I thought I’d talk about techniques for keeping data safe at home, which comes at a time where most if not all of our new culture is being created and stored in digital. My experience with keeping data safe has been notoriously bad, and so although I’m not a world’s authority on the matter, I hope you’ll all start backing up as precautiously as I am now!

Where are my Memories?

We used to have a stash of video cassettes and photographs in a small cupboard by the entrance to the house.

The video cassettes spanning years of family memories have since mysteriously gone missing and as for what’s in that cupboard of photos. . . it’s just a pile of images, no organization or structure, just a heap making them rather useless for most purposes. Should a fire consume the house, these will most certainly disappear; So paradoxically they are still as transient as the memories they were supposed to materialize, the people they were supposed to immortalize.

I found a video cassette of me singing on stage with my siblings. It was recorded on a magnetic cassette around 1989. My face is now nothing more than a bleached thumbprint on a fuzzy little body. . . 1989 was not that long ago and we continued with the use of this form of magnetic tape well into the 90s.

We were then thrust head-first into the digital age and started recording videos on CDs prone to scratching and deterioration as with anything else. Now the time has come to choose which HD camera to use and I can’t say I’m keen to populate a digital collection with such precious memories.

This is because I don’t have much data which has managed to last more than 5 years - either the hardware required to read them has changed or the data itself has become corrupted. Nothing seems safe. I have had my fair share of losing data over the years and it seems the only thing protecting wide-spread loss of data for me now. . . is in fact the cloud.

Cloud Services To the Rescue

As remote data storage reduces in cost and bandwith improves, the ratio of culture stored remotely on services such as flickr and youtube will increase in relation to that stored locally  this is likely because cloud content is easier and less costly to distribute and also because CPU time is outsourced while the uptime on a remote service is far higher and often less at risk of data loss than if stored at home.

However, such systems are still slow and so I am using multiple hard drives to backup my laptop as outlined below.

Backup Solutions

Dealing with large quantities of images and video as well as work which I’d rather not disappear on the whim of a crash, I am now resorting to a backup system which is as follows:

I have a large external terrabyte disk which two partitions, one is a 120GB partition to store an snapshot of my current hard drive (byte for byte image) in the event of catastrophic failure. This allows me to boot up from the image within minutes as though nothing has happened. The remaining space on this drive  I use for incremental backups which means I can go back in time and retrieve the odd file that may go missing. On top of this, sensitive frequent access information I backup onto a remote host.

The key point here is that information resilience requires redundancy which does not come cheap. If you are interested in automated backup solutions I would recommend you check out the Drobo which brings raid arrays to the consumer in a neat little automated package.

I’d be interested to know how you handle your data

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