Can't Stand Losing You

MIT Media Lab founding director Nicholas Negroponte starts his 1995 Being Digital with a story about answering a corporate receptionist’s question about the value of his PowerBook. He declared its value at “between one and two million dollars” (for “the bits”); she wrote down instead: $2,000 (for “the atoms”).

Over the years, some of the most painful losses my friends have sustained involved digital data: a dissertation-in-progress on a laptop stolen out of a library carrel and family photos on a crashed hard drive. An earlier version of the dissertation existed in hardcopy, but the photos (if not the memories) are gone. (Yes, companies like DriveSavers with dedicated clean rooms for open-drive surgery exist, if you can justify the expense.)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve helped people recover data, including several episodes this past month. So let me say it loud and clear: BACK UP YOUR DATA! If it’s valuable to you, it should NOT exist in only one location or even in only one format.

Ten or fifteen years ago, it would have been expensive and time-consuming to keep an entire computer or even a small set of files regularly backed up and archived. Now, thankfully, keeping regular backups is trivially easy, and you have no excuses not to do so.

So, what can you do if you aren’t actively backing up? You really should go straight to #3 below, but you may get some ideas for safer computing from the first two scenarios.

1. Move your data to the internet, using web services such as Google’s Docs, Calendar, Picasa, and YouTube; Yahoo’s Flickr; and using social bookmarking. Many have already done this with email, jettisoning desktop clients for the ubiquity of a web browser. People who currently travel for work with just a netbook or smartphone prove that this approach can work. Bottom line: migrating data to the internet comes with its own limitations and risks and does not constitute a true backup strategy.

2. A hybrid approach stores some data on the internet while still doing most of the heavy lifting on a laptop or desktop. Here, I recommend two things:
   
   i. Use Dropbox, which makes synchronizing and sharing files across devices and platforms a snap (2GB free, with data hosted using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service), is a killer app that needs little justification. I find Dropbox preferable to USB flash drives, which, while cheap, are also much more fragile and prone to loss. [Read an interview with Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston.]
   
   ii. Email yourself copies of your work in progress, so the copies live on a server. I would even set up a separate email account reserved for safekeeping; with nearly 8GB of storage for a Google Mail account, you can store a lot of copies of your opera. The weakness here is that you have to remember to do this yourself, and if, like me, you have trouble flossing regularly…

3. The easiest genuine backup solution is to use an external drive and automated backup software (for Mac users, the clear choice is Time Machine, the single best reason to upgrade to Leopard, if you haven’t yet. Go ahead, make fun of the interface, but it works well and is simple enough). If possible, I would augment such backups with:
   
   i. periodic clones of your boot drive (using either SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner) and
   
   ii. periodic archives burned to recordable optical media and stored off-site. I have copies of family pictures on DVDs stored at my parents’ on the other side of the country, for example. (No, I don’t think I’m really paranoid. But yes, I do use a mirrored RAID array for my local copies of the files.)

So what should you get if you don’t have a backup drive (or two… or three…)?

$100 now buys a terabyte of storage (that’s 1,000 gigabytes, which is a LOT of documents, music, photos, etc.) in desktop-sized drives and about 500GB in portable drives. Costco typically has very good prices on Western Digital drives.

For more durable portable enclosures, I have tried and liked (in ascending cost) the LaCie Rugged portable drives (which have USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 interfaces), OWC Mercury On-The-Go drives, and the WiebeTech ToughTech Mini drives.

p.s. The day will come when we will dispense with physical drives and everything will be stored wirelessly on the network, but until then, hard drives will remain synonymous with primary storage. Even so, we should realize that these backup strategies are only viable as long as software and hardware exists that can access and render the information we have on various media. How many of us still have—let alone use—tape decks and turntables?

p.p.s. From the newer-is-not-necessarily-better department: the vast majority of extant writings from the Bronze and Iron Ages are clay and stone inscriptions. Interestingly enough, the ancient Sumerians had a simple metadata markup scheme in cuneiform that predates SGML by, oh, five thousand years.

p.p.p.s. Other titles I considered for this post included “History Will Teach Us Nothing,” “Too Much Information,” and “Why Should I Cry for You?”

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