The Need for Simple Backup Solutions for Complicated Data
Widgets & RSS FeedsIt’s that time of year when our thoughts of New Year’s resolutions are just beginning to fade. So let me remind you of one resolution you should probably keep. Do have backups of your irreplaceable data? Are those backups recent enough that you would not loose anything serious? If the answer to either of these questions is yes then congratulations, you are solidly in the minority. Could you restore or work from those backups and not lose more than a couple of hours of work? If so, then you are in great shape, but hopefully I’ll still have something for you in this article. I will talk about online backup and storage services that serve as excellent complements to disk-based storage.
The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) ratings of hard disks are largely disconnected from reality. Common street wisdom says you are lucky if your drive makes it 30 days past its warranty period. As many have said, the question of data loss is when, not if. Once you assume that data loss is inevitable, then backups are clearly essential—unless you are prepared to sacrifice your email, photographs, bookmarks, draft letters and other data to the great data cemetery in sky.
The problem of course is that our data and thus our backups have gotten far more complicated in recent years. Increasingly, portions of our data and even the backup themselves are stored in the cloud—data and services that reside in a collection online services, network drives, virtual servers and places we often just refer to as online.
These days, I suspect most of us have complicated data, some of it is stored on home desktops or laptops, some on work machines, some of it online in the cloud, some backed up and some not. We may have multiple copies of sections of data and yet we may not have any copies of other data. Complicated data lends itself to complicated backup solutions. We often have good intentions about complicated solutions, like New Year’s resolutions, most of which we never quite get around to.
