Saving Your Bacon When Your Hard Drive Is Fried

Like just about everyone else I know, I don’t pay enough attention to keeping my data safe and backed-up. At the law school and at the firm, there are regular backups that ensure you’ll never lose but a smidgeon of data — provided things are set up such that you save to the network and not just your hard drive. But I’ve got valuable stuff on my home machines, where it lives on the hard drive.

Hard drives fail, of course. Suddenly and often without any warning: “I don’t understand it. It worked fine when I turned it off last night…!” But my foolish mistakes are the most common causes of lost data. Then there’s the unspeakable, about which we shall only mumble: lost or stolen laptop. Whatever the reason, you need to have had a plan.

Tim Bray, one of the Canadian IT biggies (now working for Sun) did a column on his weblog, Ongoing, on Protecting Your Data

The Rules · If you follow these, you almost certainly won’t lose data in any damaging way.

• Don’t use proprietary file formats.
• Don’t erase anything.
• Store everything twice.
• Do occasional ad-hoc and regular full backups.

Note that these are not rules for professionally-managed data centers, who have incredibly complicated backup requirements and often live in a regulated environment. If you’re a pro, the only way to be safe is to hire an expert and throw some real money at the problem.

This advice is aimed at the users of personal computers, whose needs are simpler and less variable.

The rule that woke me up was the one about never erasing anything. I’m a big trashcan user — the Mac makes it easy with that wastepaper basket icon that’s an exact copy of my own round file at home. (How did they do that?!) That and the fact that I get a sense of completion, I guess it is, when I empty the thing. But what Bray says makes a whole lot of sense. Storage space is cheap. it’ll likely be a long time before you exhaust the capacity of your modern hard drive; and if you are nearly full, there are plenty of inexpensive USB or Firewire external hard drives that can act as a storage bin.

So now I’ve got a folder called Saved Trash where it all goes — and where it will be when I screw up.

Of course, there are three other rules that you’ll want to read about, before you tell yourself you’ll deal with the backup problem tomorrow.