Lesson from the 80s: backup, backup, backup

You know what I'm talking about. The topic which makes everyone who owns a computer nervous. They look at the floor, the wall, a meek grin creeps up their face, they favor you with a non-commital shrug. It is the data equivalent of flossing. It is preventative, proscribed and yet frequently inconvenient or more time-consuming than you want to commit when you're in a hurry. I'm talking about data backups.

Why is it that most people don't have a rigorous method to be able to recover anything they've ever written, shot, videoed, installed or downloaded? We all put a pretty high price on our financial records, our family photos--nearly all our intellectual effort these days. We all know we should have backups, and most of us have suffered the pain of losing something. I'm not talking about the last bit of typing before the last Ctrl-S, but a Real Loss of a Significant Amount of Irreplaceable Data. So why do most people just not have a plan? Is it like earthquake insurance in CA? Too expensive and complicated if you ever have to rebuild? Is it like a structured weight-loss program? Necessary for good health and peace of mind, but, in practice takes too much discipline? Something you'll start after the holidays? "I'll start backing up everything when I get a new computer and have to move all my data anyway."

I count myself amongst the "most". I have a vague collection of external disks, thumb drives, optical media backups, online accounts. None of which are used in a cohesive plan which allows for recovery. I have, for example, some in-car video of a track day at Laguna Seca in 2006, my first time driving my Porsche on a race track. Tens of gigabytes of raw and edited files, as I recall. Maybe 30GB. I have it somewhere. At least, I hope I do. I don't really know where. DVD-R? External USB? Bare IDE drive in that stack over there? On one of the kids' computers? A little-used "E:\" partition somewhere? Not being able to recover from a backup is as bad as not having one at all. Its funny that I can reach onto a shelf and pick out one of more than 300 DVDs or one of more than a thousand books in my home, but finding any/all of my own electronic data--which should by all accounts be easier, not harder, is just not that easy at all. The most eggregious is really the perhaps 200 (don't even know exactly, really) collection of self-burnt CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs in a number of racks and shelves in the family room. The best I can say is that I know which rack to grab and throw out the window first in the event of a fire, but I can't really say that everything I most want is on those particular disks. I have a paper label pack, an ink-jet printer, a program that does labels. I even have LightScribe and a stack of blank (and expensive) LightScribe DVDs. Yet most of the disks are labeled with a marker. Too brief and too cryptic. "Downstairs computer, misc docs, pics, Disney trip, MP3s, 11-04". Um, okay.

It is amazing to me that here we are in the 21st century--nearly a decade in-- moreover we're 40 years into the Personal Computer information revolution, and "backups" aren't a thing of the past. Of course I don't mean not having backups, but I mean not having to jump through hoops to create, manage and use backups. That's what I mean by "backup". The "Fastback" or "Ghost" or other kind of managed backup process plus software. And I mean for the home, not the Small-to-Medium Business. Dell, IBM, all the big names are falling over themselves to service that market.

There have been some really interesting and relevant products in this arena, but it really should just "happen". I guess the closest thing to this ideal is Apple's Time Machine. But when you start thinking about real disaster recovery--I'm talking about your laptop going missing from your car or your home (God forbid) be flattened by some effect of man or nature--you need something more than just a hidden cache of files on the same disk.

Like flossing (if you don't do it already, regularly, by habit or discipline) you only hear about data backups or recovery from your professional care representative--like when you're suffering other effects of not doing it. As when you talk to the Apple Genius Bar about recovering from a hard disk crash. We recently got the soft admonition, after the hard disk was replaced under warranty, to perhaps talk to a data recovery specialist. We might get a quote on scraping any remaining data from the otherwise useless hunk of metal now residing in the antistat bag in our hands. Or learn to live with the lost data. Kinda like hearing you need to go see the periodontist for a root planing. Ugh.

But that event, no matter that it happened recently to not just one laptop but two in the space of one day (it was a very sad day at the Markham home), is in the past and I took it as a slap in the face to look toward the future. Fool me once, etc.

Some day (its always "some day", isn't it, with technology. Man's vision exceeds his grasp), we will have all our stuff in some variation of The Cloud. It may not look at all like The Cloud that is out there now, but I mean, pedantically, "off-site, anywhere-accessible, store". There's certainly a lot of work in this area, which maybe I'll ponder in a later post. But there are plenty of others pontificating about using Google Mail as a hard drive or any of the other umpty-dozen startups with whom you can trust your data in small-gigabyte chunks. Hopefully they'll still be around after their round two funding dries up. Hopefully your data will still be around. But I digress.

