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Today's column is late because I've been fighting a dying hard drive in
an attempt to make sure I've got everything backed up before it finally dies.
This is one of the old IBM DeskStar drives that has defied the odds and lasted
over 5 years before developing the evil "click of death" symptoms that indicate
it is about to shuffle it's mortal voice-coil.
What became apparent as I busily shuffled CDRs and thrashed the guts
out of WinZIP, is that the average PC user probably doesn't do backups
and wouldn't know how to restore them properly if they did.
Fortunately for PC users, the CDR drive, with its 640MB of storage, arrived
just in time to help them keep up with rapidly rising hard-drive capacities.
The same thing is now happening with DVD writers which have the potential
to back up the average 40GB hard drive onto just three or four disks (providing
compression is used).
However, do people really bother doing these backups?
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Most of the home-PC users I've spoken to don't bother backing up stuff, except
perhaps for the occasional important MS Word document or spreadsheet file.
As a result, there are often tears flowing everywhere when they find they've
lost a whole heap of stuff they didn't even know they needed until it was gone.
Even those who do backup more religiously will probably still be left out
in the dark if their hard drive fails.
How do they reinstall Windows (did they even get a Windows disk with their PC
or is what they got just a "rescue disk")?
Do they even have a copy of their restore software that is accessible and able
to be executed, rather than just being part of the compressed backup set?
Will their backups also restore the all-important registry settings associated
with their applications?
Can they actually find all their incremental backup disks and the set of masters
from which they began?
Do they have the program keys that might be needed to reinstal some of their
applications and, if it's software they downloaded from the web, do they
even have a method for reinstalling it or was it a bootstrapped process
that left no install files on the drive?
It strikes me that backups are no longer treated as the absolutely essential
process that we all used to perform at least once a week so when things do
go wrong, it can be a real nightmare.
Has the ever-improving reliability of modern hardware and software lulled
many PC users into a sense of false security perhaps?
I'd like to hear from readers on this subject. What backup software and
media do you use? How often do you backup? How long would it take you
to restore your system in the event of a total system crash.
And, if you're performing incremental backups, how would you cope if it
was found that you'd been infected with a new stealth virus three months
ago so at least three months worth of your backups were too risky to
restore?
If you've got an opinion, why not tell us all in
Aardvark Forums.
And yes, I did finally get all my backups current while the drive was (is)
still ticking...
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