If you’re not backing up your important data, you’re just waiting to lose it.
I was chatting with a fellow pilot the other day about archiving all the videos we accumulate with our GoPro cameras.
“I went to the store and bought a 5 TB hard drive for under $100,” he told me. “Every single photo or movie I ever recorded is on that disk.”
“How often do you back it up?” I asked.
He looked at me blankly. The truth is, he didn’t have a backup for it. He had every photo on one hard disk drive and it wasn’t backed up.
Hard Disk Crashes Happen
I’ve lived through more hard disk crashes than the average person. I’ve even lost a manuscript to a hard disk crash. I think it was that loss that taught me how important it is to back up every file I don’t want to lose.
As I type this, my 5 year old iMac is copying files from its internal hard disk to a backup disk. The iMac has been acting funky for a while and it got to the point where it just wasn’t functioning at all. I booted from the internal recovery disk and ran Disk First Aid on it. It found sectors it couldn’t fix. When I restarted from the normal startup disk, Finder wouldn’t work. For those of you who use Windows and don’t know Mac OS, it’s as if Windows won’t open anything for you. The solution was to go back into Recovery mode, make a new startup disk on an external hard disk, restart the Mac from that, and back up all my important files onto that new hard disk.
You might say, “Maria! Didn’t you already have a backup?”
To that, I say, of course I did. I actually have TWO backups of the entire going bad hard disk. But how can I possibly know if both of them are good when the source is bad? Why take chances? I’ll copy all the files over to make a third backup I know is good. Then I’ll reformat the bad drive and, hopefully, the problems will go away. Then I can reinstall the data files on the newly formatted hard drive. Or, in this case, on the computer I bought to replace it anyway. (I need to get that old iMac running to trade it in for the maximum cash back.)
As for backups of the new computer — a brand new 15″ MacBook Air I got to replace a 2 year old 13″ MacBook Air and the 5 year old 27″ iMac — I’ll periodically back up to an external hard disk, but I’ll also likely back up to the cloud. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s a good and reliable solution and I’m already paying for that cloud space. It would be dumb not to do it.
My Media Storage Solution
Going back to my GoPro and other media situation…
My media file archives and backups work like this: Each year, I buy a pair of 2 TB portable hard disks. I name one for the year and one for the year followed by BU. So this year’s disks are 2023 and 2023 BU. As I travel about, I copy all of my photos and videos from my phone, my Nikon, my GoPro, and my DJI drone to the hard disk for that year, organized by date. So a folder containing the videos from a flight I do today might be named 061923 Wenatchee Flight. When I get home from my travels, I use an app like SuperDuper to synchronize the two hard disks, using the primary one as the source. So if I add or remove files on that primary disk, those changes are automatically reflected on the backup disk.
Understand that the video files I accumulate are huge and take up a ton of storage space. The more I have, the more disk space I need. I’m trying very hard to keep total storage per year under 2 T, but this year I wound up buying 5 T drives because that’s all I could find. I’ll still just put one year’s worth of files on it.
If any of my original or backup disks go bad, I still have the other disk for that year. To lose a whole year’s worth of media, I’d have to lose both disks, which are seldom in the same location for any considerable length of time. To lose all my media, I’d have to lose all of my disks — there are about 6 years’ worth at this point so that’s 12 hard disks.
My friend, in my opinion, is putting all of his eggs in one basket — and that is never a good idea if you don’t want to lose all your eggs.
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First question is how valuable is your data. A file that was downloaded can be downloaded again, but data that you create may be irreplaceable.
Second is what are you protecting from? Hardware failure is only one scenario. Accidental deletion is another. Malware is another. And a catastrophe (fire, flood, theft) at the location is another.
An easy way to best practices is a 3-2-1 backup strategy: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, at least 1 copy offsite.
EXCELLENT advice. I’m wondering what you think of CD ROM as an archival format.
Greg makes a valid point..
Agreed! Greg is dialed in on this stuff. He always has good advice and insight on computer matters.
Years ago, I used a tool called Integrity Checker (part of diglloydtools) to store a cryptographic checksum in the various folders I wanted to have audited. I’d let my backups run, then do an integrity check on the backups. In concept, it was a great way to verify the quality of my backups. I did find that a lot of raw images from one of my cameras often failed the integrity check, and as I evolved to newer computers I stopped using that tool. I probably should resurrect that process though.
That’s actually a really interesting and smart idea to verify backups.
I’m too trusting, but I didn’t take any chances this time. Rather than relying on my two existing backups — one of which was a few days out of date — I made a third. It was actually new additions to my photo library from my recent trip that I was worried about losing. Everything else was really backed up well.