(The title is a LOT funnier if you imagine the old SNL skit with Dan Ackroyd imitating Julia Child and instructing the audience to "save the liver", while faux hemorrhaging...

Over the years, (this website included), we've all become more reliant on digital technology. Its a stunning thing to have lived (not particularly long in the grand scheme of things) to see music have migrated from 33's, to 8-Tracks, to cassettes, to CDs and now to MP3's...

But there's is a danger in reducing everything to incredibly sensitive magnetic bubbles..

About a month ago, my 6 month old Seagate Go-Flex summarily crashed. It hadn't been mishandled, jostled, improperly ejected or any of that.

In the middle of reducing a CD to an MP3, my laptop returned the message "target not found".

I rebooted to no avail-the light went on, the drive was spinning, but windows wouldn't find it. Everything was on that drive. Employment related stuff, pictures, several "ripped" CD's..you name it.

After an evaluation by "geek squad" ($59.99), I was informed that it needed to be examined in a "clean room". Now the fun begins:

If they find ANY data (originally 25 gb) I get to pay a full $1000. If NOTHING is recoverable, then they refund 900 of the $1000.

Actual recovery is an additional $600.00. The process has already taken a month, today I was informed that they expect at least a PARTIAL Recovery.

The odd thing is that I was considering an online backup, but was investigating leisurely because it was only 6 months old.

In discussing this with IT professionals, I have learned that portable hard drives are subject to catastrophic failure, regardless of age-and the mere act of putting a drive in one of those nice cases and walking around, increases the risk.

You must have multiple archives of any data. All hard drives will eventually fail and often without warning.

If you have irreplaceable data-it must backed up.

I help manage a busy data center. Drive failures are a part of normal maintenance where we turn over 2-3TB/per day.

At home, I mirror core data, mp3's, images, email, etc to three different hard drives. And I'm still considering using an off site backup service. I can't replace 20+ years of email and a decade of digital images. Funny, though, that I have better backup of the digital stuff compared to the 15k slides/negs. that I have.

Bob

One very helpful tool for backing up data between drives, either internal or portable, is Microsoft Synctoy, which is a free download from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... d0592d8c52

Once you define a folder pair and a management scheme ("echo", "contribute", etc.) you just plug in your portable drive and tell Synctoy to run the operation on the pair of drives. It checks the versions of files and only transfers the items that are new or different unless you want it to do otherwise. It seems to work well with all brands of external drives.

I have been using this for several years with no problems at all. I have a backup running as I am posting this message. It works entirely in the background and does not noticably slow down the computer. It transferred 671 new files to backup while I was writing, looks like I scanned a lot of documents to PDF's this week.

PC

When a hard drive crashes, it isn't always impossible to retrieve data. We picked this up because an SD card had eaten a bunch of pictures:
http://z-a-recovery.com/
There are other good ones around, but we happened to try ZA's free camera recovery, noticed the other features and bought the full version just in case.
Since then, I cannot count the number of times we have recovered something we thought might be hopeless. We put the full version on a laptop so we can have it with us in case we foul up a camera card while we're railfanning.

There happen to be a LOT of "freeware" drive-rescue programs out there. I've used a few to salvage anything from floppies to USB "thumb drives" to an original 2GB hard drive from Win 3.1 days.

The downside: They take time. A LOT of time. Plus the occasional "File 883Lh3V8kaBt5467983BW44MT is unsalvageable. Ignore, Retry, Cancel?" that has to be acted upon.

In the grandest scheme of things, it's NOT just how well you back up the files, but how well you inventory them and make sense of them. Ever seen hundreds of photos with no caption info attached or on the back? Dead relatives? Nobodies? What's that train? Even folder names are a huge plus.

You are so right about photos with no caption information. I see so many photos (on Facebook, or wherever) with nothing but the number assigned by the digital camera, e.g. "DSCN9247.jpg" from my Nikon. That tells no one anything about the photo except maybe that the date when it was taken is one one of the properties. But that is no help if the photo is a scan of an old print, or a copy of a slide or negative.

I have a standard way of naming my photos, including rail photos, that preserves at least some minimal information such as the subject, location, date and source. For example, a photo my brother took of the GM&O's "Limited" (formerly "Alton Limited") in Bloomington, Illinois in February 1958 with E-unit 103 in the lead is named "GMO103_Limited_Bloomington_2-1958_DVL.tif." With family photos, where you might want to sort them chronologically, I put the date first in the format YYYY-MM-DD and then the details, such as "2010-06-21_Silkebakkens_on_NKP765_FtWayne.jpg" which is a photo of my daughter and her family posing on NKP765 in the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society's shop on June 21 of this year.

Then, of course, I copy all photos over to a corresponding folder on my laptop, which is almost a clone of my desktop computer. I do that with other files, as well. I also copy most e-mails I send or receive into word-processing folders -- WordPerfect in my case -- sorted by year, and by date within the year, which allows me to search for things I have previously written to people or posted to groups, or what has been sent to me. For example, this post has been copied into the file "RYPN_2010.ema" in the "Rail_Email" subfolder of the "Email" subfolder of my "Documents" folder, preceded by "[9-2-10],", and in January I will copy all the 2010 emails and posts into a "2010" folder in the "Rail_Email" subfolder. I can go back to 1996 to search for information (older folders are in an "Archive" folder on a second hard drive in my desktop), and this has often proved useful.

