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How Safe Is Your Digital Life-Data?
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007 |
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How Safe Is Your Digital Life-Data? Let Me Tell You A Story...
It's a story about a young man; let's call him Jeff. He has a family, he loves his wife, adores his children, and has a taste for technology. He has a digital camera, MP3 player, and a digital video camera. Because he likes his gadgets, he's built a personal video recorder running Microsoft Media Center (one day he'll upgrade to Vista, but not yet) and has more than one computer in his home.
His wife indulges his geekdom. At first, she wasn't convinced. She'd roll her eyes at the prospect of digital photos, didn't see the benefit of being able to make your own DVDs, and wasn't really sure about recording her television programs without using a video cassette. She came around in the end, convinced by slide shows on the large screen television that Jeff owns, and countless DVD productions of holiday visits and their own wedding.
When Jeff bought her a laptop, and set up a wireless connection at home, she indulged him. These days she couldn't live without it.
Jeff's wife loved nothing better than sitting down with a nice glass of wine (red, if you're curious) and flicking through their baby photos; cooing over their adorable little expressions, and getting intolerably broody.
Jeff was happy. More importantly, Jeff's wife was happy. And then, one day, the hard disk in Jeff's main computer died. At first, it made some nasty grinding noises. Jeff thought nothing of it. It'll sort itself, he thought. And then, one morning, Jeff pressed the switch to turn on his computer, and was greeted with an error message informing him that his disk was unreadable.
Jeff's photos, video, mp3 collection (several thousand albums, built up over many years of owning digital players), important emails, that novel he'd always meant to finish, and all his financial records, were lost. He felt sick. His obscure albums, the baby photos, his wedding video. All lost. Irreplaceable snapshots of past memories, gone forever thanks to a faulty piece of technology.
Sounds awful doesn't it? For anyone who has an extensive mp3 collection, or a digital camera owner, backups are essential. Some forms are better than others, but anything is better than nothing.
This article will shed some light on the options, and try to offer you a little advice, in the hope that you don't end up like Jeff.
Something Is Better Than Nothing...
The cheapest and easiest solution, for digital photos at least, is to store them online. You're putting your eggs in someone else's basket, of course, but hopefully their basket will be far more fault tolerant than your own. Flickr, for example, almost certainly spread their files over multiple servers, using multiple hard drives, configured in Raid Arrays. We'll discuss these in more detail later, but it's safe to say that Flickr's backup solutions are better than the average digital camera owner's.
There are more products besides Flickr; Zooomer, Yahoo Photos, Picasa Web Albums; they all amount to the same thing: your photos no longer exist solely on your computer. And that's a good thing.
If you don't already have an account with one of these services, I'd suggest you get one and upload your most important photos. It provides a certain comforting level of security. Some services are free, some cost a little money, so it's worth exploring the options before jumping in. I use Flickr, and I've paid for a Pro account so my photos aren't reduced in size when I upload them. Your mileage may vary.
Whilst on the subject of Internet based backup solutions, photo storage and sharing products don't provide a solution for your other files. Video, for example, can't be stored on Flickr . Your MP3 collection can't go there there either. Ideally, you need an all-purpose bucket that you can store pretty much anything in.
Enter Carbonite, OmniDrive, XDrive, Box.net and numerous other storage solutions. These all offer a large amount of storage space, for varying fees, and either offer client software or use your web browser to upload. Carbonite offers particularly good value - unlimited storage space for $5 a month.
This means that, potentially, all your files could live on their servers. Their software will monitor important folders, and ensure that new files are copied, over the Internet, onto Carbonite's servers for safe keeping.
There are one or two downsides to this though. For one, you're trusting your data - and privacy - to someone else's system. If you're storing sensitive information, you have no way of knowing how secure another company's server is, or whether their employees have sufficient moral fibre to not peek. And while in some countries it might be illegal for unauthorised eyes to view your data, that's not the case all over the world. When you're dealing with the Internet, your data could be hosted anywhere. Similarly, you're trusting a host to have enough fault tolerance in place to not lose all your data if something goes wrong.
The second downside is bandwidth. For starters, you're faced with uploading potentially large amounts of data, and your upload speed is almost certainly slower than your download - this could take some time. Secondly, if something does go wrong, you've got to download a huge amount of data to get it all back. I'm sure Jeff would be perfectly willing to download any amount of data to get his files back, but it's something to keep in mind. It's also worth noting that if your ISP caps the amount of data you can download - and some do, imposing charges if you exceed their limits - then pulling down significantly more data than your monthly allocation could be costly.
If, for whatever reason, Internet backups aren't for you, then maybe something a little closer to home is in order.
Multiple Eggs, In Multiple Baskets...
Fundamentally, backing up your data requires more hardware. Either you're going to use someone else's, as mentioned above, or you'll buy some more of your own and use that.
The cheapest option is probably to use optical media. A few years ago, this meant CDs, but in this day and age you're usually dealing with so much data that it could take several days and hundreds of CDs to back everything up. Enter: DVDs; they store far more data than a CD, and these days write speeds are much improved. In some cases, the same problem might apply - if you have hundreds of gigabytes of data to archive you'll need many, many DVDs.
Another problem with optical media is degradation. Over time, your optical media might start to decay, and start to fail. Regularly refreshing your backups, as well as using decent quality media, is a good idea.
