Weapons of Mass DistractionHard Disk Recovery and backups

Anyone that has used computers for many years has had the unfortunate experience of losing a hard drive.  Once in a while you will have enough warning when a disk starts to die to make a backup of your important files, but often times hard drives will just suddenly die.  It is common to find people that like one kind of drive and hate other brands.  I have had drives from every manufacturer die on me.  My personal favorite is Seagate.  They are extremely quiet, have a longer warantee than other brands, and seem to be more reliable for me than other disks I've had in the past. 

In a perfect world when a hard drive dies people would have a recent backup and at most lose a few days worth of data.  In reality however this is rarely the case.  People don't think about backups until disaster strikes.  There are companies out there that do hard disk data recovery, but it is extremely expensive.  Most times you could build an entire new high-end PC for the price of getting the data off one drive.  In every case I've experienced the data on the drive wasn't worth the recovery cost.

If you are in need of data recovery services and can handle the expense, you should be able to afford having a good backup system in place, which will avoid having these problems in the future.

Backup Options

Online backup:
Now that high-speed Internet connections are found both in the home and at the office, companies have started offering Internet backup options.  These services are good for backing up documents and other small pieces of data.  However you wouldn't want to use it to backup an Exchange email server every night for example.  One company that provides Internet backups is XDrive, who offers a free trial of their service.  One added bonus of using an Internet backup service is that you don't have to worry about maintaining any media, keeping it safe, storing it offsite, rotating tapes, etc.

DVD or CD backup:
A large percentage of the computers out there have a CD or DVD burner in them. If you are just trying to backup some documents this is by far the cheapest way.  Roxio, the leading maker of burning applications, makes some backup software, which can burn backups to CD and DVD.

Tape Drives:
Tape drives are still fairly expensive and require maintenance.  The drive heads wear out.  The tapes wear out.  You have to rotate the tapes, store them offsite, etc.  They also write fairly slowly.  They are however good for backing up huge amounts of data on a daily basis.  This is where your exchange server backup should go.

Hard Drives:
Many people are just making copies of their data to other physical drives.  This isn't quite as good a solution.  If the drives are in the same machine a virus could easily wipe out both of them.  If a water pipe breaks in the ceiling and destroys the PC, your "backup" goes with it.  To me this falls into the same category as RAID (see below).

RAID:
Raid is not a backup! If you are relying on an array and not doing additional backups someday you will be sorry. If a power surge wipes out your system and destroys the array (it has happened to me), or more than one disk fails at the same time (also has happened to me), your data will be lost.  Repeat after me.  "RAID IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR HAVING A REAL BACKUP PLAN".

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