< link rel="DCTERMS.replaces" href="http://trappedcivilservant.blogspot.com" > Aginoth's Retirement Ramblings: February 2008

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

How safe is your data?

A coupleof months ago my Laptop Hard Drive made a horrible grinding noise and died. Never mind I though I make a Daily Backup to another drive on my network. Spent a few hours installing a new Hard Drive to the laptop, then tried to restore the backup data...

My Network Hard Drive Failed halfway thru the back up, anothe phyical failure. Tried software method sof recovery to no avail....35 Gb of data down the pan...

I lost 10 years of Photographs, every picture I had of my children growing up, our honeymoon, our wedding, thousands of pictures of us at reenactments...about 15Gb
I lost 10Gb (7000 mp3 music tracks
numerous videos
all my documents and other data (about 5Gb)

Just goes to show that one back up is not sufficient, I now do two btw.

I now back up daily to a portable toughened Hard Drive, and I also back up to an online data Store. I use BT Digital Vault, where I have about 35Gb Stored out of a maximum of 50Gb, it costs £4.99 a month.

It cost me £404 pounds to have the original Laptop Hard Drive recovered from a physical failure so £4.99 is nothing in comparison.

The online storage is backed up by BT Daily to a seperate server, plus my computer now uploads any changed file to the back up every 20 minutes.

How safe is your data?