Your vast electronic library... is it safe?

[Bob Russell]

So you collect e-books, do you? And maybe you have a big collection of music, video, pictures and audio books also. How confident are you that your precious collection is safe?

It's the sort of topic we don't like to think about and so we tend to stick our head in the sand and hope for the best. So let me shake up your world a little bit. Believe it or not, there are a lot of ways you can easily lose that content. Here are a few to be aware of...

* Hardware failure - This is the most obvious danger. Your disk drive crashes and poof, you lost your precious files. And disk drives do fail. You had better make sure your important data is also stored somewhere else. Even the recent stuff, if it's important.

But if all else fails, and you can't afford a data recovery service, try the little known trick of putting the hard drive in your freezer for a bit to aid in the rescue. A quick web search should give you the details.

* User failure - This one is also a danger, but people tend to lose sight of how easily you could lose your data due to your own stupidity. We all do stupid things when we are in a hurry or distracted! Suppose you decide to make a clean backup, for example, and wipe out the backup copy to make room for the new backup. Murphy's Law says that it's probably time for the original data drive to fail! Or what if you push your changes the wrong direction and now both of your drives look like an old and incomplete backup copy? Have you tested your backup process to make sure it works? You know what they say - an untested backup isn't a backup at all.

* Media failure - I'm safe, you say, because I've backed everything up on optical media, like homemade DVDs or CDs. Not so fast! It turns out that the optical media you used is not so permanent. In fact, if you marked it with a permanent marker, it could already be degrading. I've found out first hand that my optical copies of files are in jeopardy, but was lucky enough to discover it in time to buy a new drive that was better at reading the fading media. Bottom line, don't assume home made DVDs and CDs are long lasting.

I'm not sure how long SD cards and boxed up hard drives last, but depending on the temperature conditions, it might not be as long as we would hope.

* Site loss - That's only something that IT shops in big corporations worry about, you say. But, suppose you have your backups on hard drives, and they are plugged in with your main computer. Now suppose there is a lightening strike or a fire or a flood. Not only did you lose your primary files, but you lost your backup files. Ouch!

Depending on how much data you have, there might be a pretty reasonable Internet backup service out there that can protect you, but if you a really dedicated collector with multiple terabytes, it probably isn't a great alternative. Fortunately, that's not really an issue for most e-book collectors because the files are so much smaller than audio or video.

* Technology Shift - Are you sure that you will still be able to use your backup files in the future? If you stored it on tape, you need a compatible tape drive and driver/library software. If you have it in unusual formats, such as a compressed disk image using your favorite backup software, will you still be able to use it in 20yrs? What about when Vista replacement comes down the road forcing a complete and incompatible rewrite of software you have been depending on, and none of the file handling software exists anymore?

Or maybe you have your content in the next latest greatest format. But it flops and in 10 years no software can use it or convert it. Do you really want to convert your whole library, and have to find an ancient system on eBay to use for the job? It's a good idea to stick with standard and generic formats wherever possible.

* Business Shift - Are you depending on your online e-bookstore to be your backup source of purchased e-books? This is probably a pretty good backup, except when your book seller goes out of business, or their whole business direction changes and it's not worth their while to keep your library for you anymore.

I'm sure our readers could provide stories along these lines, or even entirely novel ways of losing important files. So I'm curious what people are doing for small and large libraries of content or other important documents like insurance papers, financial records or medical documents. It's tempting to put many of those things in electronic form if you have a scanner, but you have to think about how safe you feel about it being as permanent as a box or file cabinet with paper.

The good news is that these dangers don't usually hit. The bad news is that they do happen.

So is anyone out there feeling completely comfortable with the safety of their important data? How far do you go to protect it? Or are you feeling vulnerable because you haven't worked out exactly how to do your backups? What's acceptable risk? Maybe you even wish you hadn't spent so much time collecting those files, after you realized all the care taking and protection they require?

Let us know in this survey how you feel about the safety of your content!

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

The good news is that these dangers don't usually hit. The bad news is that they do happen.

