A cloud storage datacenter, housing multiple storage bays. Each red box holds 135 Terabytes of storage. Source: backblaze.com
Previously in this series, I focused on local storage; primarily, hard drives and similar media were discussed. But a lot has changed since that last article was posted! In particular, flooding in Thailand threatened to severely restrict the supply of hard drives, and retail prices had doubled and nearly tripled for the most common capacities and models. Pricing for hard drives has begun to stabilize, but supplies are still constrained, and the situation is not expected to go back to anything resembling normal until March 2012 at the earliest. For you and I, this means that the price of a hard drive, or even a new computer, might bit higher for the next few months and harder to come by, until the region can recover and production of hard drive components can resume.
And so, it makes sense to look at other solutions for backup strategies, with cloud storage being a lead contender. Cloud (or online) backup services have become quite popular over the last few years. They offer an attractive option for keeping your stuff safe: for a fee, you get the ability to send your files to a remote datacenter, where maintaining the storage and hardware required for backing up all of your data becomes the responsibility of the backup service you subscribe to. They upgrade the hardware when it needs to be upgraded. They fix and replace hard drives that go bad. The idea is to further simplify the backup process so that even buying hard drives and hooking them up to your computer aren’t part of the equation.
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An External Hard Drive: the easiest method for making a quick copy of your important stuff. Photo taken by flickr user Miss Karen
All, right, so you’ve heard it over and over and again, and you know it’s true: you need to make regular backups of your stuff. But how? What options do typical computer users have?
In the past few years, the options for preservation and backups have expanded quite a bit, giving users an enormous array of solutions to choose from. Of course, the diverse options can be confusing: what’s the best choice for you?
The backup options out there can be grouped into two major categories: local storage and cloud storage. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and will appeal to different users based on where and how they use their computers. Some of the best and most secure backup strategies make use of both solutions… a backup-of-the-backup, so to speak. I’ll discuss that further in a later write-up.
In this article, I’ll talk about local storage. In the next article, we’ll go into cloud-based solutions.
A hard disk drive with damaged platters, caused by a head crash. The data on this drive is not recoverable.
Whether we like it or not, those of us who rely on electronics to get our work done are guaranteed one thing: a data loss event. This means that at least once in our lifetimes (and sometimes more than that), every one of us who uses a computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone or similar device is going to one day stare at our screens and realize that the piece of information we expected to be there, just isn’t.
It can happen any number of ways. Sometimes, we users make a mistake and accidentally erase something we shouldn’t have… or someone else might’ve accidentally deleted something of ours that they shouldn’t have. Other times, it’s the computer’s fault: buggy software might’ve claimed to save something but didn’t, or a 10-year-old hard drive finally decided to give up the ghost. And sometimes, acts of nature (power outage, natural disaster, or other events beyond our control) will intervene and cause vital work to be lost.
Of course, we’ve all heard it time and time again: to protect your documents, photos, drawings, artwork, and other important data, you need to have backups. Unfortunately, while we all have heard this before and know it to be true, we don’t always follow through. In the past it’s been tedious to do regular backups; a chore we all dread. And so, it always falls but he wayside, and often, we get back into a backup regimen only after something bad has happened, and it’s already too late.
But take heart. A lot has changed recently. There ARE personal backup solutions out there that are surprisingly easy… and even automatic! keeping your stuff safe doesn’t have to be a tedious chore anymore… as long as you’re willing to invest a little time and effort at the beginning, and in some cases a small amount of cash on an ongoing basis.
GMail kept users notified through a status page of their ongoing recovery efforts.
This past week offered up a little dose of panic to an estimated tens of thousands of users to Google’s free Gmail service, when they logged in to discover that all of their e-mail was missing. According to Google:
We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email. When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.
One of the topics I like to bring up in the discussion of preserving digital data is the idea of a Digital Dark Age… the notion of a period in our historic knowledge that ends up getting lost due to a failure to plan and preserve our early digital content.
The New Scientist, however, recently published an article (Feb 2, 2010) on something a bit more cataclismic: the concept of Digital Doomsday. From the article:
Suppose, for instance, that the global financial system collapses, or a new virus kills most of the world’s population, or a solar storm destroys the power grid in North America. Or suppose there is a slow decline as soaring energy costs and worsening environmental disasters take their toll. The increasing complexity and interdependency of society is making civilisation ever morevulnerable to such events (New Scientist, 5 April 2008, p 28 and p 32). Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity’s knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?
Suppose, for instance, that the global financial system collapses, or a new virus kills most of the world’s population, or a solar storm destroys the power grid in North America. Or suppose there is a slow decline as soaring energy costs and worsening environmental disasters take their toll. The increasing complexity and interdependency of society is making civilisation ever morevulnerable to such events (New Scientist, 5 April 2008, p 28 and p 32).
Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity’s knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?
The article is a compelling read, and offers an intellectual exercise on how much of our “stuff” will survive such a castastrophe. Ironically, the logic is that the digital content with the most copies oin existence may win out. So, while scholarly works, theses, research and other important scientific data would be at risk, pop music may surive just fine.
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