Learn from my mistakes

Backup, Backup, Backup
Ok computer storage devices fail, period end of thought. Before yours fail backup the stuff you care about. This can be anything from pictures to tax forms. I should know this by now since for almost 10 years I have been doing this for clients, somehow I keep thinking I am immune.

Some past stories.
Failed HD - Don't even remember the circumstances of this one. While in college my HD failed in my main desktop. I lost all my previously created documents. They are gone and will never come back. I had no backups.

Failed 1.3 GB SCSI drive - While living in Illinois I had a 1.3 GB SCSI drive that was progressively failing. It would work fine once started but would often not start properly on boot. I kept saying it will be fine as long as I don't power off machine. Well great until power went out. I hadn't copied any of the data off. I tried all sorts of fixes to get the data off. Finally I cracked the case and started the drive by using a power drill. I was able to copy the data off before the drive failed. In this case I was lucky, but I had warning and did nothing about it.

Failing 200 GB IDE drive - A few months ago the main storage drive in the hoyty.com server began having strange problems. It would work most of the time, but would occasionally have write errors. Knowing that a lot of my data and other people's only existed on this drive I actually did something about it. I ordered two new 250 GB SATA drives and a RAID-1 card. I copied all the data off to new array. This is not a perfect solution, in theory a fire could still destroy the data.

Failed 100 MB Zip Disk - I had been using a zip disk to store a few files just in case. It had things like 99-02 tax forms, my list of install codes and some excel files I put a lot of work into. I don't reboot my machine often so the fact that the drive had be flagged for chkdsk was not apparent. When I rebooted last Saturday windows ran CHKDSK on it. It was at this point I realized the disk was in bad shape. I tried CHKDSK a few times and nothing got better and possibly got worse. Then I purchased Spinrite 6 which I find out only works on HD. Then I bought Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery. It was able to scan the disk and found the original locations of the files. I told it to restore them. All except for two text files that were less than one sector big were useless. Basically I wasted many hours and lots of money and got nothing back. All because I used a crappy untested backup method.

Think about the data on your computers. Things like pictures, purchased download music, important documents. How much is preserving them worth to you. Enough to have a RAID array to store them on and make DVD or tape based backup. Can you reproduce them? Can you live without them? These are serious questions because computer storage fails. Nothing is foolproof but you can make yourself less vulnerable. Just ask how much is your data worth?