Girl You Look Good, Won't You Back That #Data Up
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @AdamReisinger
"It's not IF your hard drive will fail, it's WHEN."
During my five-plus years as a Mac Genius, I said this to customers more times than I can count. It's a simple reality of technology: hard drives (and, to a lesser extent, flash drives) are not designed to last forever, which means you ALWAYS need to have a backup.
I'm not here to tell you what the best backup strategy is, but you should be backing up your critical data regularly. Both the modern Mac and Windows operating systems make it easy to automate the backup process, and if you need more configurable options, you can get software that will do a pretty god job for under $50. The bigger cost comes in the storage, because at minimum, you need at least as much backup space as you have primary storage space. For example, I have a Mac mini with an 80 GB internal drive, and a 4 TB drive attached that holds my iTunes media. For backing up, I've got a 500 GB drive backing up the internal drive, and another 4 TB drive backing up the iTunes drive.
Some people will recommend having an off-site hard drive in addition to your in-home backup drive, but that's entirely up to you. I personally don't have an additional offsite drive for my iTunes media, because if something catastrophic happened at my house that caused the loss of BOTH hard drives AND all my CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs, I think the loss of data would be the least of my concerns.
But, with all that said, there's a new level of backup strategy that is incredibly hard to account for: the cloud. I'm not talking about backing up TO the cloud, as most major operating systems have allowed you to do that for years. I'm talking about your data that originates on the cloud. This website is a good example of that, and we all saw what happened this past week. When all those posts got deleted, it got my thinking about my own site and how it's backed up (answer: not at all, unfortunately). All those videos you upload to YouTube, those pictures you post on Flickr, even your Facebook and Twitter posts, do you have backups of those? Probably not.
To be honest, I'm sure that Google, Facebook and Twitter have their own site-wide backup strategies in place. Hell, SquareSpace even probably has such a thing in the event of hardware failure. But because we've never really thought of blog posts, Twitter updates, Facebook statuses, etc. as "data" in the truest sense, we don't think of backing them up ourselves, which means they're more subject to deletion or disappearance than the files on our hard drives, and in many cases they're actually more important.
I know that once I saw what happened here, I immediately figured out a short-term backup solution for my own site, and I'm still looking into a more long-term one, because as much as I think my blog posts are important, I'm sure Google's got better things to do than dig through its backups if a rogue web surfer deletes a bunch of my posts. Because, just like with a hard drive, it's not IF it'll happen, it's WHEN.
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