FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-03-06: Just One More...

Most backup strategies have weak points, which is why it’s good to have more than one in place. A colleague who specializes in risk management once said to me that the correct answer to the question “How many backups do you need?” is “Just one more.” My own experience at the 2006 Podcast Expo proves this.

I was giving a presentation about “Creating and Keeping Raving Fans” for your podcast. Before setting out on my fateful drive down to Ontario, I put a copy of the PowerPoint presentation, complete with audio clips, onto the handy USB stick the Ur-Guru gave me for Christmas last year. (Aren’t we the romantic couple?) So I knew, standing by the ditch looking at the remains of my car, that even if my laptop had died in the crash, I had what I needed to give my presentation.

Since this was a podcasting conference, the organizers had arranged for all the speakers to be recorded and to have the recordings released as podcasts. I was looking forward to this, because I’ve only had homemade recordings of my presentations to date, and they don’t pick up either the audio from the computer or the questions from the audience, even when I’m not dealing with a mangled microphone cord or horrendous background noise.

Being the backup fiend that I am, I asked the conference organizer if it would be all right to make my own recording of my talk, so I could put it on a CD and send it to my mother. (My mother not only doesn’t have an MP3 player, she doesn’t have a computer.) He said it was fine, so I packed along my newly-purchased iriver IFP-895, which I had tested out the week before.

This particular model of iriver gets great audio quality with its built-in mic, but it has one real drawback from my point of view: the buttons are all too sensitive. They react to the lightest of touches, which makes putting the thing in your hip pocket a less than stellar idea, as I learned the hard way.

It turned out that when I thought I was starting the recording on the iriver, I was actually pausing it, so what I ended up with was 15 minutes’ worth of pre-presentation setup discussion with the sound and projector person. (And somehow neither of us noticed until halfway through the presentation that the projector’s resolution wasn’t up to Enna’s 1440 x 900 widescreen and I should have re-set it before starting. I blame it on the angle I was seeing the screen from, up there on the stage, but I don’t know what his excuse was.)

I was disappointed and embarrassed when I got home and checked the recording, but was reassured that at least the professional, plugged-into-the-computer, second-microphone-for-the-audience recording would be coming out in a week or so.

And then I got an e-mail message from Tim Bourquin:

I am so embarrassed and upset to have to write this email, but I am afraid the audio-visual recording company we used for the show has made a huge error and recorded over your session at the Expo.

It was a terrible error, and while the AV company has apologized profusely, it doesn't bring back the audio file. Apparently they lost a total of 4 sessions (including yours) from the upstairs sessions on Friday afternoon.

I have spent the past two days speaking with the president of their company, because they were told and knew from the beginning how critical these audio recordings were to us. Nonetheless, they failed to make backups and lost 4 of the sessions.

Now, I’d like to know how you can record over a digital file. Ron Moore of the Battlestar Galactica podcast had just finished telling us that morning about the way his digital recorder started a new file every time he tried to go back and “tape over” a mistake. There wouldn’t be any reason to give recordings of different talks the same file name. I suspect them of using actual magnetic tape for the recordings, which not many companies do these days.

The most important line in the message might well be “they failed to make backups.” There are nearly infinite ways to lose a file, but a great many ways to back one up, as well, and even physical tapes can be copied without too much trouble, even if it takes more time.

If I hadn’t botched my recording, it could have saved the day for them. If they hadn’t botched their recording, it could have saved the day for me. But neither of us produced a usable recording.

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes you have four copies of a file and every one is corrupt. As I said last week, I have multiple copies of everything, but right now they’re almost all in the same building, so fire, flood, or earthquake could destroy all of them at once. (I have trouble imagining even a dedicated thief going through all the file boxes in the garage to get every last end-of-year DVD I make.)

No backup strategy, and in particular no implementation of that strategy, is completely foolproof. Murphy’s Law is alive and well and flourishing inside your computer. But the more backups you have, and the more places you keep copies of your data, the safer you’ll be.

Don’t go too far overboard: you don’t want your backup system to interfere with your ability to create that valuable business data in the first place. But especially if you’re going into a risky situation (like traveling to a conference), it can be worth making just one more backup of the most important data.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-06-06: This Is Why We Back Up

Last week at this time I was preparing to deliver my presentation at the Podcast Expo—and feeling extremely grateful for my backup systems.