It is time to revisit the home NAS. What we currently have is an ancient Buffalo 160GB system, with FTP and WINS sharing, but rather poor implementations of both. It supports an external USB drive or a very short list of printers on its one port. One disk, no RAID. The web management interface is poor. It has been a sometimes network backup tool but mostly it is off. I can't say for sure, but I believe that a folder delete through the web interface led to a large data loss. User error, sure, but due to an oblique interface. To be fair to Buffalo, it was their first offering, and it appears (from the language of the user manual) that it was an OEM'ed import. So kudos to Buffalo for getting out ahead on the home/SOHO NAS, but bad on me for being on the bleeding edge.

That was at least five years ago. With the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP) cum media-PC running the living room, I've decided to revisit the backup and warm-store issue. We need a place for all the computers in the house to be automatically backed-up as well as for file sharing (beyond the 1TB the SSBRP offers for music, pictures & video.

Buying a NAS means buying hard disks. Some day in the future, when we're all wearing spandex jackets and driving flying cars, we'll either have everything digital we own or use in The Cloud or on a Solid State Disk. Until that shining day (2012, maybe) we'll be using the tried-and-true (but still fragile) spinning platter magnetic store Winchester Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Markham's two rules for purchasing HDD space are simple:

• Rule 1: Never buy disk until you can use it, because empty disk is flushing money. Disks always get cheaper and bigger.

• Rule 2: There are two price points to keep in your pocket when shopping for Disk: $0.10/GB for internal (bare) drives, and $0.15/GB for external drives. By these metrics, a "good deal" (at this writing--the price points slip by a penny or two regularly) is $100/TB for a bare drive.

But these two Rules work against each other. That's because the bigger the drive, the cheaper the per-GB cost, up to a point. Size increases with technology, so the biggest drives are the newest drives which aren't the cheapest drives. So there's a saddle point in effect at all times, which moves up in drive space over time as the saddle moves down on the price axis. For example, NewEgg currently has a 1TB drive for $0.10/GB--right at the Rule 1 Price Point--and a 3TB drive (!!) for ~$0.08/GB.

And of course, with the bigger size drive, even at cheaper $/GB at the saddle point, there is a bigger total outlay. Which is where Rule 1 kicks in: Don't buy the bigger disk until you can use it. So you may end up paying a penny or more per GB for a smaller disk, but it more likely you'll actually spend that penny on storing your data rather than just heating up your enclosure.

I may have to ammend Rule 1. Do I need 2TB (1TB in RAID/5 format) of disk? No. Do I want a terabyte of striped NAS always-on backup!? You bet I do!

This may be my new NAS RAID 2TB RAID0/1 for $220 This is ~$0.11/GB, well under the External Drive Price Point and very close to the Bare Internal Drive Price Point!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101091

Or there's this from Buy.com:
http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-2tb-hard-drive-dual-interface-usb-2-0-esata-raid-external-hard/q/loc/101/206461304.html

I saw a similar at the Apple store last night for $500 and this is $100 off MacMall pricing and $30 off Buy.com

It is eSata, which the StoneSoup BluRay Play (SSBRP) supports. That does mean leaving the SSBRP on all the time, but it has some good pwr mgmt capabilities. I just have to make sure that it doesn't go completely to sleep overnight. Or test waking up the SSBRP over the network via one of the laptops with an external shared drive access (e.g., a nightly automatic backup).

All this is being driven by two (count-em! two!) catastrophic laptop HDD failures on the same day at our house Monday.

First Cheryl's laptop started issuing the "click of death" for no reason other than she uses it 18h a day. It required a disk replacement at the Apple Store (under warranty) and ~5mos of her work was lost.

Then, hours later, Karey knocked my laptop that she was using off the arm of a recliner. The case was chipped but ThinkPads of that era have an HDD shock detector. Apparently it isn't fast enough or they don't do their accelerometer tests from higher than 24". Because she asked me that evening, "It says, 'A fatal hard disk error has occured. Press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.' I did but it keeps saying that. What should I do?" This wasn't even the BSoD, it was the Black Screen
ROM alert that You're Screwed. I spent several hours running the Windows Recovery Console off the XP install disk, and CHKDSK (wow...1982 flashback) showed, "irrecoverable errors". Swell.

So the question for me, currently, is one of interface. Choose the eSata disk, leave the SSBRP on 24x7 but have all the Windows networking stack and file sharing at my fingertips, or Choose the true NAS, gigabyte interface and a lower power footprint than the eSata host--but with an unknown quantity in the form of the web browser user interface and access control? I may have to try both and return the loser.

The important thing is to get a backup system in place, and this is the first step. After that: software.