BACKUPS - INTRODUCTION

Every computer depends on a hard drive to run the operating system and programs and to store your data. A hard drive has very, very thin round platters spinning incredibly fast (typically 7200 revolutions per minute), while arms with microscopically small sensors dance back and forth fifty times per second (about the speed of a hummingbird’s wings). The space between a read/write head and the surface of the platter is around 50 nanometers, about 1/2000 the diameter of a human hair. Hard drive cases are tightly sealed because a speck of dust is much bigger than the space between the platters and the read/write head.

Hard drives are mechanical devices. They break. Every hard drive will fail. Your hard drive will fail. It’s only a question of when. Frankly, given the tolerances involved, it is simply astonishing that they work as long as they do. You will feel many emotions on the day you sit down to a black screen and hear a click-click-click noise, but you should not feel surprised! It happens.

If you don’t feel uneasy yet, think about what the bad guys are doing to muck up your computer. The worst of them require your hard drive to be reformatted. If you’re lucky, you can get your data off first, but don’t count on it.

You have valuable data on your computer. Your business would be somewhere between crippled and closed if you lost your business data – your email, your documents and spreadsheets, your financial programs and line-of-business programs. Your family photos and videos are irreplaceable. Your kids’ homework, the only copy of the soccer schedule, the arrangements in progress for Grad Night – you get the idea.

A backup is just an extra copy of your stuff.

I’m going to give you some ideas about how to make extra copies of your stuff, generally and specifically. There are hundreds and hundreds of backup programs and there are thousands of ways to accomplish the goal of having extra copies of your stuff. There is no magic bullet, no solution that is better than another, no right answer. I’m going to give you enough information for you to understand what you’re using or help you pick something that works. After that, it’s up to you.

Because there is a wrong answer. Procrastinating and not doing backups causes suicidal depression, alcoholism, cruelty to animals, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Don’t let it happen to you!