Just before I packed up the laptop for the drive down to Southern California, I copied my PowerPoint slides and audio clips onto my USB key, then clipped the key back in my handbag where it lives. (Since I’m one of those women who is surgically attached to her handbag, I can be sure I’ll always have the USB key with me if I need it.) Then I put the laptop and my 2.5” external hard drive into the laptop case and loaded them into the trunk along with my other baggage.

I’d gone about 250 miles when I lost control of the car and spun off the road into a ditch. This was not, shall we say, one of the high points of my journey. However, I emerged with nothing worse than bruises, and surprisingly few of those.

Two hours later, when I said goodbye to my car for the last time and loaded my bags into a rental car at the Bakersfield Airport, I had no idea whether my computer had survived the accident. It’s probably a good thing I was carrying so much, because it didn’t have a lot of room to move around. The bag looked undamaged, but I had another 150 miles to drive, and it wasn’t until the next morning that I was able to confirm that the computer, like me, had made it out alive.

I’d have been pretty upset if the computer were destroyed, but I knew that I could still give my presentation. Actually, after the technical difficulties at my last presentation, I’d already determined to make sure I could deliver the thing with no slides at all, if I had to.

I didn’t have to, though I had a nervous moment when I went into the presentation folder on my C drive and found that somehow, mysteriously, the PowerPoint file had disappeared. (This might have happened while I was transferring photos from my phone, something I’m not terribly good at yet.) But since my business data gets backed up to my second internal drive (D) automatically whenever the machine is idle, and since I’d backed up to the X (portable external) drive the day before, and since I still had Wednesday’s version of the presentation on the USB key, I knew I was covered.

That’s what backups are for: to save you from yourself and from unforseen occurrences.

My fellow presenter and favorite podcaster Shel Holtz wasn’t quite so lucky. The hard drive on his Mac laptop died at 10,000 feet en route from New York to California. That put paid not just to his slides but to all the work he’d been doing on his trip. (See Shel's blog for all the details.)

Shel backs up, but not while he’s on the road. That meant he couldn’t just borrow another laptop to run the slide show. He gave what I understand was a brilliant presentation with no slides whatsoever—refreshing to the PowerPoint-saturated audience, no doubt. (His presentation was the same time as mine, so I didn’t get to see it.) Now he’s faced with the possibility of losing all his recent work, even if he pays a fortune for data retrieval. Ouch.

The good news from Shel’s perspective is that he gets to replace the Mac he hated with a Sony he’s been coveting. But there’s no brand of computer that’s proof against drive failures. All hard drives fail eventually. (The Ur-Guru goes through about a dozen every year.) And they don’t make them like they used to, either: it’s not unusual for a drive to die within two years. If they make it past two years, they might go for as long as five. A drive that lasts longer than that is contending for the Guinness Book of World Records.

If you create data on the road, then you need to back it up on the road. In fact, given the greater likelihood of theft or breakage when traveling, backing up when traveling might be even more important than backing up at home. The reason my first external drive was a 2.5” model rather than a less-expensive 3.5” model was so that I could take it on the road without needing extra luggage. These days a road warrior like Shel Holtz would be better served by a 4 GB flash drive or 1.5” drive, easy to carry and easy to attach even in cramped circumstances.

Anywhere you take your computer is a place you should be making backups.

Now if only it were so easy to make backups of a car…

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-28-06: Back Up Your Presentation

I have to be in San Rafael at 7:15 this morning to give a presentation about podcasting. (I’m not speaking until 9:00, but I still have to be there at 7:15, because the event starts at 7:30.)

My presentation is part of a workshop about using the internet for marketing, and all three presentations rely heavily on technology.

And where there’s technology, there had better be backups. At last count, one presenter was bringing two laptops as well as a second projector. I’m bringing my own laptop, just in case, though at 17” and too many pounds she’s not especially portable. I’d be amazed if the third presenter isn’t also bringing a laptop, just in case.

And, of course, I have multiple copies of my presentation. I sent one to the Executive Team member responsible for running the projector. I have one on a USB key sitting next to me as I type. Then there’s the original on the C drive of my laptop, including all the images and the second file with my “out-takes.” Karen’s Replicator copied that whole directory onto my external drive as soon as I booted up this morning; SyncBack had already copied it onto my second internal drive during the computer’s long, otherwise idle moments printing the handouts.

And if that weren’t enough, I have my entire presentation on my website, including a self-playing PowerPointShow. (If you want to see it, go to the presentation page.) Of course, the lack of wi-fi in the hotel’s meeting rooms would make accessing that a trifle challenging, but nevertheless, I’m confident that whatever might go wrong this morning, lost data won’t be part of it.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-09-06: Passport to Backups

I’ve talked about backing up while on the road once or twice before. One of the reasons I got a 2.5-inch external hard drive instead of a less-expensive 3.5-inch drive was so it wouldn’t need its own luggage when I traveled.

