Lesson Learned: Back Up Early, Back Up Often
Working in a job that deals with technology, you quickly learn the importance of backing up data in the event of a hard drive disaster. Whether it's the girl that lost all of her pictures of her puppy on iPhone because she dropped it in water, or the masters student that's brought to tears after the dissertation he's worked on for months is lost in one fell swoop of the dreaded blue screen of death, we've all seen it, and we all warn others about the perils of not backing their data up.But we never think it's going to happen to us.....
....aaaaaand then it does.
This past Sunday, I noticed my computer was acting kind of slow. After restarting it, and hoping it was just some weird program not-responding kind of issue, I noticed that my computer wouldn't boot up. I started to get a bad feeling about this, so off I went to the Apple Store to see if the Genius Bar could save the day. They plugged my computer into their firewire diagnostic system, and powered the machine on to run some tests on the hard drive.
Low and behold, it failed.
My 8 month old, 15" Macbook Pro's hard drive FAILED.
What?! New computers aren't supposed to have issues! It's a Mac! IT'S SUPPOSED TO JUST WORK!!!!!!!!!
The best was yet to come. After taking a closer look at the machine, we then found that all my data was corrupted.
I lost everything. Every bit of homework I had done, every picture, every movie I've edited, every expensive music composing/editing program I owned, every score I had ever written.
And then the Genius asked, "Do you have a back up?"
My mind immediately turned to the 2 TB Lacie Hard Drive that I had in my backpack. I felt a shining glimmer of hope! "Yes I do", I responded, only to then remember....the last time I backed my computer up was in July.
Oops.
The good new is, all isn't lost. The back up in July means that I will get some (very expensive) software back, and I might be able to recover some files. The bad news is that everything I've done since July 2012 has forever been sacrificed to the Computer Gods that I have so clearly angered.
Only you can prevent forest fires complete data loss.
Like many college students, we all get busy with life and forget to do seemingly routine things that can save us pain and agony later, such as backing up a computer. There are now several durable and reliable external hard drives on the market that offer a substantial amount of storage for a low price, such as Lacie and Western Digital. Some snooping around on Newegg, Amazon, or Micro Center can get you an external for a significant discount. Those of you that are into hardware can save even more money by building your own external if you have an old hard drive laying around. CNet has a great How-To article for those that are interested.
While you really should make a habit of backing up at least once a month, there are several online services for those of you, who, like me, forget to plug their external in.
If you're an Apple user, syncing all your devices together to iCloud not only allows you to share your data between devices, but also allows you to save documents to the cloud while you're working on them. This also stores all your contact info and up to 300 photos in the photo stream. iCloud is free, but you can purchase additional storage for a price. (**I highly recommend this if you like to keep your phone around water...)
Dropbox is also a cloud based storage system that offers a substantial amount of storage for free. While it doesn't automatically save your files for you, you can manually choose important files to be stored on there servers.
For those of you that don't mind keeping your computer connected to the internet at all times, Back Blaze offers automatic continuous and secure data storage for documents, music, and more for a fee. However, it's pricy, and doesn't back up your operating system or your applications. Carbonite and CrashPlan offer similar services, again, at a price.
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