Backup and sleep

August 2022

Bitter experience tells me that there is a third certainty in life beyond death and taxes: all hard drives fail eventually.  I’ve lost three in 25 years.

The hard drive is your computer’s memory, where much of the software that makes it work lives and where all your files (documents, music, photos and so on) are stored.

They are more reliable than they used to be, but they still fail. Backblaze.com, a datacentre, has over 200,000 running all the time; last year about 1% of them failed, whilst 15 years ago it was 5%.  Now, 1% may not seem much, but consider this: there are forty-nine households in our village, so I bet that there are at least one hundred hard drives.  So, the odds are that one of them will fail each year, and that’s without burst pipes, theft and natural disasters. So, take heed.

There are two levels of backing up: everything and, well, not everything.

If you copy absolutely everything (an ‘image backup’) an expert can replicate your old computer, with all its faults, on a fresh machine.

For me, that’s overkill.  You are going to buy a new computer anyway; it will be faster and slicker than your old one, so it’s a great opportunity to ditch all the never used nonsense with which you encumbered your old machine and start afresh.  You can re-download the programmes you do want in their latest form; all respectable vendors will help you. 

Now you need to recover your personal files from your backup.

There are two ways to create a backup – offline and online.  Offline means copying all the files onto a physical hard drive, perhaps a memory stick, and keeping it safe.  Nothing wrong with that except that it is always going to be a bit out of date, even if you do it daily, and is a chore.

The alternative, my preference, is to back up online, continuously and immediately, with no effort at all on my part.

I use two services: Dropbox and OneDrive.  Dropbox is independent, Microsoft owns OneDrive.  They are similar; you have a Dropbox or a OneDrive folder on your computer, and you create a series of sub-folders, as many as you want, for your files.

Then you save everything you do on your computer in one of these sub-folders.

As soon as you change or add any file within those subfolders, a copy is uploaded to Dropbox or OneDrive, and they also back it up somewhere else (goodness knows where). Google offers something very similar, as do countless smaller organisations.

So, if your computer dies, as soon as you have re-established contact with your backup on a new one all your data is restored, having been kept safe in them warm embrace of ‘the cloud.’

Of course, these are not free; nothing is.  Dropbox costs me £96 pa for 2,000 GB of storage (plenty for me); OneDrive gives me 1,000 GB as part of my subscription to all the Microsoft programmes I use (Word, Excel and so on) for £80 pa.  Both allow me to recover earlier versions of a file; recently, a spreadsheet I was working on became corrupted, but I recovered a version from an hour earlier, ditched the broken one, and was back up and running.

I suppose there is the risk that the company looking after my data may go bust, but I’ll take that chance; it is unlikely, after all, that it will go bust on the same day that my hard drive fails, so I’ll have time to find a replacement service.

The key attraction to using any of these services is that it is all done for me.  No remembering, no equipment, no worries, and I sleep at night.