Last time the Ur-Guru came to visit, he just backed up his laptop by sending everything to the server back in his home office.

This time he has a new laptop and a handful of drives, each with a different purpose.

First, there are two Western Digital Passport drives, an 80 GB and a 120 GB. The name seems particularly appropriate, since he bought them specifically for traveling overseas. The 80 GB drive contains several TrueImage backups of the laptop (system, software, and data), as well as the ISO of the Bart-PE recovery CD.

The 120 GB drive holds all the data he wanted to have along on the trip, including 18 GB of e-books, icons, source code, and project files for his current clients, a few virtual machines, software he might need to install, and an active synchronized copy of work and project data from the laptop. (He wrote his own script to do the synchronizing.) The rest of the drive holds instructional videos, MP3 music files, and other media. And there’s still enough room (or will be, after we watch the movies) for the photos he’ll be taking.

Then he has a 512 MB memory stick full of utilities he might need anywhere. (I have a similar memory stick which I load up with programs clients are likely to need, like the AVG free anti-virus or Karen’s Replicator.)

There are two more drives, each with a 4 GB capacity. One is a memory stick, one a 1.8-inch disk in a case about 2 x 2.5 inches, with a standard USB plug that tucks into one end. Because it has to spin, it’s slower than the stick, and it gets much hotter when used over an extended period of time. Now that the flash-memory sticks are available in multiple-gigabyte capacities, the Ur-Guru recommends using them instead of the mini-drives.

These two smaller drives serve as rotating backups of the source code for the Ur-Guru’s client project, so that he always has a copy of the current version and a copy of the previous day’s version. He also keeps his current work synchronized with the 120 GB Western Digital drive.

If you’re interested in getting any of them for yourself, the Ur-Guru and I will be happy to answer any questions you have about them.

Until next week—back up early, back up often.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-2-05: Backups in the Air, on the Air, and Underwater

It seems like everywhere I turn these days I hear about backups. I was reading The Everything Guide to Writing a Book Proposal and there, on page 198, under the heading “Protecting Your Professional Image,” is a warning to back up. “One writer, two days before she was due to turn in several chapters to her editor, found that the diskette she had been using to store her work had been damaged somehow, and all those beautifully written chapters were inaccessible.”

Backups in the Air

Early in August, one of my faithful readers (and have I ever told you faithful readers how much I appreciate the fact that you read what I write every week?) told me about an article in Southwest’s August Spirit Magazine entitled “Backup or Else.” Spirit Magazine doesn’t have an online edition, and I didn’t do any flying in August, so I thought I might end up missing it. However, one of my useful geek connections did fly Southwest in August, and discovered that the article was in fact the same one that appeared in the September 6 edition of PC Magazine. As a computing professional, I get PC Magazine for free, and I’d actually just cut that article out. You can read it online, and I urge you to do so. Among other things, it contains two important points in the “Best Practices” sidebar:

1. “If you encounter file problems, the most recent backup of that file may have the same problems. So don’t be too quick to overwrite the older backups.”
2. “Typical consumer backup products don’t save open files. So if you never close your mail file, or you keep a status-report spreadsheet open all the time, it may never get properly backed up.”

There’s also a review of BounceBack Pro, which I want to compare to Pam’s experience once she’s finished setting up her ABS drive.

Backups on the Air

A few days ago I was listening to the Kickstartnews Revue Podcast, and what should I hear but several reminders about backups. The show’s hosts had suffered from a flooded basement which delayed their podcast production, though they were fortunate enough not to experience serious data loss. (This brought up the topic of insurance coverage and the circumstances under which policies will cover you for data loss, in particular loss of third-party data. I’ll be interviewing a colleague on just that subject for next week’s column.)

Backups Underwater

Flooded basements are common anywhere people have basements (they are rare here in California). Common causes are heavy rainstorms, pipes which freeze and break during winter (something else which is rare here in California), and sewer backups (which can happen anywhere). If you have a basement family room or a home office in the basement, then your far-from-waterproof electronic equipment is at risk. I’d recommend storing your backup media or XHD in a place less likely to get wet, say a middle floor of the house (as the attic or top floor is more vulnerable to roof leaks). That also applies to your choice of a place to put the backup server or network drive. Don’t put it next to the window, either--says Sallie whose computer is usually resting under the window all night. (Maybe I should rearrange my room.)

