Revised 2/7/09

The clients I say that to are very lucky. There are plenty of situations where I can't retrieve data from a malfunctioning drive and clients are faced with the choice of spending well over a thousand dollars on data recovery or kissing goodbye to reams of data. Sometimes its baby pictures, other times its large mp3 collections, and even more often, critical documents that will take hours or even days of tedious work to reconstruct.

$500. for that month's worth of business data you never saved? For hundreds of baby pictures? You're getting off cheap. If I can't do it and it can still be done, you're looking at spending up to several thousand on drive surgeons like OnTrack Data that do advanced data recovery. If I ever start another computer business, that's what I'm getting into. Based in New York? I'll make a killing.

I've saved a novel. I've saved a doctoral thesis. I've saved years of email, thousands of baby pictures, and more music files than I'd ever be able to listen to. I think it's the part of my job I like the most since I get to be a bit of a hero. I've stopped tears… seriously. We've all heard the horror stories about hard drives going bam; believe me when I say you don't want to be in that situation and believe me when I say there's absolutely no reason you have to be. Of course, there have been plenty of times where I've had to deliver bad news.

Over the years I've written several articles about backing up, some of which are still available on this site. There's a wealth of information there and I'm surprised at how much of that information still holds true today.

Another thing that hasn't changed is that a lot, if not most of my clients still won't back up. The reasons never change. They run the gamut from "I don't know how" to "I thought I was" and my favorite "I don't have the time". You know who you are and you know that I'm right when I say you can do it and you do have the time. It's asinine to lose gigabytes of data when 1-10 minutes a week is all it would take to carry out this mundane task.

If you're not backing up, I hope I've scared some sense into you. If you are, you might find there are new products that will make the process easier, or more secure. Here are a few options to consider, some traditional and some not.

DVD and CD Backup

CDs and DVDs are a fairly permanent media as compared to any other. You can also keep discs offsite in the event of a catastrophic emergency such as a fire.

External Hard Drives

At their most basic, external hard drives hook up to your computer via USB or Firewire and backup via a variety of methods, some as simple as pushing a single button.

If you have more than one computer to backup, there are models that you can add to your network and each computer can back up as necessary, eliminating the need to lug the drive around. However, if portability is an important factor, models smaller than an iPod are available. Speaking of which…

iPods and Other Hard Drive Based Music Players

Not only can they play music, but you can use these in almost exactly the same fashion as more traditional external hard drives. If you don't want to spend the extra $$$ on a stand alone drive, there are worse choices than putting these roomy devices to double duty. However, their portability can be a liability as well as a boon.

USB Keys, Flash Based Music Players, And Digital Cameras

Again, these can be used in nearly the same fashion as an external hard drive. The big difference is these hold much smaller amounts of data. However, for users not needing to back up gigabytes of data, or as a means of transporting small amounts of data, these may be the right choice. They are notably less easy to damage than hard drive based devices as well.

Email

If you're working on something for a while and you have a server based email solution like, gmail, exchange, or Yahoo; send yourself a copy of the work every hour or so. It's bad enough when computer's fail, but it's worse if several hours of document production go down as well.

A Wing and A Prayer

This time honored classic backup strategy is being used by people, businesses, and certain chief executives worldwide. Good luck with it.