The Importance
of Backup for PCs
Never let this happen to you.
It was Sunday, Sunday 23 November
2003 at 4:00 p.m. to be precise. I
was in the final months of Graduate
Business School, working on a paper
for the following week. Two chapters
of a research project were finished
and stashed on my hard drive - no hard
copies, just bits and bytes created
over three months. I punched away
at the keyboard. Suddenly, my notebook
slowed dramatically.
I started closing applications in
the hope of increasing speed. I
wasn't too worried - it had happened
before. My usual fix was to reboot.
Whilst this took place I sauntered
off to fix myself a sandwich - oblivious
of the impending disaster. On
returning I saw a black screen with
one, short, stark phrase:
Drive C not present.
Retry? Ignore? Abort?
Naturally, I clicked Retry. Seconds
later the screen turned totally black.
A cold eeriness seeped slowly
through my innards. I tried rebooting
again. White words, blank screen,
panic. Reboot again, and again.
My mind glued up. For the next ten
hours I struggled with this blessed
machine. The following day I took
the hard drive to the office to try
taking an image. The result: nothing,
except anger, loss and regret.
I had lost 2.5 Gigabytes - two years
of assignments, documents, lecture notes
and articles. On top of that, the notebook
was the same one I used at work. It
contained four years of work documents,
brochures, customer databases, emails,
email addresses, marketing plans, competitive
information, and much more. Nothing
backed-up... next to nothing printed!
Why hadn't I backed-up? I honestly
thought that disasters only happened
to other people. Backing-up seemed a
tedious procedure of taking all the
files on one drive, and individually
sticking them onto floppies or some
other storage device. I firmly
believed that my hard drive would never
die while I was studying. After
this episode I did, however, buy several
USB drives and a CD Burner. I also spent
a fortune on CDs to store the individual
files that I created after 11.23.
Most people and, sadly enough, most
businesses, only react to disaster after
the damage is done. This is OK because,
at least, they are doing something to
prevent future attacks. However, can
you imagine if I were to put a price
tag on the data I lost: the time I wasted
trying to recover the data, the products
I bought, the time my colleagues spent
helping, and the time and money spent
to build the customer database? I
would put it in the region of
$50,000 to $75,000, including the lost
potential for short-term revenues by
my company.
My strategy for preventing disaster
was seriously flawed. True, you must
save and save again, however, imaging
a hard drive in its native format onto
a number of media is not a long-term
solution. There are better ways.
Backup software allows you to
take all your data and compress it into
an archive small enough to be handled
by the least amount of storage devices.
My method was expensive and extremely
time consuming because of the manual
and constant input, but backup software
essentially does everything on its own.
I hope I have raised a sense of urgency
rather than a mere awareness of the
importance of backing-up. In the next
chapters I will cover a further two
important aspects:
- The need for a planned backup
strategy (if you have a business).
- The features to look out for
if you want an all-round, robust
backup solution.
Ironically, since the disaster I
have changed jobs - joining Uniblue
Systems, the makers of WinBackup
2.0.
This is how seriously I now take
backing-up!
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Copyright 2004 K.J.
Vella
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