Backup Discipline

"As practitioners in the field of data recovery like to say (with only barely concealed satisfaction), "The failure rate of disk drives is 100 percent."

—"Data Dicks" in WIRED 3.10 by John Walen

"Over a long enough timeline everybody's survival rate drops to zero."

—Fight Club

Backup discipline is the essential practice of dilligently backing up all data. Only 26% of all people are backing up at all and only 4% are backing up automatically. It costs only about $100 for an external hard drive and about 15 minutes to set up backups and safeguard your priceless information.

Backing up is an essential part of COMSEC. Inevitable data loss is much more likely than a hostile cracking attack to destroy your data. The damage done is the same and so is the solution: backup.

Backup Discipline

• Set a routine schedule for backing up.
• Know how to backup all platforms partially and specifically.
• Obtain the hardware and software necessary to backup automatically

Personal Backups

Personal backup is essential.

• At minimum, do a monthly backup of essential files to one or more DVDs.
• Best practice is to automate backup to external hard disk on a daily or continuous basis
• Mac OS 10.5 Leopard has a new feature to make this easier called Time Machine

Server Backups

Data hosted on a web site must be backed up.

• Databases must be backed up seperately from files and images.

Backup Secrecy

• Private backups are adequate if you are the only one who cares about restoring your data.
• Known backups are good in case you and your data dissappear by accident and someone else needs to find the backup.
• Secret backups are good in case you and your data dissappear "by accident" and you want to prevent someone from finding the backup.

Data Destruction Rammifications

Them more backups you have, the more thorough you must be when doing intentional data destruction.

Data Loss Causes

• Losing notebooks or desktops due to theft and negligence
• Power interruption while writing data to disk
• Random drive failure (It happens to the best of them)
• Magnets do not cause data loss in hard disks or memory cards.

Data Recovery

In the event that a drive stops working, there are several steps to take to attempt data recovery.

In many cases the failure is not mechanical and can be repaired by Apple's /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility or a windows equivalent. Try this first.

In some cases third party utility can recover what Apple cannot such as DiskWarrior or Norton Disk Doctor.

In some cases a mechanically failed drive can be made to work just long enough to recover some data by [freezing it.]

Data recovery services can help if all your attempts at data recovery fail and the data is valuable or irreplaceable enough to justify several hundred dollars expense.

How To Recover Deleted Files With Free Software