I think this is a good method of organizing photo and other information. In my family I am known as "the king of organization."

Using longer and more descriptive file names is quite practical nowadays, and if you are able to include enough words in the description you can pretty much find anything on the computer with windows explorer search. I adopted a naming system some years ago based on either the railroad (primarily for photos) or the equipment builder (for documents) and at the time I thought I might have to build a separate database to locate files, but it was not necessary, the details in the file names have been quite adequate.

PC

All of this is true, but apparently the failure of this (and let me repeat SIX MONTH OLD, VERY CAREFULLY HANDLED SEAGATE) hard drive is, according to recovery folks due to an internal misalignment-a mechanical failure.

I've used PC Tools recovery software to recover a good bit from predecessaor drives that I fortunately never disgarded.

No utility like that will work on a drive that isn't being detected by Windows (assuming you are using it).

also, one thing I haven't recovered-is a spreadsheet that I was building to do a complete financial analysis of the Lackawanna in the post war era using their annual reports from that period..

Would have made a rather interesting thing to share (once it was translated into something more palatable than moneyspeak) with a variety of "inquiring minds"....

As I've heard it said: "If data doesn't exist in three separate places, it doesn't exist."

I'm considering getting a back up hard drive, but currently I'm am backing my stuff up to 4 gigabyte DVD's. While vulnerable to scratching, warping, disc rot, etc, they seem to be one of the better forms of data storage, and can last somewhere around 10 years (and by that time, there will probably be some new contraption out there to store data).

I would like to use online back up (e.g. Carbonite), but I don't have the money for that. Until then, it's DVD's, and maybe another hard drive or two.

Might I also suggest that the tried-and-true 4x6 print seems to be the format with the greatest longevity. It's basically only vulnerable to fire, flood, and dampness (and toddlers with scissors). With Costco giving away 100 free 4x6 prints with items such as thumb drives, memory cards, and the like, I'm seriously thinking about putting together an acid-free photo album which will probably last longer than any hard drive or DVD out there.

A good thing to do is to have your PC in RAID array mirroring, its an immediate backup if a crash occurs. Portable drives should handle shock better, but still are vulnerable. Flash drives may be better for this.

I am pretty close in getting an internal flash drive for the PC, plug it into the PC slot and its a non-physical all electronic HD with no moving parts, more pricey, buy not suseptical to physical damage like the regular HD's.

I bought a terrabyte drive, price is WAY down now on them, and had been backing up data from around 10-15 older HD's onto ONE Terrabyte drive, big project, and I have a few HD's on the "going bad" list. I hope some recovery progs can slice and dice on them.

I ditched the beige box for laptops years ago, even id "RAID" mirroring wasn't above me. The drive I'm discussing was a portable.

I'm thinking of getting an SSD (One of the big boxes is going to have a 64GB KIngston on sale for something like 119 in a a couple weeks) and putting it in an enclosure.

I'll still make regular backups from now on.

Yeah, my friends call those "Fisher Price" drives. Drives and PCs sold at a consumer emporium like Best Buy or Walmart. Brand is no salvation anymore. Most famous names have spawned a cheapie product line for big-box retailers. Seagate bought Maxtor to gain core competence at hitting a $149 price point.

The good stuff will also fail, just less frequently. Therefore quality is not a cure-all. You still need redundancy and fault tolerance. Some say, "so you might as well use the cheap stuff". One name for that practice is RAID... another is Google. They built that company on cheap hardware.

As for backups, there are a dozen possible mistakes. You can go for years not realizing your backups are trash. Therefore, you are not backed up unless you regularly test and authenticate your restores. A bit like a "brake test" for backups. No brake test, no brakes.

Spyware is an issue too. Spyware used to keep a low profile, and any malfunctions it caused were accidental. The new trend is data thieves erase your data to cover their tracks. For instance they spam your address book "Help, I'm stuck in London, wire money!" And then they erase your address book to keep you from warning your friends. As an internet abuse fighter and former IT professional, I am well aware of this tsunami of daily Internet threats, and the tools available to fight it. I see no consumer-achievable way to secure a Windows PC. I'm sorry, brand evangelism aside, it is simply not possible.

Online backup is great. Avoid Carbonite, the big upfront price is too scary. You want a service that charges pennies per gig per month (Jungledisk) or a monthly flat rate (Mozy). Here's a comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... p_services

How about disconnecting from the internet? It's pretty hard to get a virus when your computer operates without the feature where virus (viri?) come from.

Common sense works, too; unfortunately, not everyone uses it enough and it doesn't always help someone who's not "net-savvy".

How about disconnecting from the internet? It's pretty hard to get a virus when your computer operates without the feature where virus (viri?) come from?

It's also pretty hard to live without net access. Even if you can ditch it, its sort of like deodorant now, expected and not having it earns you a certain amount of social disrespect.