Preventing data loss
I gave this one a section all of its own because physical failure is one thing, but losing data is another. And there is, as they say, more than one way to skin a cat.
While you can't guard against some types of physical and electronic cockups, you can ensure your data remains intact. Here are some good ways of doing so:
Use a USB drive for backups ONLY
This is the cheapest and easiest way of running backups. I'll explain in greater detail later on in the post.
I wanted to draw peoples' attention to the "ONLY" part. If you say "hey, I have loads of space on this drive!" and use it as a primary datastore then you're running as big a risk as you would with an internal drive. If the USB drive fails then you lose whatever was on it. If that data was just backups then there's basically no data loss. Sure, you lose redundancy but you don't lose any data.
Remember: when backing up and when removing USB drives, ALWAYS STOP THEM FIRST BY USING THE "REMOVE SAFELY" button
USB disks are
NOT hot-swappable. You need to disconnect the drive at the OS level first before physically unplugging it.
KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR DRIVE(S)
Refer to my first post about
S.M.A.R.T. monitoring software and install some. It will give you warning when a drive is about to die on you so you can get all your data off it ASAP.
Separate your OS from your data
A lot of you have your OS and your files, documents and
photos all on one drive because you bought your PC from Dell and they said "yeah 500GB is plenty!". And you believed them.
They are, technically, correct. However if you look at it another way, that's a whole load of data to potentially lose if you
- Get a virus
- Have to reinstall Windows
- Accidentally mash the Delete key
- Spill beer on your computer
- Have a disk failure
So the first thing I would do as a step to ensure data integrity is move your OS to a separate 60-80GB SATA II drive. You can change the location of My Documents and associate folders easily and the windows shortcuts will all work and get along! You can thus reinstall Windows with impunity without worrying about making sure you don't whack "FORMAT" by accident and lose everything.
Image your windows install
This is less of a data protection tip and more of a "how to get back up and running when shit hits the fan" tip.
When you install Windows for the first time, apply all updates, install Office/Photoshop/Firefox/Antivirus/Porn and
nothing else. Just the core system bits that you use often.
Then download
DriveImage XML and
UBCD4Win. Burn the UBCD stuff to a CD (or better still, two), label them and KEEP THEM SAFE.
I'll explain what both tools do.
DriveImage
This app will make an image of any one of your drives (or partitions) and store it wherever you tell it to. I'd recommend a USB drive that you use for backups.
If your Windows install breaks and you end up reformatting, you can simply use DriveImage to reformat the system drive and then restore the image it took after install. This skips having to do all the pointless buttonmashing that the XP/Vista installation is and you'll be back to your "default" install in no time.
UBCD
The Ultimate Boot CD was originally made as a suite of command-line tools like memtest86 and various diagnostic utils for CPUs, motherboards and hard disks. It included things like SeaTools for working with Seagate drives and so on.
The Windows one is prettier and comes with a bunch of diagnostic and data recovery apps (too many to list), one of which is DriveImage. This means that if your system has gone tits upward, you can simply pop in the CD, boot from it, run DriveImage and restore your image!
Backup your data
This is obvious and you should all be doing it. I personally have over 280GB of photos in my main directory. If I lose the drive they are on, that's a lot of work gone out the window.
Lightroom also has a function for backing up its catalogs which you should all be using.
For God's sake, don't put the catalog backups on the same disk as the catalog. If the disk fails you have neither backups or catalogs.
So, the easiest way of backing your stuff up is to go out and buy a USB drive. Buy big. You'll be surprised how fast it fills up. Also, if you intend to use it for backup, don't put working files on it just because it's free space. The drive should be purely for backup.
You can either use the Windows Backup app, download a 3-rd party app, or use Robocopy which comes with Windows to copy files over to another location.
I do this in the following manner:
Select "Idle"
Now, for the arguments, enter the following:
Code:
D:\Where\Your\Photos\Are E:\Where\You\Want\To\Backup\To /S /E /COPY:DAT /Z /XO /R:0 /W:0 /LOG:"C:\My Documents\Logs\Photos.txt"
Replace the source, destination and Log directories with your own
This will copy any files and folders from the source that are newer than the destination or don't exist at the destination. And it will do so with no need for any work on your part as the process will run when your PC is idle.
Optical Media
Some of you have expressed the opinion that optical media (DVDs) is a good way to keep your data safe. Unfortunately, I would strongly discourage you to do this. A few years ago when USB drives were prohibitively expensive, maybe. Not now.
It also relies on your remembering to back up your archive to DVDs, label them and store them where they won't get scratched, thereby ruining your backups. Use Robocopy and a USB drive instead.
The Danger Zone or NAS/DAS/RAID/Oh god what do I do?!
If you have more money than sense or are paranoid, a USB drive or 2 is fine. But who wants to rely on that when you can harness the power of RAID and network-attached storage solutions?
That's right, buy a NAS. Look it up on your local PC retailer. They start at about £150 for an entry-level single-drive solution and go up. Get one with 2 drives and
make sure they are running in RAID 1. Stay the **** away from RAID 0. Don't ever touch it. Ever.
EVER.
The difference between the two is that in RAID 1, your data is mirrored across however many drives are in the array. This way, if any drive were to fail, then the array will still be intact due to the replication. You lose storage space but gain N+X redundancy where X is the number of additional drives.
RAID 0, however, spreads your data across the array, making it into one big single drive. If a drive in RAID 0 fails, it's like suddenly losing a chunk of your hard drive to the ether. The array will not be able to recover from a failed drive and you will lose EVERYTHING.
The next step up is investing in a home server. This can be any old box you have lying around (preferably with computer parts in it) which has some drives and a network card. Install your favourite flavour of Windows and create some shares. Then robocopy/backup to those shares. If your server has multiple drives (
good idea), set up a robocopy job nightly to mirror the contents of specific folders across the drives for RAID 1-style redundancy.