Yesterday the Ur-Guru pointed me to a post on Coding Horror entitled “International Backup Awareness Day.” Coding Horror is normally a blog, and the permalinks to posts don’t normally look like the one I just pasted in there. Depending on when you read this, clicking on that link might get you a “404: Page Not Found” error. Thanks to catastrophic data loss, Coding Horror is only pretending to be a blog right now.

Here’s the story. Jeff Atwood, geek extraordinaire, hosted his blog on a virtual machine (VM) on a server at a web hosting company. VMs are great for developers, because you can simulate different operating systems in order to test your software on them, and you can take snapshots and re-create them easily.

Unlike Jeff Atwood or the Ur-Guru, I’ve never worked with a VM. To use them you need more RAM than I have at my disposal. I can see how it might be handy to have one to test backup software on without cluttering up the registry of my main machine, though. But apparently backing up the contents of a VM doesn’t work quite the same way as backing up your ordinary operating system and files. This is a setup for a very dangerous situation: when you think you have backups, but don’t. (Have I said “Test your backups” lately? Test your backups.) And this, it seems, is exactly how Jeff lost his blog:

1. The server experienced routine hard drive failure. (Ed. note: hard drive failure is described as “routine.” In data centers, where drives are spinning 24/7, that’s exactly what it is.)
2. Because of the hard drive failure, the virtual machine image hosting this blog was corrupted.
3. Because the blog was hosted in a virtual machine, the standard daily backup procedures at the host were unable to ever back it up.
4. Because I am an idiot, I didn’t have my own (recent) backups of Coding Horror. Man, I wish I had read some good blog entries on backup strategies!
5. Because there were no good backups, there was catastrophic data loss. Fin, draw curtain, exeunt stage left.

Now, I don’t know what blogging platform Jeff was using. Given that he’s one of those extreme geek types, it could be something really obscure, even something he created himself. (Power geeks are like that; they’re as likely to insist on developing their own tools as to use anyone else’s.) I don’t even know what operating system his VM was running. But I know that there were ways to back up this blog when I was using Blogger (published by FTP to my own website), and there’s no excuse for not backing up WordPress blogs, since there are handy plugins to make it easier. And any offline blog editor like Windows Live Writer or Ecto will save local copies of your posts, so you can back them up along with the rest of the data on your hard drive. (Back in the days before Windows Live Writer, I used to write my blog posts in Microsoft Word, but you don’t actually want to paste from Word into anything that uses HTML. It did, however, mean that I had local copies.)

Jeff was able to re-build the text portion of his blog in HTML thanks to a fellow extreme geek who’s been archiving the Internet, but lost many of the images (which are not, apparently, on his hard drive, or not readily identifiable from among those on his hard drive). I shudder to think just how much work this must have been—and how much more work it will be to convert it back into blog format if he chooses to do that.

The lessons Jeff Atwood learned from the demise of Coding Horror are not just for geeks.

What can we all learn from this sad turn of events?

1. I suck.
2. No, really, I suck.
3. Don’t rely on your host or anyone else to back up your important data. Do it yourself. If you aren’t personally responsible for your own backups, they are effectively not happening.
4. If something really bad happens to your data, how would you recover? What’s the process? What are the hard parts of recovery? I think in the back of my mind I had false confidence about Coding Horror recovery scenarios because I kept thinking of it as mostly text. Of course, the text turned out to be the easiest part. The images, which I had thought of as a “nice to have”, were more essential than I realized and far more difficult to recover. Some argue that we shouldn’t be talking about “backups”, but recovery.
5. It’s worth revisiting your recovery process periodically to make sure it’s still alive, kicking, and fully functional.
6. I’m awesome! No, just kidding. I suck.

So when, exactly, is International Backup Awareness Day? Today. Yesterday. This week. This month. This year. It’s a trick question. Every day is International Backup Awareness Day. And the sooner I figure that out, the better off I’ll be.

Have you checked your backups lately? Now might be a really good time.

Backup bookmarks for December 11th through December 13th:

• Oops!Backup – Software that allows you to go back in time to recover documents and files – Altaro –
• Norton Saved My Bacon –
• Importance of Back Up and Effective Ways of Doing It –

I wrote about “social backup” provider Zoogmo back in 2007. At that time, they summed up their service as follows: “With Zoogmo you get FREE unlimited backup that automatically runs in the background and lets you protect your data at multiple remote locations that YOU choose.”

I wondered then about their business model. It now seems possible they didn’t have one, because I just received the following e-mail:

Valued Zoogmo Customer,

We would like to thank you for your loyal support.

Since we launched our backup service in August 2006 we have enjoyed serving you but the time has come for us to close our doors.

