another one bitest the dust ... almost

You don't have to read the blog long to pick up on how I feel about backup. I am a HUGE advocate for redundant data. I have known too many who have lost precious data because of drive corruption, drive crashes, and or simple carelessness. I have personally experienced the latter two in the past.

Today I started my final stage of moving into my MacBook pro by transferring my "documents" folder that I have maintained since about 1996 onto my system. Notes from High School, College, and my Master's all reside ... on one drive. Are you kidding me?!? Seriously - could I be that stupid ... wait it gets better. The drive is the original notebook drive I replaced in my 5 year old Powerbook because it had overheating issues. I need serious help. So I plug the drive in and I get a format error message asking if I would like to format the drive for use ... um NO! MY DATA!!!!!!! I fished out the Data Rescue II disks hunkering down for a long day of painful data recovery. I rebooted the machine and holy cow, the drive showed up on the desktop as if nothing was wrong. Counting my blessings and the great mercy that was poured out upon my drive I immediatly began transfering the data to a safe place - still in progress by the way.

Why do we do such things? We commit our data to places that it should never be stored. We place our data on drives that have been mass produced as quickly and inexpensivly as possible with no form of backup or redundancy. I am asking everyone who reads this to STOP! Stop what you are doing right now and check you data. If your data is not stored in more that one location go buy a drive on sale or something and get it secure! Don't go buy a camera or a new lens - make this your first priority.

Next step: automation. No one wants to manage redundant storeage - that's why we don't do it. Set yourself up with a drive to manage the storage for you. Either set up a RAID or pick up a Drobo. I am going for the latter of the two. If you are on a Mac Time Machine will handle the backup for you. If you are on a Windows machine check out Argentum Backup.

Please - don't leave you data un-protected.