Prudently Paranoid Backup Practices

by John Seidel

A Catastrophic Hard Drive Crash

I've had one too many hard drives crash over the last two decades. 

Last year the drive on my notebook computer, which is my main working computer, intermittently refused to boot.  I went through a horrible sinking feeling at the prospect of loosing data on that hard drive, of having to buy a new hard drive and then rebuild the drive from scratch, reinstalling every program and trying to remember all the ways in which I personalized settings and options for each program.  There is also the tedium of recovering working folders and data files from the crashed drive.  

Actually I was in a major panic anxiety twit!  Past experience has shown that it takes many hours of intense work, spread out over at least two days, to reinstall software (finding the forgotten program CD and the serial number or unlock key), and to recover data files, before I can start working again.  The restoration work then continues in dribs and drabs for a few days as I try to do various things on my computer and I discover ways in which the recovery process is not yet done. 

Disk Imaging and Disk Cloning

I have known about disk imaging and disk cloning software for a long time.  It is only when my notebook hard disk began to fail that I got serious about using it.  A few years ago I bought a program called Norton Ghost.  I was never able to understand it or to get it to work so I abandoned the idea of creating disk images of my hard drives.

Disk imaging means taking a snapshot of your existing hard drive and saving that snapshot on a backup hard drive (e.g., an external USB hard drive). This snapshot is a compressed image that cannot be directly used or accessed. Because it is compressed it takes up much less storage space than the source hard drive.    If your existing hard drive crashes or becomes unusable, you first need to buy a new hard drive.  Then you can use the snapshot to instantly recreate all the programs, settings and data files from the old hard drive on the new hard drive.  You can then put the new hard drive in your computer and pick up from where you left off when you made your last image.

Disk cloning means creating a duplicate copy of your existing hard drive. You need to buy an external hard drive that matches the size and type of your existing hard drive.  If your existing hard drive crashes or becomes unusable, you simply remove it from your computer and replace it with your clone or duplicate drive.  In about 15 minutes or so you can then pick up from where you left off when you last created and updated your clone drive.

While you still have to do some work restoring files that have changed since you last created an drive image or a drive clone, you will have saved many many hours of the tedious frustrating work of locating program CD's and reinstalling all of your old software.

NOTE 1: In most cases, but not every case, after you have created your new hard drive, you can still use your old hard drive.  Simply reformat the old hard drive and put it in an external USB hard drive case.  If your hard drive failed for mechanical reasons, which are very rare, this won't work.  Hard drives usually fail because a small part of the drive surface, called a sector, goes bad.  Reformating will either repair or isolate the bad sector, and you can continue using your drive.

NOTE 2:  Disk cloning is also handy when you simply want to replace an existing hard drive with a new, larger capacity, hard drive.

Salvaging a Dying Hard Drive by Making a Clone with Easy Gig II Sofware

In the face of my most recent hard drive crisis (the intermittently failing notebook hard drive) I purchased a $45 product called Easy Gig II from a company called Apricorn (apricorn.com).  It comes with the Easy Gigg II software, and with a case for a notebook sized hard drive (you have to purchase the drive separately).  I then went on the web and purchased a notebook hard drive that matched the size and type of my failing hard drive. 

(The newer drive type is SATA.  Older drives are called PATA, Ultra ATA, ATA or IDE. Check your computer owner's manual or visit the computer manufacturer's web site and look up your computer model to find out your drive type.  If you are cloning or replacing a notebook drive, make sure you get the version of Easy Gig II that comes with the correct drive case for your drive.) 

After Easy Gig and the hard drive arrived I set to work.  After about three hours I had made a clone of my failing hard drive, removed it, replaced it with the clone, and was able to continue working as if nothing had changed.  Most of that three hours was spent doing other things while waiting for Easy Gig to copy from the existing drive to the clone. 

Proactive and Routine Imaging and Cloning - Five Minutes per Computer Per Month

I have 6 computers.  In the following days I made clone drives for two other computers that I consider critical.  I then went out and bought a very large external USB hard drive (I recommend at least a 160 gig drive) and started making disk image copies of the hard drives on all six of my computers. The images are compressed to about 25-30% of the size of the orgininal drive. Depending on the size of the drive it takes from 20 to 60 minutes to make disk image copies for each computer.  Once you start the process you can do something else until the process is done. 

Now I make new disk images for every hard drive around the first day of every month.  It is simple, takes about 5 minutes of my time per computer, and as far as I am concerned it is a no-brainer!  I have two image backup drives.  They are only used for making backup images.  I keep two backup  images for each computer: last months and this months.  I do not delete any older images until this months image is successfully completed.

Everyday Backup Practices - Backup Software vs File Synchronization Software

Easy Gig and the ability to create clones and images protect me against catastrophic hard drive crashes.  But, since I only update them once a month, they are not a substitute for for backing up data that changes on a daily basis. For example, email data, word processing files,  podcasts, and of course,  Ethnograph data files.  I will add, and modify a lot of data files in the weeks following an image file.  Protecting this data requires a different type of backup strategy.

