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From: Lyle Sharp
Category: Security
Date: 21 Mar 2006
Time: 22:56:34 -0500
Remote Name: 24.182.111.42
A few weeks ago, I informed a client that a clicking noise from his hard disk was an ominous indication of certain impending death. I recommended a replacement and course of action to take to correct the problem before the system failed. This week, I was called to clean up the mess after the system failed. Several billable hours later, the client has been returned to working operation with several weeks of data missing since the last backup that I performed during our earlier session. This isn't just a case of I told you so. This is a very common business error that many of my clients make. They don't have any plan for backing up or recovering their data in case something like an aluminum platter spinning at 7600 RPMs with a magnetic head floating a few microns over the surface should fail. A hard disk is probably the most unreliable component in today's computers and yet, many otherwise intelligent people never plan what to do should it fail. If you have pictures, documents, or data on your computer that you MUST have access to, then you MUST back that information up and plan on how to get it back into a useable system WHEN your hard disk fails. For my more computer operation challenged users, I recommend an external USB device that images your entire system or can restore it to a previous state with a button push. I then schedule the backups to take place automatically. This works well for one system, but doesn't scale well to multiple systems. For my clients with more systems and more computer saavy, I usually recommend a removeable hard disk set to use as backups for one or more systems. This is a little harder to manage because the disks will need to be changed on a schedule, but will backup any system on a network as desired. The alternative is to send your failed hard disk to a clean room data recovery facility. The cost is $300.00 for the recovery attempt, $300.00 per hour, and $50.00 per 4.7 GB recovered. The recovered files are simply spanned across multiple DVDs and very difficult to return to an operational system. I personally store family photos on my personal desktop. Do they get backed up regularly? Of course they do, along with everything else I store. Could I recover my system if the hard disk fails? Yes, when it fails, I put in a new one and restore last month's system image along with yesterday's data backups. Is this expensive to setup? No, recovering data from a crashed hard disk is expensive. It's just like the old addage, "A failure to plan is a plan to fail". Plan to succeed by taking your data and backup plans seriously.