Briefly About the Show

People put an enormous amount of trust in hard drives these days. If you ask me, it's misguided trust and one day it will bite you in the ass. Hard drives are complex devices which store data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. They do fail. It's just a question of when and how prepared you'll be for it. Sometimes you get some warning via clicks or odd noises coming from the drive. Other times you turn on your machine to find errors and it's all gone. At that point your only option is to take the drive into a shop that can recover some of the data for a premium price.

However, you could save a fortune and lots of time if you have a basic backup solution in place. Since most people I know don't have any backup strategy, I thought it might be helpful if I documented one that's practical and fairly simple. Let's get started...

Mirror Your Main Drive
What it is: This may sound a little technical at first, but it's actually very simple. The idea is that you want to have a single exact copy of your main hard drive as a backup. That's the C:\ drive on a PC or Macintosh HD on a Mac.

What it does: If you have a perfect copy of your drive that's kept up to date, then you can simply swap your bad drive for your good backup and you're up and running again in minutes. Your applications are there, files in tact, no re-installing, no restoring.

The Details:

(Recommended) Option 1: Internal HD and Enclosure

1. Find out what kind/size hard drive you have in your computer and buy an extra hard drive that matches it. It doesn't have to match exactly. For example the brand and size can be different (assuming the size is bigger on your extra one) but the technology must be the same


2. Next, buy a USB or Firewire enclosure for that extra hard drive. You can get these at Best Buy or any online shop if you search for hard drive enclosure. It's just a case for the drive that lets you connect it to a computer as an external drive. We use a regular hard drive and put it in an enclosure so that if you need to swap drives out, you just pull it out of the enclosure and put it in the computer. No copying needed.

(Not As Easy) Option 2: External USB or Firewire HD
If you choose to just get an external hard drive then the rest of the strategy will work the same, but if your main drive fails, you can't remove the drive from a drive that was bought as external. So it will still work as a backup, but when the failure happens you'll need to run to the store to buy a new internal drive, swap it out and then do a full copy of all the files from your external drive to your new internal one. Of course you'll have to first install your OS on that internal drive and then make the mirror copy over itself (Mac users won't have to do this as Macs can boot from external USB & Firewire drives).

Make the Mirrored Backup
Once your backup drive is in place, you'll want to make an exact copy of your current drive on it. There's different software for this on Windows vs Mac...

Mac Solution
There's a great app called SuperDuper! that makes this process incredibly simple. Best of all, it's FREE as long as you don't want a scheduled backup system and even then it's only $27.95. After the first full backup, SuperDuper can just update changed files to the external drive instead of doing a complete backup each time. This saves tons of time and is much easier on both hard drives.

I'm not going to go into other apps because there are many and it would take forever and this app is free. If you can find another one that does what SuperDuper does, use it.

Windows Solution
I haven't used Windows for some time, so I'm not up on the best software to accomplish this same task. I'll gladly update this article if someone can point me to an app that matches SuperDuper. Otherwise I know Norton Ghost can do the job (but for a cost) and I was told Backup4All may be a good choice too. Just make sure it can copy "everything" on the source drive for a completely mirrored result.

Handling Video, Music, and Other Files
These days most people don't have enough room on a single drive for every file they have. Music collections grow, downloadable video is a reality, and so on. So some of you may already have an external drive for storing those kinds of things. That's great, but those drives fail too. In fact, they typically fail more often than internal drives. So what do you do about backing up those files without creating all these backups of backups?

It really depends on how important these files are to you and whether the investment to back them up is worth it. For me, I edit videos and have huge project files that I simply cannot lose and yet they don't fit on my main drive...

Option 1: Single External Drive
If you can stand to possibly lose these files, then you can still save some money and be somewhat save all at the same time. Simply buying a single external drive to store the files on may be enough. Buy something big that you can grow into. If you're using 100GB now, buy an external drive that holds 200GB. It's really something you have to decide based on how fast your collection grows.

Once you have this external drive and your files on it, just pay attention to it. Shut it down when you're not using it and listen for odd noises. The minute you suspect something, buy another external drive to copy everything over before it's too late. As I said, it's the riskier approach, but doesn't require as much of an investment.

(Recommended) Option2: External RAID Array
Again, this sounds uber-technical, but it's not. A RAID array is simply more than one hard drive linked together to act as one. Go out and buy one of these in the largest size you can afford. Most drive manufacturers make this kind of thing (I use Maxtor).

Because there are multiple drives together, you can set them up as RAID 1 (Mirrored) which means you only see a single drive on your computer, but each time you copy a file to the drive, it's actually making two copies (one to each physical drive inside). This means you automatically have a backup of everything on that drive without having to run software or worry about it.

The reason I say you should get the largest size you can afford is because when you mirror a RAID you end up with half the actual space it's capable of. So if you get a 500GB external drive that's RAID capable and you mirror it, the drive will report as a single 250GB drive, thus making room for two copies of each file you place on it.

What about a fire?
If you have data that would destroy your life if it were lost, I'd recommend taking extra precautions. Just making backups won't do much good if a fire wipes out all of your drives and your computer. In this case, store your backup drives in another location. Keep them at work or some other safe place away from the originals. Also, don't use the RAID solution - instead use 2 external drives of the same size and make backups of one to the other and take the extra one to another location as well.

Also, if you only have a handful of files that are this important, you could look into one of several web sites that offer online backups for files. Sometimes they allow up to 1GB of data to be backed up via their password protected web site. Here are a couple... (iBackup.com, Xdrive, box.net)

Thoughts on CD or DVD Backups
Honestly, I think they're poor solutions. If you have sensitive data you're backing up to CD/DVD and you throw one away when you're making a new backup (or you lose it) then that data is available to anyone. Wiping the disc clean before throwing away would require a "lot" of scuffing and scratching to ensure it's all safe. And the cost for large amounts of data (gigabytes) can be quite high if you have to keep buying discs. They're also slow to read/write from (painfully if you're backing up an entire drive). I'd just recommend against this.

My Setup and Costs
To give you an idea of what we're talking about in terms of cost, I've looked over my setup and come up with a run-down of costs...

• 160GB laptop drive and enclosure to backup main drive ($150)
• 1TB External Maxtor Drive w/RAID ($430)
• Grand Total: $580

That may seem like a lot to some of you, but keep in mind, I have an enormous amount of video that I need to backup, so most of you should be fine with a 500GB external RAID, which is about $230. Also, if those extra files aren't important enough, just stick with the main drive solution until you can afford the rest.

Conclusion
I hope some of you have found this helpful. What I like about this strategy is that it's very straightforward (one drive for your main backup and another for extra files). It's also extremely convenient if you use the enclosure option. I recently had a drive fail and I was back up in 15 minutes as if nothing had happened using these methods. All my settings, apps, and passwords were completely in tact. Nice when you're on deadline and tragedy strikes.

Keep in mind that this strategy may not be thorough or scalable enough for those of you with absurd amounts of data or other unique needs. It's great for the general home user or media enthusiast though. Also, I didn't go into detail about how exactly to do some of what's mentioned because this isn't a tutorial, just a general strategy, but the information shouldn't be hard to find.

Best of luck!

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