downside of these back up methods, is that the backups tend to be kept with the original data. If something bad happens to one device, chances are good it will adversely affect your backups too. Storing them separately is inconvenient and most likely wont get used very often. There are security concerns with the external hard drives to be aware of.
The real solution, as long as you have pretty consistent access to the internet, is an online backup service. Most are really easy to set up, invisible to the user until recovery is needed, data is safe, and the cost is really cheap.
A colleague of mine wrote a blog post about this topic a while back. He is David Gracey owner of Network 1 Consulting, a 14-year-old IT Support company in Atlanta, GA. I consider David an expert in this area, plus David has 3 children. Here is a link: http://network1consulting.com/tuesday-tip-protect-important-data-and-photos/
I still use external hard drives just because I have them but my main solution and peace of mind comes from an online backup service.
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Don Miller is a PMP certified Project Manager splits his time between Atlanta and Seattle. He has come to Teledata Select via Seattle, New York and Washington DC. His experience running small to multi-million dollar projects in the Banking, Software, Telecommunications and Insurance Industries across the US has given him a wide range of business experience.
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