Have You Backed Up Your Back Up?

I hope my lesson will help others. No, I'm not one of those people who never back things up and then I freak out when I lose something. I use multiple external back up drives. I back up frequently enough so that I can restore everything I need if I should have to. Yet my system still failed me. Let me explain.

I work from home as a software developer. I have legacy code that I must manage. In addition I also have a lifetime's worth of digital pictures (constantly accumulating) that I never want to get rid of. So about five or six years ago I bought a 3 terabyte external Buffalo drive. I read the reviews yata-yata and it came highly recommended. I also have a 500 GB Western Digital Passport drive and an ancient 250 GB external drive. I had backups on all of them. So what can possibly go wrong?

About 2 days after we moved to Dallas, GA our cat was exploring my office as he had countless times before. He always ends up in precarious positions yet seems to extricate himself without doing any harm to either him or others. On this particular occasion he was behind my monitor and he grazed my Buffalo drive just enough to flip it on its side. Wouldn't you know that that little folly was enough to crash the drive inside the casing. Yes I was frustrated but I didn't panic, as I know data can be extricated from crashed drives. However, the "cat-attack" did so much damage that I could only retrieve 40GB from the 1.5 terabytes I had stored on that drive.

So what's the issue if I have other devices that I back up my stuff on? The problem was I backed up EVERYTHING on that monster drive, and only "critical" things on the others, at times when I had time to do a "secondary" backup. For anything related to my work, I had the originals intact on my computer. I never saw a reason to take up hard drive space for my digital empire, so the go-to spot was the Buffalo drive. The result is that I permanently lost quite a few videos and pictures, the extent of which I will probably never know. Thankfully I found a stash of videos and images on one of the other drives.

So I have taken what I have learned and come up with a better way to manage backups while minimizing the chance of loss. Here are my recommendations:

1. Use external drives that are powered by USB only. Disk that are constantly spinning for month after month, year after year are more vulnerable. Hook it up, do your backup and put it away.
2. Don't buy monster drives or you'll be tempted to do what I did and focus on that one drive. A 1 TB WD external drive can be purchased for only $40.00. Depending on your needs buying several should not hurt you. Spread copies around.
3. Reevaluate what data is important to you. You know what you absolutely MUST save, but think about actually permanently losing the stuff that makes you say, 'meh'. When push comes to shove you may still want to have it.
4. If you have a CD or DVD recorder burn off a disc of data once in a while.

You might wonder why I didn't mention online backups or a service like Carbonite. If you are doing this successfully then I have no qualms; as a personal preference I want everything here where I can see it or touch it. Plus word has it that restoring from the cloud can be extremely time consuming.

Note that this discussion is more for personal backup needs. If you have a small business, you may want to consider a dedicated server.

So spend a Saturday really organizing and storing your stuff. Depending on your needs update the files bimonthly. You'll thank me the next time your cat walks by your monitor.