Do You Check Your Backups?
February 27, 2009 Internet, Technology
A recurring theme on this site involves an apparent love-affair with excessive amounts of data, and the need to backup that data. Considering the amount of personal and irreplacable information we seem to keep on our digital systems, the idea of not backing up that precious data seems as absurd to me as walking through the Sahara with neither water nor a guide. However, I sometimes feel as through my warnings are falling on deaf ears. When someone asks me to help them recover some data that they’ve lost, I often ask when they made their last backup. Ninety percent of the time, I’m told that they’ve never made a backup. For the ten percent that do occasionally burn a CD or DVD with their important information, I ask how often they verify that data. Not surprisingly, very few seem to know what I’m talking about.
Why is this? Does the small percentage of people who backup their data have a false belief that their data is always perfect? Perhaps it has something to do with most backup software’s inability to (quickly) verify the recorded information. However, it might have something to do with a much more plausible situation: they’ve not (yet) had to restore lost data, or explain to their spouse why the last five years of digital photos has irrevocably vanished.
A Painful Lesson
Backup verification is an integral part to any backup plan. Unfortunately, I had to learn this the hard way a little over a decade ago when my (then) massive 1 Gigabyte hard drive seized, causing some catastrophic data loss. This was at a time when CD burners started at $700 for a 1x recorder, and blank discs were $25 a piece. As a result, I would use a 100 pack of 1.44 MB high density floppy disks, and create a spanning Zip file that contained all of my important files. This included all of my college assignments, unpublished fiction, personal accounting data, and a few of my scanned artworks.
After replacing the dead hard drive and installing the operating system, I started to restore the data using the spanned floppy disks but, somewhere around disk 45, the system complained that the massive .zip was corrupt! It refused to read anything after the broken disk, and I managed to recover just a fraction of the data I had thought was safe on the floppies.
Suffice to say, I was devastated. It was an incredibly painful lesson, and I have been an avid backup freak ever since. Not only do I back up all of my data in three separate locations, I also do spot checks on the backups by restoring a few random files and performing consistency checks on the data. Is this excessive? Perhaps, but I have never lost a bit of data in all the years since.
I’d be interested to know how many of you regularly backup your systems, and if you ever check the integrity of those files. If you’ve never checked any of your backups, perhaps now would be a good time.
Comments (2)
Now that you mention it, I don’t really check my backups. Before time machine, I would just back it up to an external HD and keep the HD somewhere in the cupboard till the next backup. Even with time machine, I don’t keep the attached HD constantly on. I only turn it on for a few hours every 4-5 days. That’s the iMac. The Macbook on the other hand backs up whenever I’m home.
I do have a separate backup plan though. Every few months of so, I would manually copy the contents of my user folder onto yet another external HD….
Thanks for the reminder. ^^.
Time Machine is great. And so easy (just plug the drive in) even my 71-year-old Dad can use it on his iMac no problem!