In the days before computer data storage and self-rebuilding RAID backups, files were stored in paper form in file drawers. The US military had a data center in St Louis called the "Personnel Records Center" that contained millions of personnel files from discharged soldiers.
One day in 1973 the place caught on fire and 16-18 million records were destroyed. According to the government:
"No duplicate copies of the records that were destroyed in the fire were maintained, nor was a microfilm copy ever produced. There were no indexes created prior to the fire. In addition, millions of documents had been lent to the Department of Veterans Affairs before the fire occurred. Therefore, a complete listing of the records that were lost is not available."
The Army alone lost 80% of its records for personnel discharged from November 1, 1912 through January 1, 1960.
Among those lost files was my father's service record from World War II. I know, because I tried to get a copy. The only chance of retrieving his data would be if there happened to have been a second copy made for some odd reason, and this does not seem to have been the case.
So, learning from the limitations of the physical file systems of the past, we have a clear incentive to back up our data today. It's fast, it's easy, and it's cheap. All of my computer data except the media (pictures, movies, and music) is backed up in a "cloud" online, and is as secure as data gets. My media is all backed up automatically every hour by Time Machine on a second hard drive on site. I have a third copy I keep offsite in case of disaster.
Paper is fragile. Millions of books, records, and works of art have been lost forever through the ravages of time, water, and fire.
But with digital data, we have a way to keep it almost forever: back it up! Don't ever trust a single data source for anything, remember: "All hard drives will fail, it's just a matter of when". I know many people who have lost irreplaceable data because they got complacent.
Ok, fast survey, how many of you backup all your precious data frequently? At all? Be honest.
5 comments:
Photos are the only files we really have of value. We store all of our photos on an external hard drive, which really should act as a back up to the computer. Now that you mention it, I think I may have to put them on the computer too so we have them stored in 2 places!!
I was thinking,.... I back up to an external hard drive but it sits right next to the computer, so if I had a fire, all the files times 2 would be cooked. Who do you use for offsite and how much is it?
Mark
If you get an external drive and keep it somewhere else, it's just the price of the drive. There are also online services like mozy, which are free up to a certain limit and then pretty cheap above that.
I'm confused. Is mozy your "cloud" online? Time Machine is your backup's backup?
No, I use MobileMe, that's my "cloud". Mozy is an online backup if you don't need all the other MobileMe stuff like address book, calendar, and email syncing. Time Machine backs up the hard drives locally.
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