It’s the dirty little secret of the computer industry. Hard disk drives (HDD), the single most important hardware component in your computer, fail. And they fail more often than most people realize. This is important because all of the information that is stored on your computer, be it pictures, email, banking information in Quicken, Quickbooks, or MS Money, your Word and Excel documents, and the programs that are installed on your computer, is stored on this disk drive. In short, everything that the computer remembers is on your HDD.
What is an HDD?
The HDD is an internal component of your computer. People often think of the “tower” as the HDD but in actuality the HDD is inside the tower. More importantly, the HDD is the storage location for everything your computer “remembers”. Think of it as the filing cabinet for your computer. If your computer remembers it, it’s stored on the HDD.
The HDD has four main components:
- An electronic controller.
- The platter(s). These are the “disks” in hard disk drive and the actual storage medium.
- A drive motor that spins the platter(s) at a constant RPM. This is a mechanical component and one of the common failure points.
- An armature that moves the “heads” back and forth over the disk to read the information from and write the information to the platter(s). As with the drive motor, this is a mechanical component. It is also the most common point of failure in the HDD.
Because HDDs have mechanical components, they are more prone to failures than other parts of your computer such as the Central Processing Unit (CPU), motherboard or memory modules.
The Cost of Failed HDDs
When we combine the mechanical aspects and the chance of failure with the critical importance of the HDD, we can see why we need to back up the information that it stores. While it is often possible to recover data from a failed drive, it is an expensive proposition. Because of the way that HDDs work and the extremely tight tolerances involved, recovery of data from a physical failure of an HDD is something that the typical computer repair shop can’t do. As a result, HDDs that require a physical recovery due to mechanical failure are almost always sent to a third party vendor who specializes in this type of data recovery.
Because of their specialty nature, these types of data recovery do not come cheap. Typical cost as of this writing are in the $2500+ range! On top of that, there is no guarantee that the data on the disk can be recovered. While most companies do not charge the full amount of no data is recovered, most do charge a minimum amount to attempt recovery, typically in the $500-$700 range.
When you add it all up, the cost of of a failed HDD can be looked at in two ways:
- Spend a lot of money to recovery data from the failed drive, with no guarantee that you can get the data back.
- Spend no money and lose all of your data.
Backup, Backup, Backup!
Given the costs involved, you can understand why I preach backups! To emphasize it even more, remember this:
Your computer is not important. It is just a piece of hardware, a tool. Hardware can be fixed or replaced. It’s what you do with that tool, and the information you store on it, that is important!
Many people do not think they need to do backups because the don’t have anything important on their computer. In reality, the average person has pictures, contact lists, emails, music and other documents that they would be hard pressed to replace if they lost them. It’s a story we hear far too often:
”I had hundreds of pictures of my grandkids.”
“What about all the music I bought on Itunes?”
“All my accounting information was in Quickbooks.”
Without good backups, or a means and willingness to spend a lot of money (and still no guarantee), the data is lost.
Why Don’t People Backup?
The reasons why people don’t backup vary but fall into some common categories:
- Failure to realize the implications of not backing up.
- Backing up is complicated.
- Forgetfulness
- and yes, Laziness.
If you’re reading this article you can probably understand the implications of not backing up at this point. So let’s address the other reasons people don’t perform backups.
There was a time when backing up was a complicated process that required the user to interact with the PC by changing floppy disks, CDs or tapes. Because of this many folks (the author included) often didn’t back up because we didn’t have time, or we were too busy. In other words we were lazy. This laziness then leads to forgetfulness. Skip a few backup cycles and before you know it you’ve fallen out of the routine. The next thing you know it’s been six months since your last backup. Simply put, when backups require the user to do something, they often don’t get done.
Fortunately, in today’s world, backups are easy and inexpensive. Systems exist that are completely automated and require no user interaction other than initial setup. Install your backup system, and it just happens. No need to swap disks, start up a process, etc. The system does the work.
Painless Backups
In today’s world it’s easy to perform complete system backups. There are two main components to a painless backup system:
- An external USB HDD as the backup media.
- A good backup software program.
Backup Media
We recommend external USB HDDs as the backup media for a variety of reasons. First, they are inexpensive. 500G drives can be found for less than $100 as of this writing and prices continue to drop. Second, they are small enough to be portable, and take of very little desktop space. Third, they are fast. Faster than CD/DVDs and any tape drive device that is accessible (read $$$) to the average user. Fourth, they don’t require any user interaction. No CDs/DVDs or tapes to swap out.
Backup Software
Good backup software does several things:
- Allows the user to schedule when the backups will occur
- Notifies the user of the success or failure of the backup run
The first of these requirements is pretty much a given for all backup software solutions. However, not all backup software provides notifications. Why are notifications important? If something is going wrong with your backups and your software doesn’t give you a notification, the only way to know the status of the backups is to manually check the status. As stated above, it’s a simple fact that when the user has to manually take actions, often they don’t get done. The assumption is usually that the backups are running. If this assumption is wrong, you aren’t backup up.
Fortunately, this trap is easily avoided if your software notifies you in some way of the status of each of your backup runs. These notifications can take the form of pop up messages on your display or through email. Seeing that “Success” message is very reassuring and when there are failures you know about them and can take the appropriate action.
Setting up Your Backups
Setting up your backups is the most difficult aspect of your backup strategy. While backup software has made great strides over the last several years, most of the better, more feature rich packages can still be a bit of a challenge.
Before attempting to set up your software you need to make a couple of decisions:
1) What to back up
Back in the day of floppy disks and CD as the back up medium, this could be a difficult decision. The more you backed up the more work you had to do and the longer the task took. However, if you use and external HDD, this is basically a non-issue. We recommend backing up the entire contents of your disk drive since it is much simpler in most cases to set your backup software to do so. It also provides the advantage of removing the possibility that you might miss something important. Most programs store your data somewhere in your My Documents folder. The key word there is “most”. Some programs store important information other less intuitive locations, so backing up your entire computer will eliminate any concern of missing important data. Nearly all backup software compresses the data as it stores it so the amount of space required is not 1-1. A simple rule of thumb is to get and external HDD that is at least as big your internal HDD.
2) When to backup
Scheduling your backups is a little more complicated than it might appear at first. First and foremost you must schedule your backups to run at a time when the computer is on! It may seem obvious when it’s said, but the backup software can’t turn on your PC when it’s powered off. Most programs will give you the option of having missed backups run the next time the computer is turned on but we dont’ recommend doing this.
Second, all backup software will impact system performance when it is actually performing the backup. Some have less of an impact, some have more. You don’t want your backups to run at the time of day you are busiest with your computer.
Third, the amount of time that the backups take has to be considered as well. In most cases backup software performs incremental backups by default. Incremental backups create “snapshots” of the system each time they backup. This is an advantage because it provides you with multiple days of backups in a very small space. Small because each day the backup runs it only backs up what has changed. This also means the excluding the initial backup, which must back up the entire system, each daily backup will run fairly quickly since it only has to deal with any changes you’ve made since the last time it backed up. Typically, daily incremental backups take less than 30 minutes to run, again excluding the initial backup.
Other Considerations
If at all possible, backups should be kept offsite. If your backups are stored in the same location as the machine that is being backed up, it would most likely be destroyed by any event significant enough to destroy the PC. However, this does raise the complexity level and cost of doing backups to a point that it is probably not feasible for most residential users. Businesses should always maintain an offsite backup!
If you do maintain an offsite backup, remember that it should be kept secure doing transport and storage to protect your information. Rotate this offsite backup at least weekly and if possible daily.