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Bruce Schneier shares two stories, one of a U.S. man whose murder conviction was thrown out and he will be re-tried because a virus ate the stenographer's homeworkaudio transcript. The stenographer didn't bring enough paper, relied on audio recordings, copied the audio recordings to her computer, and a virus destroyed them before they were transcribed.
She is now an unemployed stenographer.
Bruce also mentions PhD students losing their thesis documentation due to lack of backups. I'm sure this is really common this time of year/semester.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/04/the_importance_2.html
The Tao of Backups site is a site selling a commercial product, but the lessons that it teaches are quite applicable even to home users.
I've always maintained a paranoid approach to backups.
External hard drives are not expensive, buy one that is 2-3 times the capacity of the systems that you're backing up if you can. I don't follow this rule with my iMac because I already had the 3 TB drives before the iMac came along, and that drive was big enough to back up all of my computers, but adding the iMac changed that mix. If you're buying multiple drives, try to stick with the same manufacturer and series so that your power supplies and cables are the same. This way you just take the drive back and forth to your offsite location and not the power supply and USB cable. And by encrypting your backups you're guaranteed that whoever you work with can't be nosy and look in to your data. But you need to make sure your encryption password schemes are known to your spouses or whoever will take over your information if something happens to you.
http://taobackup.com
(And I can't believe that I remembered the syntax for doing an HTML ordered list and got it right the first time!)
She is now an unemployed stenographer.
Bruce also mentions PhD students losing their thesis documentation due to lack of backups. I'm sure this is really common this time of year/semester.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/04/the_importance_2.html
The Tao of Backups site is a site selling a commercial product, but the lessons that it teaches are quite applicable even to home users.
I've always maintained a paranoid approach to backups.
- First, back up regularly. This is easy with a Mac: leave an external drive plugged in and let Time Machine back up the machine hourly. I can't speak to other platforms, but there's lots of backup software out there and you can at least back up your changing documents. Documents that don't change as often, such as music or photo libraries, don't need to be backed up as often, but still need to be backed up.
- Second, TEST BACKUPS. Backups are worth nothing if you don't test them to make sure data is not only being written elsewhere, but can be read. There are all too many stories of people who've done backups faithfully, but never tested them, only to find out that the backup had a problem and could not be recovered. I admit that I'm a little lax on this one.
- Third, distribute backups. If your backup is in your house and your house is burgled or lost to a disaster, you don't have a backup. And you might have lost your computer at the same time, so you're doubly-screwed. Backups need to be separated geographically, so that a disaster that strikes one place may not affect another. My off-site backups are stored at the observatory, which is safer from fire than our house, and is 20 miles away.
- Fourth, if you can, maintain multiple generations of backups. In my first job as a network administrator in the late 80's, we had five boxes of backup tapes. Each box was labeled Week 1 through 5 as there are no more than five weeks in a month. Each tape was labeled with the week number and started with Tuesday to make accommodating Monday holidays more easy, that was the day that the tape was inserted. On the first work day of the month, the tape from the previous night was removed, relabeled, and taken to an off-site warehouse and stored in a fire-proof cabinet. It wasn't a bad methodology, but it could have been better. Myself, in previous generations when tape drives were viable for personal backups, I maintained three copies. I would back up my system and take that tape to work, where there were two tapes that were dated. The oldest tape would be taken home that night and my computer backed up again. So I had pretty much two copies available and one older generation. But now with the way that disk storage has expanded, the only way you can effectively back up is to another hard drive. Currently I maintain two sets of backup drives, a pair of 3 terabyte and a pair of 1 terabyte drives. The 1 TBs are for backing up our laptops, the 3 TBs back up my 27" iMac which has a 2 gig drive which is 3/4ths full. I encrypt my backups (easily done with Mac's Time Machine) and swap the drives every month or so and before we go on a road trip.
External hard drives are not expensive, buy one that is 2-3 times the capacity of the systems that you're backing up if you can. I don't follow this rule with my iMac because I already had the 3 TB drives before the iMac came along, and that drive was big enough to back up all of my computers, but adding the iMac changed that mix. If you're buying multiple drives, try to stick with the same manufacturer and series so that your power supplies and cables are the same. This way you just take the drive back and forth to your offsite location and not the power supply and USB cable. And by encrypting your backups you're guaranteed that whoever you work with can't be nosy and look in to your data. But you need to make sure your encryption password schemes are known to your spouses or whoever will take over your information if something happens to you.
http://taobackup.com
(And I can't believe that I remembered the syntax for doing an HTML ordered list and got it right the first time!)
