TECH TALK: Hard-drive heartbreak avoidable
By Donovan Hoggan
This week I spent a whole bunch of time trying to help someone whose hard drive had crashed. Her laptop got dropped, after which she wasn’t able to turn it on. When I plugged it into another machine, the computer couldn’t even see that there was a hard drive there. I phoned her to let her know, thinking that the conversation would be about whether she got a new hard drive or decided to replace the aging laptop. Instead, her first reaction was, “You mean my pictures are gone?” and she started to cry.
It turns out that every picture she had taken since her two children were born was on that hard drive. I checked into a specialist data recovery service and was told it could be up to $3,000. Her immediate response was “Go ahead”. No hesitation at all. Unfortunately, it didn’t do any good. The impact the hard drive took rendered the data completely unrecoverable. All of her pictures are gone. From here, I’ll be hooking up a scanner for her so that she can scan whatever pictures she can scrounge from friends and family. She estimates that she’ll get back less than 5% of the pictures she had. It’s really upsetting for a family to lose all of their pictures of two adorable kids. What adds insult to injury is that this is so easily preventable. Backing up computer files has become dead simple. In spite of that, I regularly deal with folks who are really nervous about losing files. The best solution is an online service. My two favourites are Mozy (www.mozy.com) and SOS Online (www.memlane.com/donovan.html). Mozy has free accounts available up to 2 GB and unlimited for $5 per machine. SOS is a flat $2/GB regardless of the number of computers you back-up. Mozy is best if you have lots of data on one machine. SOS is better the more machines you have and the less data you want to save. Both use encryption to ensure security and both run automatically in the background. With online back-up set-up, your files are as protected as they can be. And, compared to the personal or financial costs of losing your computer files, $5-6 per month is pretty cheap. If that won’t work for you, then there are a whole bunch of other alternatives. The only two I feel comfortable recommending are external hard drives or archive-quality CD/DVDs. External hard drives are the most reliable and back-up software can be configured to save to them automatically. This “automatically” is a huge factor. Apple did a study a few years ago and found that 19 out of 20 of us don’t back our data up properly. Having the computer take care of it for you eliminates a very significant point of failure. The last option I’d recommend is archive-quality CDs or DVDs. One big vulnerability of anything local (ie external hard drives or optical disks) is any local event. A fire, burglary, etc. runs the risk of costing you your computer AND your back-up, in which case you might as well not have had any back-up at all. If you use either of these, be sure to keep a copy at your mom’s house or at work. Whichever solution you choose, CHOOSE ONE and implement it today. We all have lives and this is exactly that sort of task that can, and generally does, fall by the wayside. Unfortunately, most of us don’t learn how important it is to back-up our data until just after we need it. “A smart man learn from his mistakes; a wise man learns from other people’s”. As always, if you have any questions, or want a hand figuring out how to set up something that will work for you, please send me an email at donovan@castlegarsource.com.
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