Backup or: How I learned to stop procrastinating and love the data

(Apologies to Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove)

I sometimes feel that I’m being tested by some outside force, or the old saying “things happen for a reason” often applies. Something really bad happened today, and as they say, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

Ok, I promise no more cliches. Last night I was having some hard drive problems, so I ended up having to run CHKDSK on my external hard drive. You know, the one where I keep all my documents and the 250GB of RAW and retouched photos that I’ve worked on over the last 2 years. Yes, you guessed it — I woke up this morning to find that I couldn’t access my drive and it asked me if I wanted to format it.

#&%@! I said a few more than just that. Then I held my head in my hands and wept. Felt sick to my stomach. Why? Because I had been procrastinating about backing up my important data for months, but never did it.

Hit the jump for the rest of the story and find out what you probably already know, but need to be told again.

So after a Windows re-install issue a few months back, I moved all my documents data as well as my RAW photos from all my photoshoots onto an external WD Mybook 500gb hard drive. After doing that I kept telling myself that I should buy another HD (they are about $129 at Costco here in Canada) and backup that data on a daily basis. It’s cheap right? Sure is, but I was stupid and never got off my butt to pick another one up and setup the backup.

Well of course I’m kicking myself now, but at least this problem helped me plan out and execute a backup strategy for my data.

I picked up another hard drive and plan on just utilizing that drive solely as a redundant backup device for my photos, music and documents. I’ve already taken care of my company/business data. We have used Foldershare for a few years now to have copies of all our business data across multiple machines throughout the house — just in case! (more on Foldershare in a future post!).

So what’s the lesson here? Don’t rely on hardware to keep your data secure. Your business documents, home photos, music, etc. is so important today in this paperless/photo print-less environment today. Don’t let a hard drive failure make you lose everything.

Any other suggestions for best practices for backing up data?