Did you have something or someone particular in mind, Bob? I am still in pain...

[nekokami]

I back up all my user files (including my PDA sync files) periodically to optical media (currently CDROM), which I then store in a fire-proof file cabinet. However, I don't have an automated backup system and I don't backup as often as I should. I have a spare hard drive (somewhere) that I intend to use for more regular intermediate backups, but it's been packed away since our move last november and I haven't found it yet....

That being said, a few years ago I needed to retrieve some files from a 10 year old Mac laptop. I checked, and the machine still booted and the files were there, but I didn't have time to extract the files at that point. Unfortunately, the machine died on the second boot.

Feeling fatalistic about my chances, I dug through my box of 3.5" floppies. Not only did I find full backups of the files I wanted, but I had apparently organized them better on the floppy than on the original system! Fortunately, I still had systems available with floppy drives compatable with that format. At a later date, looking for files from an even earlier hardware iteration, I found some even older 3.5" floppies in single sided low density Mac format. As it happens, I still had a relatively old system available that could read those disks, but only one and it was quite a while before I found it. Then I had the challenge of getting the files off of that system and onto a newer system... with no ethernet on the old system. I think I eventually found someone with an old Zip drive that would work on both the old and new systems. If that hadn't worked, I was planning to try a null modem and kermit.

Then there was the time I decided to try to retrieve some old Apple ][gs files... in an old graphics format... I remain amazed at how much conversion software there is out there (and at how we are able to find such things these days, with the wonders of a searchable web).

Moral of the story: keep forwarding/translating your files to your new system as you move forward. It saves a lot of trouble. And stick to simple, non-proprietary formats (like HTML) when possible. If you have to, you can always write a script later to convert such files to whatever the hot file format flavor of the day is.

Edit/addition: I almost lost the whole contents of a web site in that November move, as well-- because we changed cable vendors and I had forgotten that the web site in question was hosted in the "free" space provided by the cable vendor, as most of my web stuff is now hosted elsewhere. Fortunately I had local backups....

[RWood]

As anyone of you who have read my posts in the past may well ascribe, I can be a bit of a nut at times. Backing up my data is one such time.

First, my hard disks are arranged so that the system files and program files are on the logical and physical C: drive. All user data is located on other physical hard disks. In the event of a system or system crash all I need do is to remove the user drives and install them on another system. (Yeah, you read right, I said drives, plural.)

Business data has its own mirrored RAID drives. Photography has its drive and ebooks have their own drive too. (On other machines are the music server and video editor/server.) Business data is incrementally backed up once a day to other machines and a full backup once a week to DVD. At regular intervals these DVDs are moved into fireproof secure off-site storage. Full DVD backups are also done at regular intervals for the other data groups in addition to the incremental backups.

Does it work? Yes. Is it a pain? Not really. After years in IT these are just common practices that become a habit. I also have a junk collection in basement storage consisting of a 5-1/4” floppy drive, a 3-1/2” floppy drive, and a Zip-100 drive. Since I have not seen a 5-1/4” disk around here for over five years I think I will toss it the next time I see the drive.

[NatCh]

You could turn it into a clock, that's what I do with 5.25" disks when I come across them.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I'm in the "backup regularly, but probably should do it more often" category. I have a plug-in hard drive that I use to backup my PC data, and which includes my PDA backups (which I do weekly, on PC and on SD card). The PC backups I do less often. The hard drive holds more than a stack of CDs, and it plugs into my PC via USB, making transfer easy. Then I unplug the backup drive, to extend its life and to make sure a PC failure doesn't automatically take the backup with it.

[Wizard-mag]

Having seen and sometimes experienced quite harsh accidents, I have (rather in a pace of the evolution) developed the following backup system based on my optical drive:

a) Once upon a time I backup everything important on a DVD-RAM, which is actually very good format for this use. You can always rewrite only the files and folders you need to and when writing to the media, everything that is written is automatically checked against the original data (because of that, even though the writing speed is 3X, you get 1.5X in practice).

b) In theory, the DVD-RAM should be bulletproof, but in reality it is not. It has already happened to me that I could not read a small part of data from this backup DVD-RAM because of CRC check failure. I do not really know what it caused given the DVD-RAM theory described above, but the DVD drive went completely useless in 5 months and this might be an early problem connected to that.

