The ThinkPad T60p had been acting strangely for a few weeks and I had a hunch it was going to crash. Unfortunately, it did. I called Lenovo support at 6PM Monday night and they determined that the problem was the "motherboard" needed replaced. The shipping carton arrived on Tuesday, they received the ThinkPad in Memphis on Wednesday and I received the repaired unit on Thursday morning. Nothing short of remarkable customer service. That is the good news.
The bad news is that I continue to learn more about the nuances of backup and "recovery". I should not still be learning after all these years. I suspect I am not alone. There are a number of stories about "backup" here in the blog. I don’t claim to be the master of backup but I do take it very seriously. The moral of this story is to take recovery as seriously as backup. This story is a little bit more technical than usual stories but I hope it is helpful. If you are interested, please read on.
When it comes to backup, there are many ways to do it. I have used numerous backup programs over the years and one thing I know for sure is that none of them is perfect. The best one I have found is called Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files. (If you have a Mac then you definitely want to upgrade to Leopard and use Time Machine and most of the rest of what I have to say in this story does not apply. Apple really does make things easier!). CDP provides real-time, continuous data protection for all of your data and it does so without administrative complexity. The initial setup is not quite as good as it could be but it only takes fifteen minutes or or. Once you have it setup, you are finished. From then on any file that changes on your system is automatically backed up. You don’t have to remember to do anything — CDP just does it for you when needed. I chose to keep the most recent five versions of all my important files. The backup is done over the home LAN to a RAID server in my basement. RAID means Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. What it does is give you peace of mind. The RAID box has six hard drives in it but to Windows it looks like one big drive.  If one of them fails — no problem — because all of the data that gets written to a disk is "striped" across four different disks. The fifth disk is used to keep track of "parity" and the 6th disk is used as a hot spare.  What all this means is that when a drive fails I don’t lose any data.  I am sacrificing storage capacity for this redundancy but I consider this a must-have for critical data because the fact is that drives do fail — either on the system you are backing up among the RAID disks you are backing up to.
A key question is what data do you want to backup? One answer is backup your entire hard drive. That takes a lot of storage and if you have a hard disk crash you will probably want to reinstall your software on the new hard disk anyway. An alternative to backing up everything is to just backup your "critical" files. I did that for years but then I learned that there are some data files that are critical that I did not know about. Just backing up your "My Documents" may seem sufficient but it isn’t. For example the bookmarks for Firefox are stored in a folder at "C:Documents and SettingsAdministratorApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles". There are other things hidden away down deep in Documents and Settings. Backing up everything gets around the problem but if you have a lot of pictures and music and programs and keep multiple versions of things you can easily end up with a requirement for a very large backup facility. The bottom line is to make sure you know what your critical data is and where it is. If you are not sure, it is worth thinking about and looking into.
Storage is getting inexpensive but it isn’t free. There are some really impressive backup servers available. A new one was announced at CES from Netgear. Backup serves may seem like overkill until you think about all those pictures of the grandchildren, music that you spent days converting from CDs, and your tax returns, financial records, email archives, scanned documents, etc. One thing about backup I can tell you for sure is that if you have not yet needed it, you will. Hard disks and PC motherboards are extremely reliable — but they do fail. The MBTF (mean time between failure) of your hard disk may be one million hours, however the key word is "mean". That means in the middle between the ones that last forever and the ones that last an hour.
The final part of the story is about "restore". Backing up data is useless unless you can restore it after a hardware failure. I have backups that I burned onto CDs years ago that are no longer compatible with today’s CD drives and other backups that were made with a backup program that I no longer have. In both cases those backups are useless. The nice thing about CDP is that the backups are files just like the originals. Although CDP provides a nice restore capability, you don’t need any special program to retrieve your backup files. You can just copy them if needed. The key thing about recovery is to practice it. Make a commitment to do the fire drill. Tell yourself that your PC has just crashed and you can get no data from it. Now go to another PC — most of us have more than one these days — install Quicken and see if you can get your latest financial information, install Outlook and see if you can get your latest email, install iTunes and see if you can play your music, etc. This week while I was waiting to get my repaired ThinkPad back I discovered that there was certain data that I had forgotten about that was buried in various nooks and crannies of my system.
Once you start to think about backup and recovery, it naturally leads you to think about "web services". If you use Google or Yahoo! for your email then you move the backup problem to them, assuming you trust that they will protect your data — keeping it not only backed up but also protected from hackers. I use Plaxo to keep my contact list and calendar backed up. I don’t use it for day to day purposes but if I lose my system I know that my contacts and calendar are intact and usable at Plaxo.com via a browser on any system. Likewise I keep my email on both Dreamhost and Spamarrest. (Dreamhost offers 200GB of storage for $10 per month). There are also numerous online backup services. For example, Quicken.com offers a service for $9.99 per year (that’s per year, not per month) to provide 100MB of storage to protect all your Quicken data files, including Quicken Home Inventory and other Quicken products.
There is much more to learn about backup and recovery. My bottom line advice is to make a commitment to go through the drill. Figure out what data is important to you, find out where it is, and simulate a disaster to see if you can recover from it. I hate to say it, but if you have not experienced a data loss yet, consider yourself lucky. I hope it does not happen to you — but just in case — please be prepared.