I’m not a huge downloader of stuff from the internet but I do have a large and ever growing collection of digital photo’s which are getting ever larger individually because of increasing resolutions. Right now I probably have about 200GB of irreplaceable photos in digital format from holidays, family events etc. Looking back 10 years I’d qualify to be running a corporate datacenter with that much data, and I’d probably have a sophisticated tape backup system with robotic autoloader, offsite storage etc. That’s not likely to happen at my house, but in reality my personal requirements probably aren’t that much different to a datacenter in so far as I don’t want to lose that data and not be able to reliably and rapidly recover it somehow.
Yet today with the advent of £99 750GB external drives, how do we backup that precious data, indeed do we back it up? I run my home server with a 4 drive RAID-5 array and so have some protection from disk failures, yet I have had two separate disk failures in the past 2 years. If I didn’t have RAID-5 I’d have lost quite a lot of irreplaceable data. Even so, I am still at risk from destruction, fire of theft all of which would lose my data. As it happens I do keep a separate backup of the critical bits, but that’s at home too. Another factor is that backing up large data sets actually takes a lot of real time whether that’s to Blu-Ray media or even another hard disk.
Now I know people who have vastly larger collections of data than me, boosted by music and movie content which takes up more and more capacity. So now, even a spare 750GB drive isn’t enough as a backup and is potentially still exposed to the same disaster as the main data.
For me, I have taken to uploading my photos to Flickr so that I have a permanent backup, or do I? Actually Flickr make no guarantees that my photos are safe and their T&C’s state that as well. Its a good backup option though, as its unlikely to fail simultaneously (unless the world ends).
Unfortunately, until there is infinite bandwidth and unlimited storage to allow everything to exist in your own virtual datacenter on the web, many heavy users really do need to think about getting a disaster recovery plan in place for when they lose data, rather than if.
