Keeping data safe - part four

As I said, the final part of this series would be about using services that let you forget about backup. That is, unless you are really devoted to avoid data loss. And we are, aren't we?

The cloud and it's services has made this much more available only over the last year or so. There's a host of online services:

• file storage (dropbox, Microsoft's onedrive (previously known as skydrive), google drive, jotta cloud, amazon, just from the top of my head)
• online office apps
• music and video streaming (spotify, wimp, youtube, hbo, netflix)
• todo-lists like Wunderlist
• online notebooks such as Evernote
• specialized storages like flickr let you store and share your images
• source code repositories
• e-mail - back in the day, it was downloaded to a file on your computer. today, it's a given that it's available online.
• and more

And with all of these services, backup is taken care of for you. In some cases, like a music streaming service, you don't have your music files backed up, but you have access to a whole library of music, that I pretty much can guarantee has a good backup strategy.

They also have apps for different systems, so you can get a hold of your stuff from work, from your cell phone, or from your linux laptop.

This means that you don't have to back up every single file on your existing drive. Instead, you can concentrate on the bits that aren't taken care of in the online services.

Imagine you're only using online services. Hard drive crashed? No problem. Just reinstall the operating system, and you're good to go. Seems too good to be true? Chrome OS already does this.

So what I'm suggesting is partly utilizing these services that already take care of the important part for you, so you can concentrate on actually generating more important personal memories (data). The different services offer different pricing models and features, so you need to consider them and make an educated choice for yourself.

Then know what's not included in the online storage, and assure that that part of your data is safely backed up as well.

Finally, I'd like to recommend taking a minute to value the different data. I mean, not every single file, but in groups: Family photos? Probably the one thing, next to work, that I'd really hate losing forever. Forever like in a house fire.

If an online service is terminated, there's a good chance your data won't be accessible. Likewise if your user is deleted for some reason, the terms of the service may state that they are required to keep your data only for a few hours...

Now the probability that your hard drive crashes simultanously to some critical error with your storage service, or very close to that, is of course very small. But it does exist. So if you really need to be sure, you should consider adding another backup to your system.

Keeping data safe - Part three

The previous part was about partitioning, and this part is about mirroring. As it turns out, not having to restore from a backup at all, is the most efficient way of avoiding data loss.

One way of ensuring your data is to mirror it continuously, usually by mirroring the whole disk. A drawback of data mirroring is cost - you need at least two disks, which means the price doubles. That is where partitioning steps up and says hey, you don't need to mirror everything - just put the important bits on the mirrored drive.  You usually don't have more than a 256 GB disk of personal data (I know many who have less  - a few have a lot more), which means you can have a small-ish set of drives for mirroring.

It actually makes sense not just because of the price tag, but because of the time it takes to rebuild the drive.

The benefit of this setup is quite easy to see, because recovering data from a hard drive failure can be very expensive, and always takes a certain amount of time. And even if you have a backup, you risk data loss because when did you perform a backup the last time? Even if it's a few hours ago, it doesn't help much if the work you did after, is gone.

How to set up mirroring

Strictly speaking, there are two ways of mirroring, one is by hardware, which you set up in your computer's BIOS, the other one is software based and can be done from the operating system.


In either case, you'll just see it as a regular hard drive on your system, but behind the scenes there are two drives, and every write action is performed on both disks. If one fails, the system automatically fails over to the working one. Hopefully you'll also get a message about the failure, but this depends on the software.

I'll just quickly go through the built-in feature in Windows 7. Go to Disk management (either click through Control Panel, Administrative tools, Computer Management , Storage and hit Disk Management - or just write disk management and click on "Create and format hard disk partitions" or from the run dialog, write diskmgmt.msc). Right click the disk you want to mirror, and select "Add mirror..."  This option is only available if a suitable disk exists. You can also remove mirrors the same way.

Windows 8 has a new feature called "Storage Spaces" that provides the option to mirror or distribute data over several disks. You'll find a nice review of this feature at howtogeek.com.

Things Takes Time

A word of caution here, (re)building an array of disks takes time. I have two 2 TB disks mirrored, and whenever I hit blue screen or reboot or system crash of any type (last time, way back in 2012) I couldn't really exhale until some 6 hours later... because meanwhile, the status of the array was "rebuilding". It basically means going through every bit on the one drive and replicating it on the other. And if the working drive fails during that time, you are in a hard place. (So if you're really really paranoid about losing anything, you might want to keep a spare drive handy, or even go for a heavier RAID setup, like RAID 5, which involves more hardware, but has a higher fault tolerance)



Windows does not do a good job in telling you if something's wrong with the mirror (it does hint something with a shout-out just after booting, but you have to sit there to notice it), so you need separate software. Or, you can go to Disk management, where you'll see the status of the array (I've highlighted the relevant bits). You see the two red disks, "disk 0" and "disk 2", they are both assigned to G: - if I go to Explorer, I'll just see one instance of G:.  You'll also see it reports a 50% overhead, which is correct. I have 2x 2TB = 4TB disk space, but only 2 TB is available. 50% is lost, because it's mirrored.

