 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Backing up is a state of mind John Collins |
You open your office and, God forbid, you've been burgled! Computer's gone. Worse than that - all the files on your hard drive are also gone.
If you don't like that scenario, how about this one? You sit down at your computer, turn it on and it just sits and sulks. You eventually discover the hard disk drive has developed an irreparable fault and nothing you can do will convince it to surrender any of the information you've stored on it.
Fantasy? Nightmare? Couldn't happen to you? Don't you believe it. These things happen every day. Crime statistics tell you that no-one is safe from burglars. Hard drives have an average life of three years. Sure, you'll find people who have had theirs for ten years without a single problem, but you'll also find people whose hard drive ran for an hour before dying. From personal experience I can tell you a brain-dead hard disk is not a pretty sight - its owner is an even sorrier sight.
What do you do now?
I presume all your software is legal and you therefore have the original diskettes or CD-ROMs. Restoring the programs won't be a problem. It will take time but a few days will see it all done. But what about the data that's taken days, weeks, months, even years for you to gather and enter?
Losing all that data, no matter what the cause, would be a hardship for anyone. For the owner of a small business it can mean financial disaster. It is not the cost of replacing the computer or having a new hard disk drive installed that ruins you. It's the cost of replacing the lost data, if it can be replaced.
Stop for a minute and work out how long it took to enter the data. Now cost this at $25 an hour, because that is the minimum it is going to cost you to have the information entered again, always assuming that you can find or recreate the data. For the average SOHO operation this can easily run to thousands of dollars. Not to mention the difficulties of servicing your clients - whose data has also been lost in your computer disaster. How you maintain credibility in your clients' eyes, while confessing you have lost all of their data, is also up to you.
What can you do?
It's simple. Insure. No, not with an insurance company. Self-insure by taking a simple precaution - backing up. Why do I say that backing up is a state of mind? Effective backups have little to do with hardware or software. How you back up isn't important either. What is vitally important is that you do it.
You can back up to floppy disks, a streaming tape or a removable hard drive, but you must oversee the process. There is software to make the copying simple, DOS has a backup utility. Symantec has software to help you, such as Norton Commander and XTree. You could do sa simple backup by first saving your data to your data disk, then replacing the data disk with the backup disk and saving again. You then swap disks and go on.
How often should you back up? Ideally every time you change a file. We do this on tricky work. More practically, if you backup at end of the day's tasks, at worst you will lose only one day's work.
However, you will need to be careful about overwriting your backups. Make sure that you are not overwriting your only copy of the data. Recently, as I was backing up on a networked computer, the system went down as the backup disk was being overwritten. The result? We lost the data on the disk. Fortunately, the original hard disk data was intact.
We learnt our lesson and now we are careful to have two alternate backup disks.
You can go even further than this, as we have in our office. We have a rule: No data is ever saved to a hard disk.
We save all our work to 3.5-inch floppy disks. The data disk is backed up to another floppy disk. The data disks stay by the computers in the office, but the backup disks are stored offsite. We use 3.5-inch disks now, but when we are richer we will move to tape drives and backup to high-speed tape. We'll benefit twice from that investment. Tape is more stable than floppy disks, so our backups will be quicker and more secure.
Our rules won't change. We'll use two backup tapes, one by the computer and one away from the office. While 3.5-inch disks are not the perfect backup or storage medium, they are better than no backup.
I know it's here, somewhere
Time spent in working out a careful labelling system for your backup materials will pay for itself in the long run. We type a special label for each disk and press it on over the existing label. The label tells what the storage refers to - often the name of our client. There are no rules or secret codes, but as with file names, we try to make sure the disk label is meaningful. Labels like Backup 1, Backup 2, aren't very helpful when you are trying to find that bit of information you need to meet a deadline. Remember, unlike DOS file names, you can put more than a measly eight characters and an three-byte extension on written disk labels.
Is it worth it?
If it sounds like too much work, it isn't. Not when you compare the time it takes to back up with what you stand to lose if you don't do it and you have a disaster. And disasters do happen, take it from me.
As I said earlier, don't think of it as time spent on backing up, think of it as cheap insurance. You have your house and car insured, even though you are fairly certain that your house will not burn down and your car won't be stolen. You pay the insurance premium, just in case. Why baulk at spending a little time at the end of each day to protect your data?
About the author
John Collins is old, really old. He started learning about computers on one of the first Apples then moved to IBM and DOS. He has great trouble with Windows, but he is learning. John and his wife Robyn run a two-person business, doing anything they are competent at (editing, management, training), that is fun, and makes a little money. This article reflects some of his sad experiences with files and disks.
Reprinted from the July 1996 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
