Thoughts on Backup
When it breaks...
Too often, I come face-to-face with an end-user desperate to have their data recovered from a failed/failing hard drive. The biggest issue here isn't the hard drive; it's the failure to backup!
What is a hard drive and how does it work?
"A hard disk drive (HDD; also hard drive or hard disk) is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic data storage device. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the platters." -Wikipedia
FACT: Hard drives die!
According to a study posted in 2010:
- 38% of data loss is caused by hardware failure in the hard drive
- 30% of data loss is caused by data read instability
- 13% of data loss is caused by software error, including your operating system
- Google reports a 7% fail rate per year for drives older than two years
My 2 cents
This article will not tell you how to recover your data or what tools that I've found to be the most useful since these are tricks of my trade, but what I will stress is the importance of backing up, because hard drive failure never happens when you want it to.
I've given some thought to why users may not back up, and have compiled the following:
- "It won't happen to me" syndrome
- "I'll do it tomorrow" planning
- Overwhelmed by backup complexity
- Time it takes to complete a backup
Whatever your excuse, understand that it's important to backup your data. In my experience, data can be recovered in most cases; however, on occasion there will be a catastrophic failure of a drive and the data is simply gone. In these cases, unless the user can afford to send the drive to a data recovery lab that opens the hard drive in a sealed environment to fix mechanical parts, full recovery, if any, may not be possible.
Backups that just don't work
Many backup schemes create a single-file backup that is a compressed data tree of the files and folders selected for inclusion in the backup. Often times, these can only be restored using the software on which they were created. I do not see these as a good, solid form of backup, but more for archival purposes. It works in the business world, but it's just not for the typical user due to the restoration process being convoluted and time-consuming.
A backup that works
I believe that a good user-level backup would result in a mirror copy of the files and folders that a user would need to "survive" a catastrophic hard drive failure. This would include documents, photographs, music, videos, and bookmarks. I see these as the things that truly matter to most users. In general, users are willing to reinstall their software and reconfigure personal computer settings as long as they have what was important to them.