Next part will be about continuous backup, or using services that let's you forget about backup. Stay tuned.

Keeping data safe - Part One

My girlfriend's laptop wouldn't boot the other day. No startup options, just the good old "inaccessible boot device" message. After the initial shock, and a hundred reboot attempts, she started realizing perhaps her laptop was not going to boot anytime soon. Panic time.

I'm going to share my thoughts on keeping your data safe, and even if they're just my thoughts, but I've put them to the test over the last years - and so far, I'm quite happy with this "strategy".

Baby photos, videos and diaries

If you're anything like my girlfriend and me, you keep a lot of your personal memories on your computer. Nearly everyone has a smart phone, digital camera and perhaps a digital camcorder. The things you capture and create on these devices, cannot be found anywhere else. And you probably want to keep them safe, for that exact reason.

Until recently, people have been storing their memories in a physical format. That's actually much harder to keep safe, than the digital memories today. But for some reason, a lot of people think otherwise. Earlier, you had to make copies - physical copies - of your photos or videotapes, and store them somewhere. Today, you can mirror your data instantly, and have two or more copies available at all times. You can spread them over the world, if you think it's necessary, in fact; you probably will without knowing. And the big difference from the old physical world: It doesn't have to cost much at all.

The Cloud to the rescue

You've probably heard about the cloud, a popular buzz-word the last years. It's not just for big companies or programmers, it can also provide great service for consumers. Backup is just one of them (or rather - storage as a service, STaaS).

Dropbox, Microsoft Skydrive, Amazon Glacier, Google drive and Jottacloud are just the top-of-my-head examples of cloud storage services. Some of them just offer storage space, some offer a complete backup solution - I use jottacloud. With these kinds of applications, you just register for a username, install the application and you are on your way to keeping your data safe.

At the time of writing, Dropbox, Skydrive, Jotta and Google drive all give you a free quota of space, when you go beyond that, they start charging you. So if you don't need any more than the free quota, this is actually completely free.

However, many of us will need more, actually my camera's memory card is capable of storing more than the free quotas. Before you think that these are expensive solutions, think about the initial cost of getting an external drive. Then, there's power consumption, monitoring, and staying alert to replace the drive if it should fail. I think you'll find that the cost is worth it, for the extra peace of mind.

Mobile too

Yep, more and more people are storing a lot of data on their mobile devices. Of course the cloud people have  though of this, and provide services for IOS, Android and Windows Phone 8. There are other ways too, apps that let you sync directly to your computer.

I think it's a great idea to install something like SugarSync that keeps your mobile data backed up. Just remember to include that folder in the folders that you back up.

In fact, your mobile phone should be on top of your list of items to back up, because for most people, it's where you keep all your contacts, snapshots and calendar dates. And mobile phones are so much more at risk of being stolen or broken, than your desktop computer at home.

Hedge your bets

Of course, Cloud backup is not a silver bullet. It is a great worst-case solution for me, as I have purchased "unlimited" space and can upload all that I want to keep safe, but I would prefer never to use it. I want to hedge my bets, so that my data are safe no matter what, but I want to keep my options open - restoring a backup from the cloud can be like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, if all you're doing is reinstalling Windows.

Let's say that my computer is stolen, or my house burns to the ground (knock on wood). In that case, I would be really happy to download all my stuff right onto my new computer! But in most other cases, this would not be the preferred way. It takes time, and there is a chance that you have lost something. There's always a time window between your last backup and your crash, though it may be very short, you will lose data.

I've made a little table of how this hierarchy may look:

What	Saves you when	Won't save you when
Partitioning	Operating System reinstall	Hard drive has failed
Mirroring	Hard drive failure	Operating System reinstall
External drive	External drive failure	Drive is gone (fire, theft)
External drive off-site	External drive failure	Network is down
Cloud storage	All of the above	Network is down

I hope that's some food for thought for you, perhaps you've already though this through by yourself. Please share if you have any input! Part two of this article will be going into detail of the different solutions, so stay tuned.

Part two: Partitioning