Hard drives aren’t as safe as you think!
So, you have this huge irreplaceable collection of digital photos of your kids, video of their first steps, tons of MP3s, that Great American Novel you’ve been working on since you were in college and it’s all sitting on your hard drive with no backup. According to this article that data isn’t as safe as the manufacturers claim. What’s an intrepid photography nut or music guru to do?
Five to eight years ago, when we were all just getting started with digital cameras and the biggest size was 1 Megapixel, the 4.5 GB of storage space found on a DVDR seemed like plenty of space. As we’ve seen the MegaPixel race on digital cameras, and the rise of digital video grow, 4.5GB just isn’t enough to back up all of your data. For instance, I have over 50GB of MP3 music and hundreds of GB of recorded video. It would take me DAYS to burn all that to DVDR.
Ok, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray should help with their substantially bigger sizes. But what happens when that huge 50GB Blu-Ray disk containing your entire archive gets lost, or scratched, (or worse yet, for no reason whatsoever refuses to work on your new machine 5 years from now?) This is a very real problem that many of us have already faced from when we used to back up to CD-Rs.
No, the only real viable storage mechanism for backup these days is a big hard drive. Those external USB backup drives have become the rage over the last two years, and they are handy. However, the drives found in those units are the exact same ones that are discussed in that article and analized in the study. In other words - don’t think just because you put it on the external drive that it’s safe!
Instead, anyone who has a lot of data that they can’t afford to lose really should be looking into some sort of RAID solution. Many modern motherboards support at least RAID-0 (mirroring) which takes two identical hard drives and makes them hold mirror copies of each other. In this case, if one of the drives dies, your data is still ok. Just replace the dead drive and the RAID array will rebuild, restoring all of your data. This is fine, but there is a better way…
In comes the home NAS (Network Attached Storage)! These units are small dedicated computers usually with 4 or 5 drive bays, supporting RAID-5 which allows for much greater use of the total capacity of the drives, while at the same time allowing for drive failure. These are also really nice because you can attach them to your home network and access the data from any machine in your network, and many also have the ability to hook up via USB. You can get these either pre-loaded with drives or buy a bare unit and buy whatever drives you want.
I have two friends with NAS units and both couldn’t be happier. The units are small, quiet, easy to administrate, and allow them to access their data from anywhere on the LAN. They also love knowing that their precious data is safe from drive failures.
If you’re interested in this technology, check out products by Thecus, Buffalo, Infrant or one of the various others out there. Microsoft is also pushing their Windows Home Server initiative which turns a PC into sort of a NAS. At a minimum, if your PC supports RAID, USE IT!
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Having been bitten by relying on RAID setups in the past, I personally feel backups are needed as well. I’ve had two drives go bad in a RAID-5 setup twice in the past 3-4 years which means I lost the RAID and I’ve had an instance where mirroring drives resulted in corrupted data. Granted I do sysadmin stuff, but one of the RAID-5 issues happened on my personal network.
So, with over 60GB of music, 60GB of video, 10GB of photos including an archive of all my parents photos and my personal documents I decided to use RAID-0 on the active data, another drive on another controller which is nightly synced with the RAID as well as an external USB drive which is nightly synced and another external USB drive (Mvix HD760) that I copy data over every so often! Overkill? Maybe, but the data is irreplaceable.
I’ve considered a NAS as well, but would not rely on just the NAS as my only backup.
The key point to protecting your data is redundancy (and I don’t mean RAID!)… redundancy in the sense that you need multiple copies of your data in multiple places… some kept at home, some at the office, and some offsite somewhere else (preferably several States away). This is really the only way to approach 100% certainty that your data will survive a disaster (be it fire, flood, tornado, military invasion, or alien invasion). And if the disaster is so big that ALL of these backup sources are wiped out, well, then chances are really good that you and everyone you know are wiped out as well, and have no need for the data anymore.