Sharon and Jacques’ Excellent Blog

It seems that I hit a bit of a nerve with the last posting about optical media and its tendency to fail. I thought I would write a few lines on how to prepare an external hard drive for backups to ensure that your data has a good chance of keeping it whole. One friend pointed out that its a dirty secret in the industry that optical media has a typical shelf life of 5-7 years unless it states that its designed for long term archival storage. That set of 50 CD-Rs that contain your best of the 70s and 80s likely isn’t archival quality.

Don’t forget that an external hard drive is also a  single point of failure. If that drive fails or you have a fire, all of data is going bye bye. One of the posters mentioned a system called a Drobo which is an external drive systems with lots of drives in it and it manages the failures. Expensive but worth it for the non-technical types. A cheaper solution is to get an external hard drive that can take 2 hard drives and set up the drive with something called RAID 1 This page lists at least a dozen or more from Canada Computers. All the data that you write to the drive is mirrored on the other drive so failure is less likely.

The place to buy computer equipment in Toronto (and elsewhere for that matter) is Canada Computers (http://www.canadacomputers.com). Hard to beat their prices or selection. Certainly cheaper than Tiger Direct.

Get yourself an hard drive or RAID box that will comfortably fit your collection plus room for growth. I use backup software, Retrospect, that lets me add volumes to the backup. You should consider something like this as well as opposed to simply copying them.

I would suggest a bare bones drive dock such as the Themaltake ST0005U. Ugly, but you just drop a drive into it without having to buy another case. Its about $46 at Canada Computers. This dock features an eSata and USB interface. If you are moving lots of data, I would recommend eSATA. Drop me a line if you want more information.

Plug your disk into your computer. A dialog will appear asking you to format the drive. Make sure that you DO NOT select Quick Format. You want to verify every single byte of data on that drive. Depending on the size of the drive or RAID configuration this will take a few minutes to many hours. Let this complete and then use it for backup.

If you do a quick format, its possible that you will write data on to a bad portion of the disk. The disk may recover but I’ve learnt the hard way this is not a good idea having had more than a few pictures show up with strange lines in the middle of them. I traced it back to bad blocks on a disk and had to restore from backup.

Make a point of doing backups on a regular basis if the data is valuable and you might want to consider also making a backup and storing it in a safe deposit box.

Good backing up!