Hurricane Katrina/What's on your harddrive?

Before I go any further on comments, I first want to send my condolences and sympathy all that have been impacted by Hurricane Katrina. It was a horrible natural disaster only made worse by the lack of slow response of rescue operations by the government. I will leave my opinions at that, and save the rest (or should I say RANTS) for another entry.

But first, a moment of silence............









Ok, perhaps not silence, but the closest thing one can do in cyberspace.


So tell me:

What's on your hard drive?

No, that's not supposed to be a sick innuendo (ok, well perhaps it was, but it did get your attention.)

It begs the question, do you know what you have on your hard drive? Not sure? Think about it for a moment.

Now ask yourself, when is the last time you made a backup? An hour ago, a week ago, a month ago, more than a month ago or are you asking 'What's a backup?'

What would happen if your computer crashed tommorow? Can't imagine that?

Perhaps this would be easier, imagine after you finished up tonight with your computer, you took it and placed it in a timed-locked vault and set the vault to open in 1 day. But wait, imagine when you typed in the time to open, you missed and made it one decade (yeah, I know it's unlikely, but work with me here eh? I'm trying to make a point.) There is no way you could access your computer (or the data on it for that full decade)

Ask yourself what would you miss?

• Access to your email (or access to your email archives that you had stored localy)
• What about your Quickbooks data or your last tax return
• What about those pictures you downloaded from your camera of the last wedding, or vacation you went on. What about the vacation from last year, or even before that, or since you got your digital camera.
• What about that word document you were working on? That 5 million dollar proposal that you spend all night (and the last 6 months working on.) Or the database that you have with all your email contact in it, or the spreadsheet with your budget.
• What about your calendar of all your events for the next decade?
  
• What about all those other small things you wouldn't normally think about, like your book marks, or password lists, and the likes.
  
• And most of all, you would miss reading this great blog (ok, ok, I admit it, this one was a case of shamless self promotion)

Now just think about this for a moment. That's a lot of stuff just in this list I've come up with off the top of my head. It is by no means all inclusive, I am positive there are thousands more. It would create quite the headache if it was all suddenly gone.

Now your thinking, "Geez, I better go make a backup!" which is good. Now your at least thinking about it.

But ask yourself a very important question: Do you know "what" to backup?

In the good old days, it was easy. You backed up everything. It was easy. After all, you could fit everything on 30 floppy disks or so. That was back in the days when harddrive size was measured in megabytes. My first harddrive I had was 5mb (yes, only 5 megabytes) You could fit the entire contents on about four HD (high density) floppys. Man that was easy.

Nowadays you typically don't have harddrive smaller than 40 gigabytes and now there are ones that are as large at 250gb and growning bigger every day. An you know what? It's just like money, the more you have, the more you spend. The bigger your harddrive is, the more space you tend to use.

Now, even with CD writers and even DVD writers, the amount of data to back up is just staggering. By the time you get done with your operating system (call it 100 megabytes) and your office suite (call it another 250mb) and any other software you may have, let's call it easily 1gb of data. And that's not including your data, that just your basic system configuration.

Already there, your talking 2 CDs (700mb each) worth of data.

Now think of it, how many pictures do you have from that digital camera? I know my picture count is getting up to 2000 or so after owning it only a year. Granted all of them aren't keepers, but let's use that for sake of argument. With a five megapixel camera, typically each picture is 3 or 4 megabytes. So 2000 * 3.5mb = 7000mb, or 7 gigabytes. Now your getting close to the size of 2 DVD (about 4.7gb) or a single DVD-DL (approx 7.2gb or so) and that's just your pictures.

Add in your email, contact lists, etc, etc, etc. Not only is it getting to be a lot of data, but it's also getting to be a lot of time.....

So what to do? That will be in the next post. Things to consider when you creating your backup strategy.