Standard backup programs are one solution.  In general they allow you to identify folders on your computer to backup to an external drive.  Some backup programs are smart enough to identify important folders for you.  After the first backup most programs are smart enough to identify new files and modified files.  On subsequent backups only new and modified files will be backed up.  

Instead of using a backup program, my preference is a synchronization program.  I like to think of synchronization as a process of creating clones, or identical copies, of specific folders on an external drive.  Synchronization was originally designed to update folders on different computers.  But it also works very well for updating copies of folders stored on an external USB hard drive or thumb drive. 

Daily Backups using Beyond Compare Synchronization Software

I use a program called Beyond Compare (scootersoftware.com).  It is simple and cheap ($30).  It compares sizes, dates, and times for all files in a folder.  It highlights files that are different in at least one of these ways.  For certain types of files, it lets me open those files in side by side windows and shows specific differences between the two files. 

Ethnograph Backups using Beyond Compare

While you cannot use Beyond Compare to open and view Ethnograph Data Files side by side,  Beyond Compare can tell you that two Ethnograph files with the same name but in different folders (e.g. your Project Folder and a backup folder on an external drive) have different sizes, dates and/or times.  For almost any type of file, that is all you need to know.  All synchronization software do this for you.

Ethnograph files are stored in a project folder, (e.g., MyProject),   The strategy is simple. If your project folder is MyProject, create a folder with the same name on a USB thumb drive or a USB external hard drive.  Then set up Beyond Compare (or any sync program for that matter) to compare and synchronize the files in both versions of MyProject. 

For your daily routine, sync the two MyProject folders before you start working with Ethnograph, and after you work with Ethnograph.  If you mess up a data file while working in Ethnograph, (e.g., accidently delete a file, or delete all the code words in a data file) it is a very easy to use Beyond Compare to restore the previous version of that data file.  At the end of the day you have the peace of mind that you have identical copies of you data files on two different drives.

Backing up Other Folders using Beyond Compare

You can do the same thing for your My Documents folder, or any other folder on your computer.  I do this for My Documents, Quicken, Thunderbird (my email program), and other folders that contain important and frequently changing information and data files.  It is simple, takes only a few minutes, and has let me recover gracefully from times when my figures do things on the keyboard or with the mouse without my permission (like accidently deleting a file), or I have simply gone brain dead or been distracted while doing something on the computer. 

Using synchronization software is not a mindless task.  You should take a minute to think before you do anything on a computer.  Not taking that minute to think is the cause of a lot of minor and major computer catastrophes.  Unfortunately not taking a moment to think is a common mistake we human beings make far to often.

NOTE 1: My Documents contains a lot of stuff.  Because of this it is easy to make synchronization mistakes.  Too many things to think about.  To simplify things, I set up synchronizations for what I consider the important folders within My Documents. I take care of these before I do anything with My Documents itself.   

NOTE 2: In Windows Vista My Documents is now named Documents.

Checking out Synchronization software

I've been using Beyond Compare (ScooterSoftware.com) for over 10 years.  Periodically (every one or two years) I check with Tucows.com (search for "sync programs") and CNet.com (search for "sync files" in software) to see what else is available or what's new.  I download and play with  programs rated the highest by the editors and users (4 or 5 cows for Tucows, 4 or 5 stars for CNet).  While I have found a couple of attractive alternatives, I've stayed with Beyond Compare, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Use Ethnograph's Backup and Restore features in addition to or along with Synchronization Software

Of course Ethnograph has it's own internal backup and restore feature.  This is the easiest and simplest way to backup your Ethnograph data files.  You can use it to backup your Ethnograph project to an external USB thumb drive, a USB external hard drive, or a network drive.   As a bonus, if  use Ethnograph on two computers, you can automatically restore an Ethnograph backup on the second computer.  With Ethnograph backup and restore this is a no-brainer.  Other strategies will require that you manually set up projects within the Project Manager before Ethnograph will recognize your project on another computer.  

In addition the Ethnograph Copy Project option in the Project Manager lets you create duplicate copies of your current project on any drive connected to your computer.

Ethnograph's internal backup and restore will probably work just fine for most Ethnograph users.  Combining it with synchronization software may seem like overkill, but I think that each strategy has its merits.   They do different things.  They take little effort.  When something unfortunate happens, they provide different ways of recovering files. 

Be Prudently Paranoid

Invest a few hours in developing backup strategies.  One strategy should be to protect yourself from a catastrophic hard disk failure.  The other should be to protect yourself from deleted, damaged, or "messed up" files that you work with on a daily basis.  Any strategy is better than no strategy.  No strategy is fool proof (as this fool knows all too well).  

copyright (c) 2007, John Seidel