Today, at about 8:00 AM, a hard drive in our our work email server decided that life wasn't worth living, and it ended its life in a rather dramatic noisy fashion, with grinding and groaning.

At this point, many of you are expecting the story to be full of wailing and gnashing of teeth as our business ceased to function.

In fact, our IT director came in at the normal work time, pulled out the dead disk from the RAID array and popped in another. It took a few hours for the disk to synch up with the other disks in the RAID array, but aside from some slowness, nobody noticed.

That got me to thinking about how many times I've had people come to me, devastated that they lost data when a hard drive goes bad. All hard drives go bad.

So, if you don't have a solid and effective data backup plan, consider starting one - now.

Also, I've been saving useful web sites, in their entirety (for example, Wikipedia), for offline access.

A Terabyte drive is like $100 these days - there's no reason not to back up things that matter to you.

Good call. A good strategic back up plan for your data is essential. Also very good timing - I just picked up an external terabyte drive this afternoon!

Be careful since a good backup plan is to have data on some other media type. An external hard disk is nice for quick day to day copies but things like power surge, virus, etc can wipe it out as quick as your main drive. Make copies on dvd, tape, flash, whatever and store offsite. I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen people with a bunch of external drives hanging off their system mess up and corrupt them all. Its espically important is your running a closed source OS since you never know what can go wrong with it.

In my day job, we see all kinds of data loss due to hard drives failing....and people not having any backups in place. The financial losses for these people would floor you.

My mantra is RAID is for high availability. Backups (on and off site) are used for disaster recovery. Even though these are two completely different functions, both go hand in hand for business continuity.

There were many documented cases after 9/11 where businesses suffered huge financial losses due to data loss...and some never recovered at all. RAID is not much good when your server cannot be recovered. Whereas having remote off site backups and other business continuity plans in place, may have your business back and running in a few hours.

For a recent and very real case of data loss, see this Google cached page (start reading about 1/2 way down at "Tuesday" then read upwards) of a popular online journal/blog site that went down....all because simple backup procedures were not in place. The site is now back online with different owners and it is a shell of what it used to be...and they probably will never recover from the negative attention the original owners created.

For the average home user, there are a ton of websites that describe in detail all you ever wanted to know about backing up your home computers to any device such as external hard drives, USB drives, SD cards and online backup sites..which I don't recommend.

That's my plan too, though hopefully with cheerleaders rather than rare-earth magnets.

-Blast, who tried really hard not to go there...

Exactly what will happen when your wife finds out about those cheerleaders!!

I have all of our critical data saved on punch cards and magnetic tape!

If it is really critical information write it down somewhere.

As soon as I figure out how to write down 67 gigabytes of MP3 files, I'll let you know.

Let's see...

101101011010001101010110101101000110110101101010101101001101100010101100110

The external drive goes into the safe after the backup.
Since it's twice as big as the computer's HD, I have extra room for the daily grandfather backups as well. All my equipment is on a UPS. I used to use tape, dvd-r, dvd-rw, etc but they are cumbersome by comparison.

April 14 1999. My accountant calls me and says that my IRS extension request is ready. What????? This is the first year in the last 5 I have had all my ducks in a row on time!!!! What happened?

Seems the entire computer system in his firm (He owns the firm) crashed. But not to worry, because he has a company that just arranged all his back-up operations last night.
Last night???? Isn't this when the system crapped? Uh, yeah but the information was already backed up.

Turns out the back-up's were still going to the main storage device (different partition). Since it failed physically, HE LOST EVERYTHING!!!

The court case recently ended between CPA and IT firm. The IT firm called it quits and the owner gave himself Excedrin headache number .357.

Back-up your back-ups!!!

Yes, believe it or not this is a true story. I am also related to the CPA, otherwise I would have called bull.