There are alternatives to optical media. Iomega offer the Rev device which consists of 70gb removable hard drive style cartridges. They also produce the Zip drive, which uses a form of high capacity floppy disk, but is limited to a maximum disk size of 750mb.
It's also worth mentioning tape drives. Whilst these aren't as common as DVD or CD writers, they are a tried and tested technology, and backup media is resilient and affordable. The drives are hardly cheap though.
Beyond optical media, there's the option of adding extra hard disk drives. You can do this in several ways.
The simplest form, and one that won't necessarily break the bank, is to purchase an external hard drive that connects to your computer using USB or Firewire . You can connect this, copy your important files across, disconnect it, and store it in a drawer, safe, or off-site location. What if that drive fails? So buy two. Buy three. The more hardware, and ultimately money, you can throw at the solution, the more resilient it will be.
The problem with adopting this method is that your backups are only as good as the latest set. You've got to remember to do it, and do it regularly. If you forget for three months, and your main hard disk fails, you've lost three months of data.
The ideal, then, would be something slightly more automated: you could connect multiple external devices and schedule regular backups, but lining up several hard drives can take up quite a bit of space. Much better to install them inside your computer.
The most basic way of doing this is to simply fit another drive. You'll then end up with C and D drives for Windows folk, or multiple disk drives on your desktop for Mac users. You can then keep a copy of all your important files on each disk. Again, you've got to remember to back things up, but there's software available to help you do this.
Raid Arrays, which I mentioned earlier, are a way a configuring your hard drives for fault tolerance. Your computer needs to be Raid capable to do this, so it's worth checking with your supplier, or motherboard manufacturer. If your system doesn't support Raid, you can buy a controller card to do it for you, and these are arguably better at the job; once again, the more you pay, the better your solution.
A Raid 1 array takes two hard drives of the same size, and mirrors them. Each drive is an exact copy of the other, and any changes that are made to one drive are automatically synchronised. As far as you're concerned, there's only one drive in your computer. You never have to worry about copying anything into more than one location, so it's all done for you.
Unfortunately, a Raid 1 setup means you're essentially sacrificing one of your hard drives to the Gods of fault tolerance. You won't be able to enjoy the extra space, because it's all eaten up when you mirror the existing drive. This might not be ideal for some people.
Raid 5 works slightly differently. Using 3 (or more) disks, this configuration stores recovery information on each disk. The theory is, if you lose one of your drives there's enough information on the others to reassemble your lost data. As you're not mirroring a whole drive, Raid 5 is more economical with its use of space. In order to configure it, you'll need at least one additional disk to Raid 1 though.
And, as with every solution, Raid isn't perfect. It won't protect against you foolishly deleting your important files. Nor will it prevent your entire MP3 collection being wiped out by a virus. If something happens to one disk - be it a deletion, malicious attack, or accidental overwrite - it happens to all disks.
There is another hardware based option, and in Jeff's case it would have served him well. Jeff has multiple computers: his wife's laptop, his media center, and his main computer could all have accommodated some or all of his files. It would have been very easy for Jeff to configure a synchronisation schedule that copied his important data between the three computers. This way, if one machine dies a horrible death, you know you can recover everything from another machine. If you forget to copy the important data to your other machines and something bad happens, it's gone forever. Make sure you've got everything you need.
Even if you don't currently own more than one computer, you can acquire a reconditioned, or low specification, machine quite cheaply. You don't need an all powerful computer just to store a few files - you just need a large enough hard disk and a network connection. The know-how to set everything up would be handy too, but the Internet is awash with solutions and how-to guides on this sort of thing.
In The Future...
Both Microsoft and Apple are introducing new features in their future operating systems to support improved backup.
Windows Vista includes the Windows Backup And Restore Center, for improved backup functionality like hard drive imaging, and automatic backups. Microsoft's OneCare package also enhances your backups dramatically, and is available now. Significantly, as this is something that nobody has done before, OneCare will nag you if you've not backed your data up for a while.
Vista also makes increased use of Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy technology, which already exists in Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. This assists with file restoration, and developers can leverage its functionality in their own applications.
With Leopard, Apple are introducing Time Machine. Whilst not as revolutionary as Apple would have you believe, Time Machine does something quite important: it makes backups fun. By using a nifty time portal graphical effect, Apple have put an attractive spin of restoring backups. The more prominent the software to back things up is, the more likely you are to do it.
From a hardware point of view, the future will almost certainly bring two things: increased capacity, and lower prices. Perhaps more interestingly, the future will also see affordableNAS solutions - Network Attached Storage. As wireless networks become faster, and hard drives become cheaper, a one terabyte device that automatically plugs into your home network and acts as a storage device becomes an affordable possibility. NAS, however, is still not immune to drive failures and virus infections, so on its own isn't really an all conquering backup solution.
Something for everyone?
A backup solution, no matter how technologically extravagant, is something everyone should have. If you store any files of emotional, financial, or educational significance you need to make sure that, if something goes wrong, you can restore those files.
As we move deeper and deeper into this digital age, we become increasingly dependant on our "Life-Data". In a few years time, it's not difficult to image home storage solutions that house a family's music, video, games, photos, documents, and email. Off the shelf, hardware based backup solutions will probably be more common, easier to configure, and more affordable.
Until we get to that stage, we need to make sure that our digital lives are properly looked after. Don't end up like Jeff: find a solution that works for you now. Before it's too late. |
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posted by rajat bhatia @ 6:22 AM  |
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