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Terrifying Tales from the Backup Graveyard

The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I'm not a person who owns life insurance. I have the minimum legal Hungarian coverage on my beat-up Fiat Brava. I've even gone through periods without health insurance, now and again, placing my trust in God/the loving embrace of potential bankruptcy and state-handout health care. However, the one place where I've always been willing to pay for peace of mind is in hard-drive backup -- that is, in backing up all the content and programs on my computer onto separate storage. Considering that I'm one of the few people I know who has never had an unrecoverable hard-drive failure, this may seem like an unlikely obsession. I don't think it is, though. For one, it's entirely inevitable that a person like me who travels with a computer everywhere, who uses a computer every day, will fall victim to loss, theft, mechanical failure, creepy viruses, trip-and-fall disasters, etc. Perhaps more important is that my life is contained on my little IBM x40 -- my photos, email history both personal and professional, documents in progress, etc. The backup, in other words, IS the life-insurance.

Further, part of my job is advising non-profit organizations on how to protect their (sometimes very sensitive) information; my colleagues and I always emphasize the need to back-up any important information, as well as to keep it off-site from their offices -- many human rights organizations, for instance, work in repressive countries where their offices may be under some kind of surveillance, or subject to raids and searches .

At this point, many of the groups we work with use writable CD's and a CD burner, probably the most available technology for major backups. This works acceptably well for a few large files or a group of smaller files, but there are still problems:

  • you may have many CD's worth of information to back up, meaning that you have to manually decide how to divide up the backup.
  • email files, which many people use as their basic information archive these days, can exceed a CD's memory capacity
  • you usually end up with a bunch of CD's that you then have to keep track of, no mean feat unless you are organized to a somewhat creepy degree
  • in many parts of the world, read-write CD's (i.e., CD's that you can write to multiple times) aren't the easiest to come by, or are quite expensive. People are more likely to use write-once CD's, which means they throw them away after the next backup -- they aren't reusable. Kind of a waste.

I have always hated backing up to CDs for all the reasons above, and have instead wasted hundreds of dollars over the course of the last ten years on bespoke backup products marketed to memory obsessives like myself. These products inevitably, and usually quickly, become obsolete. Usually they become obsolete because the amount of memory expected/needed in a backup product has expanded so rapidly; others become obsolete because they are either built-in to computers as standard options, or because they are so tragically bad in design/usability that they are quickly and guiltily abandoned.

Here's a brief history of my back-up devices:

  • 1.44 MB external floppy drive -- this must have been from the mid-to-late 90's, as I still have a pile of floppies from my graduate school years (97-98) with backups of my MA thesis on Grant Wood. 1.44 MB!

  • 100 MB Zip Drive from Iomega -- I brought this with me when I moved to Prague in 1999, also carrying with me a Samsonsite-sized IBM laptop that only had a CD-reader in it. The leap from 1.44 MB to 100 MB on a disk of the same size seemed, well, unbelievable, a conjuring trick. Several months later, when I tried to back up a client's website and realized that I had well over 100 MB of psd's, I started to think that there might be something else over the rainbow.

  • External CD drive with read/write functionality -- this came with another IBM laptop I bought, and I quickly filed away my Iomega brand Zip drive disks (100 MB, ha!) and started burning 750 MB CD's, wowing my Prague clients with the hot new technology. A whole website on one little CD! (This was still during the period when CD's were only viewed as repositories for music, and so much confusion ensued in terms of what digital data exactly, er, was.)

  • 250MB, 512 MB, 1 GB memory sticks -- The first time I put my whole email file (half a gig and counting) onto a device that looked like a piece of gum and stuck it in my lipstick case was, let's just say it, something like a divine manifestation. And, lo, the rapture has not ended.

  • 250 GB external one-touch MAXTOR external hard drive -- Hate it. I idiotically bought two of them in April 2005 (one for me, one for Husband) while in the US and lugged them back to Hungary, defying all good sense (see list above) as well as Hungarian customs import duties (evil VAM, are you reading this?) The whole "one-touch" deal only works if you submit, lamb-like, to MAXTOR's proprietary zip format. If you want to treat it like a regular external drive, where you can, you know, see what you've backed up after you've done the deed, you need to do a by-hand "duplicate" that has taken me and Husband three tries to get right. Further, the thing ships without instruction manuals, diagrams, or any idiot-proofing whatsoever. Thumbs down. Another plot in the graveyard.


So what's the moral of the story in terms of backup options? Personally, I think the best idea is to get your favorite geek to set up a very standard removable hard drive for you that you use regularly. Or even better, as the beloved Joe at my office has done, have your favorite geek set up an invisible automatic backup on a remote server. My computer now backs up every time I connect to our network, and I never notice. At least, I hope it does.

Posted by Janet on January 1, 2006 01:01 PM |

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