View from the Labs
Darien Graham-Smith has a backup confession to make, including the tale of a NAS drive that went pop
This month’s Labs has been of more than professional interest to me. The truth is, I need to sort out my own backup situation. Yes, I’m one of those terrible people who lectures friends and colleagues about backing up, yet doesn’t have a proper system in place himself. In fact, I’ll admit it: my home setup illustrates some quite serious backup mistakes.
It’s not that I’m blasé about the possibility of losing my data. At home I have a 6TB NAS appliance, which hosts File History data for all my Windows machines – plus Time Machine for the increasing number of Mac clients in my household. So I know that if I manage to leave my laptop on the W7 bus, my data at least can be recovered.
So far so good; my first big mistake was to assume, on setting up this system, that it provided all the data security I needed. In reality, as we detail on p86, there are some scenarios in which on-site backup simply won’t suffice.
That’s something I learnt the hard way early last year. Luckily for me, the wake-up call wasn’t anything so dramatic as a fire or a break-in, but rather a good old-fashioned hardware failure. For that I count my blessings: if I had lost both my computers and my NAS box, I would have been completely sunk.
In the event, when the NAS drive went pop, I was able to keep on working without any immediate interruption. However, I lost access to older versions of my files – and any new work I did wasn’t being backed up. What’s more, here’s my second big mistake: somewhere along the way I had got into the habit of using my NAS appliance not merely for backup, but for archiving my largest, most rarely accessed files. At the time, this seemed like a clever way to free up space on my desktop clients; when the unit died, it dawned on me that the “backups” I had lost were my only copies of certain files.
The story has a happy ending, more or less: I was able to take the disks out of the NAS drive and, with the aid of a four-bay USB enclosure, hook them up to a Linux VM, mount the RAID array and copy my data off onto a fresh NAS device.
But I don’t mind telling you that, until the files were safely recovered, I was holding my breath. And at the end of the process, one fact was clear. This stressful, complicated and time-consuming procedure would never have been necessary if I’d relied on a reputable cloud backup service to either replace my NAS box or mirror it.
Yes, some part of me still bristles at the idea of paying good money for an online service that – touch wood – I may never need. But I’ve come to realise that a reliable backup service is worth whatever your data is worth. Hopefully, if you’re still on the fence about backup, my story will inspire you to do the right thing.
One last piece of advice: after reading our reviews and choosing your preferred backup provider, I suggest you take advantage of the free trials offered by most services. Not only will this help you confirm that the features and interface suit the way you work, it also gives you an opportunity to test performance for yourself (read the IDrive review on p85 for an illustration of this issue in practice). Our figures below represent our own real-world experience, but depending on your line speed, location and ISP, you might get different results.
“My first big mistake was to assume, on setting up the NAS appliance, that it provided all the data security I needed”