So I also once upon a longer time backup this DVD-RAM to a DVD-RW. Once upon even a longer time, I back it up on a DVD+R and I of course do not throw the old one out.

So, if DVD-RAM fails, I have DVD-RW. If even that fails, I have the DVD+Rs.

The problem with this system is that when drive goes broken, you do not have to immediatelly recognize it and you can still burn your backup media for some time not knowing anything.

Therefore, I think it would help me if I had at least a drive with the media testing (PI/PIO) capability and the best would be if I had an external hard drive as another back up option, but I do not think that right now I could justify the expense, because the system that I already have seems quite safe to me, but I might buy it, because the data backed up is really precious to me.

By the way, I would agree that backing up on anything that is permanently in or connected to the PC is not really a safe backup, since I think there are lot of ways that a whole PC can go off taking anything connected with it.

Overall, I would say it is always better not to feel safe about your backup system. A healthy level of paranoia certainly won't harm you here.

And one last thing: concerning the OS failure (e. g. you cannot boot up), it is always good with Windows to have 2 safeguards:

a) Some external tool that regularly (e. g. on startup) backs completely up your registry of which failure will in most of the times be the cause of you not being able to boot up. For WXP, there is ERUNT, which does exactly that. When you cannot boot up, you only have to run a batch file included with every backup from the Recovery Console (the backup has to be made into the Windows directory for this purpose).

That is in theory. Luckily, I haven't had to try it in practice.

b) Some OS bootable from CD, DVD, flash disk, etc., in case the registry back up does not work and you have some important files you on the system drive you would like to back up before formatting the drive. BartPE is quite good for this, but one has to spend some time tweaking it to his personal needs, at least in my opinion.

These are at least for me necessary safeguards concerning the OS. It may look too much to someone, but having experienced so many nightmares with it, I sleep much better with these tools in mind.

[Blue]

I'm still a student and have to move every week from my home to my place in the city near the university. I have a laptop at home but also a desktop in my other place. I use SD cards to synchronise the files in both places. The same for my music library but I don't synchronise it so often, only when I take my laptop to school.

Besides I'm gonna set up a little server at home to synchronise my docs and music with each week. That way, the entire music collection of everyone in the family is also available for everyone and synchronisations can be used to update each collection. Meanwhile, you also get 4 hard drive back ups in different places at home.
Only problem is finding enough storage room on my laptop

[NatCh]

We're syncing the 'vital' files on usb flash drives, using windows Briefcases. It works since our vital stuff is relatively small.

[Mambo]

I have bought a hard drive for my backups, but also I save everything on DVDs. So I will have everything twice.

Once I am done with all this work, I will probably buy another hard drive (the bigger the better), so I will have everything important on 2 external hard drives and DVDs.

Wish me luck so that no disruption occurs before I achieve this.

Eventually I want everything on 2 DVDs and 2 harddrives, one HD to be with me always (2.5") the other at home (3.5") with one set of DVDs in the U.K the other set of DVDs in Hungary.

Then I will not worry about anything...

[Azayzel]

Lol, it's funny to see this topic crop up (though it is very much a concern on mine), hopefully someone didn't lose something recently.

I've have more than my fair share of HDD's go bad, so I trust them with a grain of salt, and I trust floppies with even less. I guess the stuff that I really want to keep I throw onto DVD-R's, just wish D/L DVD's would drop a bit more in price so I can minimize the amount of space they take up.

I used to trust external drives quite readily, but again, I think I had 2-3 go out in the past few years, so I've lst a bit of faith in them. Where I used to work, they had a 1TB RAID go schizo and dump a ton of user info/research; I think they paid a recovery expert ~$50k to recover the RAID, they were only able to recover about half of it and we received most of that on DVD's. yikes!

Bottom Line: If you really, really don't want to lose your data, always have some type of backup.