Flooded basements are minor-league problems compared to what’s happening in Mississippi and Louisiana thanks to Hurricane Katrina. In cases of real disasters, just keeping your backups out of the basement isn’t enough. In fact, your off-site backups better be a very long way off site.

I have to admit my own backups wouldn’t save me from a disaster on that scale, and it’s making me think I’d better create some DVDs to send to my parents for safekeeping, not to mention backing up any critical working files to my website. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, though responsible for only a small percentage of the data lost in any year, are the answer to the question “Why would anyone pay a monthly fee for online backup services when external drives are so cheap?”

Do you know someone whose data was drowned in Hurricane Katrina? DriveSavers data recovery service is offering to waive its $200 attempt fee and cut prices by 1/3 for Katrina’s victims.

Next week: “Do your backups meet the requirements of your company’s liability policy?” featuring Charles Wilson of RiskSmart Solutions.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-29-05: Backing Up on Vacation

I’m back from beautiful British Columbia with all my data intact and some new backup information to share.

My first backup encounter was on the flight to Seattle. Southwest Airlines’ July Spirit magazine contains a special business section called “Most Underrated.” Guess what the most underrated business practice is? That’s right: backing up. Southwest has this to say about it: “We know that you’ve heard it hundreds of times before, so why haven’t you backed up your hard drive in the last 11 months? Huh? Why? Do it.”

Now, I like to think that people who read this newsletter/blog have backed up more recently than that, and I prefer to be more polite about urging them to do so, but the point is well taken.

Being on vacation is definitely no excuse for not backing up.

As I said last week, I took my external hard drive with me on this trip. It went into my checked luggage along with the digital camera, the removable floppy drive, and half a dozen chargers and cables. So my backup schedule was pretty much the same as usual in terms of daily file backups, once I’d found something to act as a lap desk and hooked things up.

This trip was our biennial family reunion vacation, and the largest one yet, with twelve adults and three small children, not to mention three laptops and at least four digital cameras, plus portable DVD players, MP3 players, and the like. My brother and my cousin Jason the Mac geek had both brought wireless routers so we wouldn’t all be fighting over the limited desk space in the underfurnished office, and once the cable guys came out on Monday, we were able to get online and keep up with the most urgent things we’d left behind.

An internet connection is a very good thing to have when you’re on vacation, purely from a backup perspective. Almost everyone takes photos while on vacation, and these days they’re usually digital photos. In addition to first transferring mine onto my laptop and then copying them onto my external hard drive, I uploaded all my photos to my FileSlinger FTP directory. This was only partly for backup purposes: I wanted to show them to the Ur-Guru, who wasn’t able to join us this year, and e-mailing 200 MB of photos wasn’t feasible.

Jason, who didn’t bring his iBook (his father is borrowing it), uploaded his photos directly into his Yahoo! Photos page, originally created to show off pictures of his nephew, Andrew. Jason and I did some photo-swapping via the flash memory cards our cameras use, and he uploaded my photos as well. That meant there were copies of my pictures in four different places, pretty much guaranteeing their safety. And because I copied Jason’s photos to all the places I put my photos, his were just as safe.

My brother Alex has the best camera equipment of any of us and usually takes the best photos, which he puts up on his own website (or used to, anyway. The domain name seems to have expired). His camera doesn’t use the same format or same kinds of cards as Jason’s and mine do, so we always have to wait until after the vacations to get copies of his photos. This year, unfortunately, none of them turned out, for reasons Alex doesn’t yet understand.

Fortunately for all of us, Alex had the rest of us as backup photographers. I’m making slide shows from photos that Jason and Pam (my stepmother) and I took, and you can see the first two, Grouse Nest Exterior and Grouse Nest South Wing on the FileSlinger.com website. (Sorry, I don’t have a Mac version yet. I’m working on it.)

Traveling is when your data is most vulnerable: that laptop, camera, or USB drive could get dropped, stolen, have something spilled on it, catch a virus from a strange network, or who knows what. Even if you don’t have access to your regular backup method, you can use the internet to upload or e-mail copies of anything important. (But don’t put it in your public_html directory unless you want Google to find it and have half the Net reading it by the time you get home.)

Even if you do bring your regular backup equipment along, an online copy is a good idea, because there’s no guarantee that the backup drive will be any safer from thieves and small children than your main drive is. (Some of the drives out there these days are so tiny that you have to worry about infants swallowing them.)

If you’re planning a vacation, plan your backups as well.