Arts IT Savvy

Today’s IT Info Session will be focussing on Backup – that subject that everyone puts into the too hard basket, but bitterly regrets not taking that step to ensure their data / computer is actually backed up when it is lost.

The session will be from 1:10pm to 1:50pm in S403, Building 11, Clayton Campus.

No charge or RSVP necessary.  Come along and find out the different backup options that are available, and how to finally have a little bit of confidence that all that work you keep doing, the photos you are taking etc etc is actually safe from (the very commonly occurring) disaster.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve advised people about backing up – it’s like the property market “location location location”.  My catch-cry should be “backup backup backup”!

I have a reasonable backup regime in place, but obviously it is not perfect, and once again I’ve lost data, so let me just say this again for everyone’s sake, including my own:

Make sure that you ALWAYS have more than one copy of any file that is important to you.

Last night, I was cleaning up a number of files, and transferred about 12GB worth onto one of my main harddrives.  Unfortunately (stupidly), I moved the files rather than just copying them.  So that meant that I still only had a single copy of the file.

The drive that I moved the files to failed sometime between then and now, and has become unreadable, and so all the files that I moved have been lost.  The drive itself is rather large (1.5TB), and fortunately I have a backup of it, so the majority of the files are safe (but now at risk, seeing as they have become the only copy, and that is bad news.)So all that I have lost are the files that I moved (and 12GB is a pretty significant chunk even so).

So stop for a second and think – are there any files that are important to you that you only have a single copy of?  If the answer is “yes” then before doing anything else today, stop putting the problem into the “too hard” basket, and find out what you need to do to back them up, and do it!

With the ever-increasing amount of data that people have (and rarely backup), the storage capacity of the backup solution is steadily increasing (or more precisely: exponentially where it comes to digital multimeda).

Once upon a time, a 1.2MB floppy disk was a significant storage capacity, then along came CDs, Zip drives, DVDs and I could go on and on.  There is a worrying trend that I am observing of people using USB keys, not only as a backup, but as the ONLY copy of their documents.  These devices are great for file transfer – they are compact, with pretty impressive capacity these days, and fast.  They also fail, and when they do so, there is very little that can be done to reclaim the data on them.

So use them by all means to transfer files from one place to another, but please, do not trust your only copy of a file to one!

Where it comes to backing up, there are a number of better options.  A high proportion of users would have less than 4GB of data in total, so the low cost solution of burning a DVD is certainly a good choice.  If you need larger capacities, (such as for large photo libraries, music collections etc), then an external harddrive becomes a cost competitive solution.

Something like this drive from Maxtor is a good choice:

It is small and light (around 170g, 125mm x 80mm x 15mm) and runs off the USB port of your computer.  It doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall, as it draws the power it needs from the USB port.

There are different models with different capacities, up to 320GB.  Inside is simple – it is a laptop harddrive, and that is why I regard them as being a good backup solution.  (Note I still say backup – I don’t trust any file to one location only – you should always have AT LEAST 2 copies of every file, (unless you don’t care if you loose it)).

This isn’t the only type of external harddrive that is available, and chances are if you’ve already purchased one through ArtsIT, it wasn’t the Maxtor – I chose it to show here as it is a good example of this type of backup solution.