photoxelsIf you have ever had a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) crash on your computer, you know that awful sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. If you are lucky, your computer boots up and you can list your directories. Some files may be lost but overall, count yourself lucky.
But, as is more common, you can’t even boot up your computer. The HDD is fried. And so are the thousands of photos saved onto it. But you had a backup, right? Right?
The computer and software can be easily replaced, but the photos cannot.
Most of us never bother with a backup strategy because:
- everything is just going fine and dandy;
- it looks too complicated; and
- we really don’t have the time to do it.
Truth is, it does often look too complicated and expensive. So, you tell yourself that maybe you’ll do it someday. Well, someday is here and you’re caught unprepared. We faced that situation, escaped unscathed courtesy of our “Simple and Secure Backup Strategy” and would like to share that inexpensive strategy with you today.
We were lucky that we never lost any data but, after a couple of scare, we decided a while back [last year, in fact] that we needed a backup strategy here at Photoxels. Sure, all the pictures that are posted on the site are on our external server, which has a RAID drive, etc. etc. But the time and effort to retrieve them would be horrendous and, with a small team, we could not afford that.
We needed a backup strategy that was both 1) simple to implement and 2) would allow us to recover in a heartbeat should our HDD crash. This is what we came up with and we invite our more experienced readers to chime in with their comments and advice.
Here is what we did.
- Don’t save anything on the Hard Disk Drive on the computer. Yep, you read that right. No content pertaining to Photoxels is saved onto the computer’s HDD. The reason for that is quite simple: last time we upgraded computer, it took us the good part of a week to transfer all photos and content to the new computer’s HDD. “Transfer me once, shame on you. Transfer me twice, shame on me.” Where do we save our stuff, you ask? Read on.
- Save all content on an external Hard Disk Drive. We thought hard and fast and decided we were NOT going to go through that pain again of tranferring large amount of data everytime we upgraded computers. Solution: an external HDD that plugs into the USB port. Now, upgrading a computer is relatively simple: just unplug the external HDD and plug it into the new computer. Done!
- Get a second external HDD as a backup. We told you it was simple. Every night, we do a backup from external HDD #1 [code-named: Earth] to external HDD #2 [code-named: Cybertron]. Only the file(s) that got changed for the day are copied over. In this way, we have an “exact” copy1 of HDD #1 on HDD #2, down to the directory structure. We only keep one copy. When we’re working on a review that takes a number of days to complete and may require many revisions, we also keep a rolling copy of just that folder to permit easy rollback. As in, if we muck up and delete a post or part of it, we can easily go back through each day’s backup for that folder and restore the portion of the deleted content. We don’t zip or do any fancy stuff: it’s just a plain straightforward copy. This way, if HDD #1 fails, we just swap HDD #2 in. Zero downtime.
That’s it! The price of an external HDD is so cheap nowadays and you can get up to 2TB capacity.
Of course, this strategy works only if your data is less than 2TB [or whatever future size limit will be]. Once you go past the size limit on a HDD, you need some other backup strategy. But, we’re thinking we’ll be archiving past years, and free up valuable space. What do you think?
We would prefer a more robust backup strategy and would welcome any advice from readers. Do bear in mind the two criteria that any strategy must meet: 1) simple to implement, and 2) no downtime switching to the backup.
June 07, 2010: Since I wrote this article, our main PC’s Hard Disk drive crashed yesterday. Well, first the PC rebooted all by itself. I thought it was just a power fluctuation but since the PC is on a UPS, I knew at the back of my mind that something was not right: the UPS would have absorbed any power fluctuation. I rebooted the PC and everything went fine for about 12 hours. Then, the PC crashed again, but this time it refused to reboot. Of course, because I had all data on an external drive, I was not worried. Unplug the external drive from the crashed PC, plug it back into another working PC, and we were off, with no downtime. But, as the linked article below shows all too clearly, you still have to consider the applications you use, such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc. Which makes me think that we need a backup PC, too, mirroring all the apps we use on the primary PC. Or, consider cloud computing as it slowly but surely becomes a reality.
1 In reality, we do a “backup” instead of a “sync” and there is a very important difference. A backup copies new files from HDD #1 to HDD #2, and if you delete a file from HDD #1, that file remains on HDD #2. With a sync, the two drives are always exact copies of each other, so if you delete a file from HDD #1 (say, by mistake, oops!), it will also be deleted from HDD #2. We recommend that you always use a backup and manually keep your files in sync (i.e. if you delete a file from HDD #1, and it’s not a mistake, then manually delete it from HDD #2)..
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