How do I keep my digital stuff safe?
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
It’s a digital world!
Well a big part of it at least, and as more and more people get linked up with internet devices , computers, smartphones, tablets, and other electronic goodies, the storage of your digital life becomes a household problem.
How can you be safe and sure with your treasured photos, films, music and other files?
As a computer technician, I think the answer here lies in numbers. As in numbers of copies that you have. A single copy of any file is at risk. a backup copy is essential. Better have two backup copies. And make tham on different machines and/or media.
Example: Your file resides on your computer. You have a copy on an external hard-drive. Great! Except, when you had the power surge the external hard-drive was connected to the PC and bothe are fried! Sensible you had made a copy on a DVD!
You can guarantee that a hard drive will eventually fail, and sometimes sooner than you think!
Real example: I bought a new PC, I backed up my laptop to it and my wife’s. 90 day’s later it refuses to re-boot. The shop guarantee will only cover returning it to initial state, and no cover for my data. I could have lost the whole backups, and had I thought, “ah well, I have a copy already I can make some space on my laptop!” I could have lost a whole bunch of files. As it turned out I managed to get the PC to re-boot once, make a rapid copy of my backups to another drive and got the PC repaired.
Think threes, at least three copies of your data and not all in the same place. Cloud based storage is available and there are some inexpensive plans available, that keep your files synchronised with online storage. A pretty good solution, but when you have a real problem with your PC AND you’ve lost your internet access you’ll wish you had a copy locally stored too!
It might seem SO unlikely that such a number of almost impossible things happen together the chances are way way high against it ever occuring. Except that it does.
Real example : I was working in a company once that had a number of administrative buildings with underground network cables joining the buildings. Pretty storm-proof you might think. Well there was just once a local thunderstorm and one of the buildings took a hit on a tree not 10 meters from the building. Of course as bad luck would have it, this building housed the communications office and boom! 26 network cards fried! Totally unreal! Except when it happens to you!
Many people are creating on-line businesses from home, and the risk of losing that data is possibly more devastating than losing some of your favourite tracks! So if you are running a business froml home the same rules apply. Backup your data and back that up too!
Verify your copies!
One fatal assumption to make is “I’ve got a backup copy, I’m safe!” You will probably say that this would never happen, but believe me it does. Your server goes down. You get another machine on-line and all you have to do is copy your backup file to that machine. Simple!
Except you never VERIFIED you backup copy, and half of it is corrupted! You could lose your job like that. So the lesson is, put a good backup plan into action. Use it, and TEST IT! VERIFY that you can actually re-load all 100 giga-bytes to another machine, once a month or so.
In a home based scenario, one way of capitalising on the networking capabily of components these days is to invest in a multi-media storage device. You can set it up as a way of storing all your favourite TV programs and your music and photos, but also as a networked drive you can use it as a separate storage media for your backup copies of your PC’s. There are anumber of automatic backup programs that can be set to run while you’re asleep to copy tons of files from your PC to the multi-media drive. These multi-media drives can have several Tera-bytes of storage space on them, and they are reasonably priced.
Well, I hope you have got the idea of how to be more certian of keeping your digital lives well stored and protected from loss, and when the lightning strikes, you’ll be glad you took my advice!
Jeremusic