Stories of People
Who Didn't Back Up

I've had a number of clients who lost everything on their hard disk drives in spite of all the repeated warnings I've given about the absolute necessity of making backups. One time, a person who was making a backup overwrote a good backup tape before making another backup. One of the user's hard drives that had been backed up on the first tape failed before another backup could be made. That drive was fried and there was no way to get anything on it back.  We found a tape that was copied about 45 days before the drive died so we didn't lose everything, but the user had done a lot of work that was lost in the month and a half that was lost.

I've now heard the sound of a dead hard drive three times, kind of a rhythmic clicking sound. I'm told that the read/write head has fallen off of the arm from which it is normally suspended and plows up the recording medium. The drive is spinning, but all of the information is gone.

I had two clients in one day get caught by the CIH virus and both their hard drives were completely wiped out. One client needed the information on their hard drive because there were no backups. Ontrack has an ingenious method for hooking onto a computer remotely and they were able to get the information back (at a cost of nearly $1000 plus my fees) within less than a day. The other client had written all essential files onto a file server which was backed up so they just reformatted the hard drive and started over.

Another client called to say that the floppy disk she was saving her spreadsheets on was not readable. Despite repeated warnings about the necessity of backing up (making redundant copies) of any essential information and a highly sophisticated way to back up selected portions of every person's hard drive in the company, there was only one copy of this file and the disk lost it.

One of the toughest backup-related things that ever happened to me was with a client who I had implored for years to get a backup in place. They had gotten a Zip drive to back up financial files (TimeSlips data files). We even backed up some documents onto another computer's hard drive.

One day, after all of my griping about no backup, they ordered one. I installed it and, as the last thing after doing this, I ran a backup of the local computer and data files on the other computers in this small network (six computers total). Everything appeared to go well.

In the following weekend I got a frantic call that one of the computers, a relatively new one, had crashed and could I come over because there were a number of needed documents. I smugly assumed that the necessary documents were backed up and congratulated myself for my preparation. Anyway, I tried to go over restoring the documents over the telephone and was not able to.

The next day I showed up in the office and found out that the local drive was properly backed up, there was a catalog of all the other drives, but there was no information on it. I had never seen anything like this. We called the software maker (Seagate Backup) and they said the problem was because I had used the UNC (Universal Naming Convention) listing for files (\\Joe\CDrive) instead of actually mapping the drive (calling it, say, the J:\ drive) and said that they had seen this a number of times and an upgrade of their software would fix the problem.

To make a long and painful story short, it did not fix the problem. We finally sent the trashed hard drive to OnTrack and the tape to be recovered. They have about a 95% chance of getting data. They struck out on both of them. The data was lost. People have had to spend many hours getting data back by scanning old documents and by retyping.

I don't know how to express the importance of backups except to say that PC Magazine wrote about the top 10 things to make your computing lives easier and 5 of them were backups. It just is not worth using computers if you don't make redundant removable copies of your necessary files. It is a pain to do, but nowhere the pain of having all your files that you have created with hundreds and thousands of hours of work evaporate into thin air.

Now, there is an easy way to make an encrypted back up over the Internet using Carbonite.  It costs $49.95 per year (or $89.95 for two years).  It is not meant for backing up file servers, but only for the files on one Windows XP or Vista workstation.  It will not work with Windows 98, Windows 2000 or ME.  You must pay a full subscription price for each computer that you want backed up.  It won't back up mapped drives.

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