Disaster Recovery

Last spring I moved from Detroit to LA and after unpacking my computer I realized that my backup was totally damaged. Although I had one of these fancy Western Digital external hard drives with over 500 GB, it seems that they are not very sturdy.

During the drive from Michigan to California, the backup rattled loosely inside the trunk of my car and the disk was rendered useless. I cannot even describe the helpless feeling I had once I realized that all my work for the past 4 years was lost. Or so I thought…

I immediately contacted some local companies (by the way the Geeksquad was mostly useless and didn’t even bother to suggest where I could seek a more specialized help) after doing some online research. After several hundreds dollars and a couple of days of wishful thinking I was able to recover my data. After this incident I promised myself I will never risk something like that ever again.

After more time spent online, I found several solutions that gave me peace of mind and allowed me to sleep much better at night. First of all, here’s my setup (of course yours might be very different):

• I have 1 desktop and 2 laptops to backup.
• The desktop and one of the laptops are always connected to the web.
• I also have 3 websites and a blog I need to backup at least every other day.

All my hardware has the disks “split” in 3. On C drive I have a partition for the operating system. On D drive I have 2 large folders; 1 containing the files for all my clients and the other with all my work files. The third partition contains the backup of the second partition. I usually keep 10 backups at all times. This is usually about a month old. I delete the rest as I do the backups.

Once a month I create a CD with the backup and labeled with the month and the year.  I also discovered 2 great online solutions that will allow me to backup my web sites and blog files automatically on a separate location. They are:

• Amazon
• JungleDisk

For only pennies per day I have a perfect plan for when disaster strikes and I can recover my files with just a few clicks. I encourage you to develop such a plan and use the links I have suggested. You will thank me in the long run.