17
01/07
1:49 am
Insurance and backups love to be hated
I know this subject has been covered many times on many other blogs and websites, but I still feel this needs to be repeated (for myself too).
Insurance In’shmurance
Like most people, I absolutely hate all forms of insurance. Whether it’s for a motorcycle, home, health or teeth, it’s always a pain in the ass. Not only does it cost a lot of money, but there’s usually a 5% chance you’ll never use it (depending on your situation of course).
Another form of insurance is for your data. In the computer world, we call them backups. They also cost money and chances of you needing them are extremly low.
The fact that insurance and backups are recurring costs make them even less lovable.
Unfortunately, some people seem to forget the 5% can end up costing you 10x more than you can afford. An absolutely critical mistake that should be avoided at all costs!
Oops
I recently lost all my travel photos from Europe due to an unplanned disk crash (yeah, as if those are ever planned lol). This could have been much worst so let me use this post as a reminder to all those out there who think they can get away without insurance and proper backups.
WAKE UP. DO IT. It might cost money now, but trust me if you lose all the source code for that project you’ve been working 6 months on, you will not only be very angry, but you’ll be very poor too.
Here’s what i’ve been investing in for various reasons:
- 4.7GB DVD+R spindle
- 700MB CDR spindle
- 250GB external hard drive (for storage and backups)
- Software to automatically perform backups (i’m still testing different apps to decide which one suits my needs)
My plan of action
The real trick with backups is to have them automated. Write down the entire procedure for recovering data, print it and post it on your wall.
If there’s a time/day you know you will be in front of your computer/wasting cycles, then schedule a calendar reminder to manually verify the backed up data. Simulate a disk failure or loss of data, find out how devastating it will be to lose 1 week of work vs 1 day of work vs 1 hour of work.
It’s really simple and you can have a proper backup schedule and recovery procedure within 10 minutes. Do you have 10 minutes to spare? What if you lost all your data and don’t have ANY backups, then will you have 10 minutes to spare?
bjhess
January 17, 2007
9:29 am
I use rsnapshot to backup my critical data, both personal documents and “job stuff.” I put together a machine with old parts (talking 366MHz Celeron machine) and a big hard drive, loaded Ubuntu server on it and dedicated the machine to backup.
Rsnapshot goes out on the network and pulls data in once per day, making incremental-like backups. I then shared the “snapshots” area to my network and I can see the state of my data for each day in the past week, each week in the past month, each month in the past quarter, and each quarter in the past year. It’s excellent. (Rsnapshot was a little easier to setup because I have all my data on another Ubuntu box, so it’s grabbing everything from a Linux machine. I didn’t mess with pinging OSX or Windows boxes.)
I can’t really imagine a better solution then one in which there is absolutely no required manual processes. Manual processes will almost unanimously assure failure at some point in time. I have further protections I won’t get into. Think “backup the backup.” These protections are manual. Guess what I’ve been remiss on for the past few months?
Alex
January 17, 2007
10:47 pm
Wow that seems like a great solution!
I travel a lot and carrying a dedicated backup machine is definitely not feasible, although I would look into that if/when I move into a studio space with my team (if/when I have a team) ;)
As I mentioned earlier, automation is the key to proper backups. Do it often and do it well.
Thanks for posting!