September 12, 2005

Backing Up Your Data the Smart Way

NY Times writer David Progue writes that backing up is one thing, but making sure you back up the RIGHT data is another thing. If you backup your "my documents" folder, but fail to back up email - you've got a serious problem.

He writes I shared the tale of my nasty Dell hard drive crash, and my efforts to recover the data I lost. And for two weeks, the number one reaction from readers has been, "O.K., you've scared me into getting a backup system in place. So what backup system should I put in place?"

This is a good thing. As you now know, every hard drive will one day fail. Or, as one reader put it: "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who back up, and those who will."

As I hinted last week, there's no single backup strategy that's fast, cheap and easy. Oh, sure, you can find cheap solutions, like burning your documents onto blank CD's or DVD's; but in this age of huge music and photo collections, that's not a very realistic strategy for most people, and it's very slow.

A number of you wrote to suggest extremely comprehensive backup strategies, involving, for example, a rotation among five external hard drives, each holding one weekday's backup, plus a sixth drive that you keep in a safety-deposit box in an earthquake-proof underground salt mine. Read David's full article here.

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