Belt & Braces Backups.

Every so often I'll get someone wander into the workshop with a dead PC. "Can you fix this ?" they'll say. "What's wrong with it ?" I'll reply. Then we get the tale of woe. "It was working OK but it isn't working now. And I need the files I was working on for my homework / job / university dissertation / e-bay transactions / email replies / impending court case..... " You get the idea ? It's always important and it's always lost. Gone, No more, vanished, disappeared, irretreivable. Sometimes the punter can't even remember what they were doing before the data was lost and don't even know what file which the data they so urgently need was held in.
So I shake my head in despair ( I'm not the symathetic type ) and then brighten up and tell them "No problem at all, just need your backup files and I'll be around an hour or two if you're lucky. You do have back up files ? ..... " Silence. Momentarily. "Aye well, I thought that I had backed it up but I haven't" or even better " The backed up data is on the hard drive - You'll be able to get it from there....."

Well, then I start with the sharp intake of breath...... "Oh dear, oh dear oh dear...... Well I'll try to recover what I can but if the drive is unreadable then theres no hope, and no point in me trying to build your hopes up. Prepare for the worst." Now to be truthful most of the time the data isnt lost, its just Windows playing at silly burgers and I have a couple of bootable CD tools which will rectify the problem. Most of the time. But if the CD Tools doesn't even see the hard drive then we are looking at new drive, and restore from System CDs and then install applications and test internet access and load anti virus utilities and spyware protection, and only then, after a rigorous testing from myself, will I release it back to the user. Of course the cure costs time, which equates to money, and althogh I enjoy doing teh work I don't want to be doing it every spare minute of the day. I'd rather be demonstrating how the kit works and how to do secure & safe backups etc.

A friend of mine was a local doctor and he introduced me to the concept of "belt & braces backup", which means creating a secondary contingency fallback, to be sure, to be sure. We used at that time removable Jaz drives and rotated each one on a daily basis. Fine, no problems. Software used was Ghost, before Symantec bought over Norton. Only difficulty was if a restore/recovery had to be done, the PC had to be loaded with Windows again and the Ghost software and the image copied to hard drive and then restored form there, because the Ghost software had some difficulty with the Jaz drives. Then we updated to removable hard drives in 3.5" caddies. Even better, as no faffing around with software, just load the boot floppy and run the restore option. Now we use USB removable drives. These are simply 2.5" notebook hard drives in a USB 2.0 or Firewire interface casing which are pretty cheap i.e. around £60 all in. The speed of backup and restore is fantastic with USB2/1394, not so hot with USB1.1. And so reliable that I'm even considering storing all of the common laptop builds which I do on a USB drive so that I can complete the process even faster...... we're talking less than 10 minutes here for a standard image.

Finally, my daughters laptop hard drive died after months of continous running. I had advised her to set the laptop in hibernation mode, but it didn't happen for some reason. As the kit was bought in New Zealand & was still in warranty, it should have been a direct warranty replacement. But I'm not sending it half way across the globe to do something I can do myself and quicker. So I purchased a new and bigger 80Gb HDD and set it up. Remove battery, pull plastic tag, unscrew hdd, insert new hdd, push into hdd slot, replace battery, boot up laptop. Yeah, as easy as that. I had made a Drive Image when she came home a couple of months ago, so it was no problem to restore that from DVD using boot floppy. But now what about the data ? Well she uses HOTMAIL as her mail client so all the contacts are there. And her music and pictures from a year in New Zealand ? Well I had thought that they were lost, but she had them on DVD and also stored in her i-River MP3 player. So the belt and braces technique worked after all. But only as the data storage was essentially offline, i.e. it wasnt stored on the HDD.

So some advice my friends, go get yourself a USB case and notebook drive, stick them into your PC and make sure you've got your vital data OFF THE HDD. Remember to cc your emails to a web-based email system  - USE GOOGLEMAIL and GOOGLE DOCS & SHEETS!!.  
And don't trust the hardware, it WILL FAIL.
I'd better go on and do my own backup now before I'm a victim of my own bullshittery.......