We plan to shut down our servers on 31st December 2009 at which point your backed-up data will no longer be available. We suggest that you check out www.mozy.com for unlimited online backup for just US$5/month. If you have any queries about our shutdown, please email us at info@zoogmo.com.

Thank you once again for using Zoogmo,

The Zoogmo Management

The online backup industry has become overpopulated and highly competitive. Some of the players are bound to have to drop out. Re-reading my posts about Zoogmo, I wonder whether Online Backup Vault, whose representatives posted comments to both of my Zoogmo entries, will fare better. One can’t tell from their blandly glossy stock-photo website. On the other hand, their comment-spam-marketing processes certainly wouldn’t encourage me to entrust my data to them.

Does the failure of Zoogmo suggest a problem for social backup in general? Will we see similar notices from companies like Cucku and CrashPlan soon? Or will we see more social backup because we’re having more social everything?

These days, people don’t share photos or other files by sending them directly to their friends. Instead, “sharing” means uploading the file to a server somewhere “in the cloud” and then letting everyone know where they can see/hear/download it. This is a generation accustomed to entrusting everything to someone else’s servers. Only the geeks, the old-fashioned, and the slightly paranoid are likely to prefer a system where they know exactly where their files are and who has access. And only the geeks are likely to have friends with computers that are secure enough to compete with the data centers where online backup providers rent server space.

And the geeks already have the means to send the files to each other. I didn’t use Zoogmo myself, beyond the initial trial so I could write the review. And I’m a slightly paranoid, old-fashioned geek. My own experience suggests that a social backup system has to offer significant benefits over and above what the technically savvy can do for themselves.

Or else it has to re-frame itself altogether, and become something like Dropbox. Backup is a valuable part of what Dropbox provides, yet it’s almost incidental to the real function of the service, which is to make it easier to share and synchronize files. That’s a much easier sell, with a much bigger market.

Zoogmo had an interesting concept, but despite a 2008 mention in Lifehacker, it never caught fire. It just may be that most people feel safer entrusting their data to strangers than to friends.

Backup bookmarks for November 26th through December 5th:

• Google Backup is what I want for Christmas | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com –
• How to backup WPMU – WPMU Tutorials –
• Verbatim InSight (500GB) – At A Glance – Reviews by PC Magazine – The Verbatim InSight (500GB) answers the age-old question: How much free space do I have left? An innovative e-ink-like display gives you the answer at a glance, even when the drive isn't running.

After last week’s meditation on using external hard drives instead of DVDs to back up photos, Loyal Reader Mike Van Horn responded with the following e-mail:

My advice to you is, “Purge!”

I look at my own backups of photos, and what I see is lots of garbage (at 1 to 2 meg each). Many duplicates of the same photo. Gobs of photos of people or things I never need to view again. Photos of all the notes I’ve ever taken, including notes from people who have sold their businesses—or died.

If I would go through my photos and select only those that I could conceivably want to view again during my lifetime (or that my posthumous biographers would draw on!), I would reduce my photo storage by 90%.

It does take some time to do this. But if you don’t, you’re backing up haystacks just because they may contain a needle. And in that case, the needle is already essentially lost.

Mike makes a very good point. I went through my old printed photos a few years ago, and was appalled to find out how many prints I’d saved that were out of focus, overexposed, grainy, badly composed, or whatever. In fact, there was no real reason for me to have held onto any of the shots that weren’t good enough to make it into the photo albums in the first place, apart from reflexive pack-rat-ism. And I had two copies of a lot of them, from the days when many discount film developers offered free double prints. Twice the trash! Out they went.

If you mess up a photo and you know it, you should delete it right away, before it even gets to your computer. Make room on your card for a better one. There’s certainly no point preserving junk in quadruplicate.

And with the end of the year coming up, it’s a good time to go through all your files anyway, to see what you need to keep and what you can pitch. Cheap storage shouldn’t lead you into sloppy habits.

In some cases, though, “Just throw it away” isn’t an option. Even small companies may be bound by data retention laws, depending on the kind of business you’re in. In that case, the best you can do is move the data off your computer into your archives, and practice what’s known as deduplication. The larger your company, the more space deduplication will save you, particularly when it comes to things like e-mail attachments that get sent to all 10,000 of your employees. You don’t need 10,000 copies of that file, only one.

Enterprise backup and archive systems all handle deduplication automatically. Some of the SOHO backup services are starting to offer it as well, the better to keep within your cloud storage limits. In most cases, however, the best judge of whether two files are identical (in spite of having different names or dates) is going to be you.

And no matter what system you use for storing photos—or anything else—make sure you organize and label them to better help you find what you’re looking for a few years from now when you’ve forgotten everything you think you’re going to remember about them.