Remember, It's Important to Back It Up
Nothing
is more devastating at tax time than to lose your records.
Losing all of your business or personal data is one the worst things
that can happen when you need the information for tax reporting. It
happens daily and not just to the other guy. Personal computer hard
drives fail. It is not a matter of "if," it is a matter of
"when." Component manufacturers use a term called "MTBF,"
Mean Time Between Failures, as a yardstick of reliability,
usually measured in hours of usage. Those numbers have climbed in
recent years to the multi-thousands as the overall maturity of
products has led to higher reliability. Just don't tell that
to two recent victims of hard drive
failure in my neighborhood.
Hardest
hit was a laptop user who works from home. The data lost was not
replaceable; it had to be recovered. The hard drive suffered
a catastrophic failure and could no longer be found by the laptop PC.
The only recourse was to send the hard drive out to an Orlando
company that specializes in hard drive recovery.
Depending on the damage to the drive, it may not be able to do the
work there. The company's "clean room" laboratory in
Nevada is used when the platter must be pulled from the unit.
It
isn't a cheap service. The company charges $695 for the first
gigabyte of data, and $145 a gigabyte thereafter, if it can be
recovered at all. The company also charges a nonrefundable $150
assessment fee, even if the data can't be saved. These fees are on
the low side, compared to some of the services available. The fees
for recovery of a PC hard drive can go as high as many thousands of
dollars.
The
other drive failure, while just as complete, had been backed up on
CDs using a software back-up
program that allows using the CD-RW, or CD burner, instead of the
slow, time consuming tapes. The restoration process is not as quick
or painless as it should be, but the data has been restored and, with
only a few glitches, is again in use.
Most
operating systems have backup programs, but typically, they are slow
and limited as to what you can use as a medium. There are many ways
to back up your data and programs. One of the most popular is the Zip
drive. and recently, the rewritable CD has gained a strong
following. The old 3.5-inch floppy disks and tapes have all but
fallen by the wayside as too small or too slow.
Future
programs will allow use of DVD writers as a backup medium.
There are several versions of the DVD format and they may not be
compatible, so DVDs should only be used to back up the unit they were
created on. The advantage
is the huge amounts of data that can be stored on a DVD. There are
optical drives that can also be used.
Having your data backed
up is a smart move.
George Mindling ©
2003
