There has been some very healthy commenting on a blog post within the flyingsolo.com.au website this week following an article by David Moore, from I Hate My PC.
You can read the whole article here, however I do have an extract for you.
I’m going to tell you the most important information you’ll ever hear about data backups. They come from the heart, they come from cold hard facts and they come from painful experience.
Data backups are essential, but they aren’t sexy or fun. They’re often done poorly, overlooked altogether or fail when you need them most.
I’m not going to tell you what method to use to do your backups because every situation is different. Instead I’m going to share the facts you must take into account:
1. Your backup needs to involve a person who cares about the data
I’m sure you’ve heard about (and maybe even bought) automatic backup solutions that “look after themselves”.
Why would you believe that? Nothing else in computing looks after itself, so why would your backups?
It is a worthwhile article to read and so are the comments left by many small business owners. Online backup must become a part of all backup strategies in particular those of small businesses.
The case that automated is an over-promise has merit, not so much that you can’t let software run the show for you but more from the point of view that you need to test your backup regularly. Furthermore it is your responsibility to ensure that it is working, that the backups are being made and that the data on the backup is up to date. A person needs to do this, you can’t rely on a PC or software to ensure that this is 100% correct.
Whenever I hear a customer telling me that they will install Carbonite and then all of their backup needs will be totally taken care of, I shudder. Much like anti-virus software, the software can only do so much, you also need to be a little smart about the sites you visit and the information you place on those sites.
Carbonite was developed to help everyday consumers and small business get a backup service up and running simply and easily whether they had a internal or external IT person or not at all. Given its easy install process and automated nature, once installed it will begin the backup process and then keep monitoring files for change.
Your responsibility is to ensure that the correct files are selected for backup and that the software is working correctly all of the time. You can check this easily via the Carbonite Backup Drive. This service sits in your system tray and tells you what is happening. What you need to look out for is the green lock eg
If you double click on this what you need to see is:
With your Backup Drive showing you that “Your backup is up-to-date” you can feel secure that your Carbonite software is doing what it should be doing. You can see below what my PC shows.
The take up of online backup services such as Carbonite over the past 3 years in Australia has been significant. This is supported by the fact that flyingsolo as a small business website has run two backup feature articles over the last couple of months.
When we first started marketing Carbonite 3 years ago and approached flyingsolo to contribute articles they didn’t think that their audience would be interested. True story and shows how far we have come.
The issue of internet plans not supporting online backup services is also a misnomer. True that if you don’t watch your backup you could go over your limits but the data plans in Australia have been growing so much that this would really only affect a few people. My experience has been 2 complaints in the 3 years that I have been associated with Carbonite.
This comment is also very relevant:
Ultimately, if you don’t regularly test your backup, try to recover any or all of the data from wherever you’ve chosen to store it, then you are just giving yourself a false sense of security.
The risk that the data wasn’t backed up correctly is a real risk, but so is that fact that you won’t know how to restore it properly if you don’t practice. You need to know how to add the backup to your MYOB or other files. How to return the files to your Outlook.
The beauty of an automated service is that if you don’t have time to do a manual backup and worse still if you are not backing properly at the moment, it can give you a serious head start. Whilst it might be every PC technician’s ultimate recommendation, Carbonite has saved hundreds and millions of files for every day consumers and business owners all over the world.
This is what gives us the confidence to continue recommending this service.
Its been an amazing week. Twitter and hour use of it to promote Carbonite in Australia has enabled us to access and connect with many businesses that we otherwise would not have ever been able to access. One of those is a @PaulHassing a writer for MYBRC, MYOB’s My Business Resource Centre which amongst many wonderful and really useful services for small business also has a blog that Paul manages.
I have been supporting this blog for some time, contributing opinions and re-tweeting where I think its appropriate in order to develop greater conversation, that is what social media is about.
Well Paul finally decided to find out what Carbonite was about and after some hesitation tried it. Whether it was the product itself, or the fact that he wanted to do be a favour for supporting his blog (probably a combination) he admitted to actually liking the idea of what Carbonite had to offer.
He wrote a blog post about it this week and published it. It received lots of comments which was great. I contributed where I could to provide some independence around the need for online backup. I thought what a great day, what a great outcome for Carbonite, I mean great exposure and all through Twitter.
At around 3pm that afternoon my wife calls me to tell me that the PC/laptop at home had frozen. I thought OK, this has happened before, just restart it. Vista Business has been relatively stable of late but its still Vista and a bit of a time bomb. The restart delivered an error telling me that a registry file was corrupted and that a reboot disk was needed.
Anyway my options where to take it to the PC store where I purchased it, or to re-image the machine and start from scratch myself. The end result would have been the same, other than the PC store probably would have saved some of the local files on my laptop. I took control of the situation and reboot it myself with my CD and after about 3 hours I had a fresh PC, the same PC I had when I purchased it, completely clean.
Now the story about the restoring files to my PC I will cover in posts over the coming weeks, however what really dawned on me is that with Outlook down, thank goodness that I used a cloud based email service for my primary email account. What this meant was that I could continue to answer emails regarding some personal matters that I attend to without having to worry about restores of data etc. I was live and communicating once I had the PC working again and the internet connected.
The second reason I say “Thank goodness for the Cloud”, is that even though I used 3 forms of backup for my files a local disk drive, a 1TB external drive and Carbonite, Carbonite was the only backup that was completely up to date. Everything else is atleast a few months old. The truth is that its current because it does it itself, there is no me getting involved. The automatic nature of Carbonite and online backup services in general really came through for me. I can’t thank them enough.
I do need to use my external drives more often, however my laptop sites in the dinning room of my house, I don’t have a separate study as each room is taken up by children at the moment. We are fast outgrowing our home.
Anyway, I can’t recommend online backup enough after what I have gone through this week. At the moment I am in the process of restoring via Carbonite. We are 23% of the way through and should be mostly done in the next day. That’s next week’s post.
In this blog we talk a lot about the fact that hard drives fail but we haven’t as yet looked into some of the key signs to look out for and the key reasons why your hard drive will fail. So I have done some research into this topic this week and the following article should provide you with a a guide as to what you should be looking out for. If you have ever had a hard drive failure, then it might also provide an explanation as to why it might have actually happened to you.
All hard drives crash. It is only a matter of when. When it happens, the pain it causes is directly related to how prepared you are for it and what options you have to rectify the situation quickly. Backup, backup, backup. We say it each week via this blog and via our tweets. If your data matters to you then you need to do something about protecting it.
Warning Signs
These are some signs to look out for that might give you an indication that your hard drive is having a tough time and might just give up on you:
- Computer freezes often. When it happens, the mouse cursor is unmovable and keyboard input is ignored. Nothing works and a restart is required to recover the computer. This might not be entirely related to the hard drive as sometimes programs on your PC and even your browser can cause this, but you need to look out for it.
- Files mysteriously disappearing.
- Your computer locks-up during booting. Look out for a pattern here because as mentioned above, your PC will freeze from time to time.
- File access slows down dramatically. Saving or opening files simply takes forever.
These are typical warning signs of a pending hard drive failure. When you start to see a noticeable increase in these patterns, backing up your data needs to take top priority. Otherwise you really are playing Russian roulette with your hard drive.
I didn’t just want to leave it here though. Its important to also get an insight as to what actually happens to your hard drive. Here is a little more that I have managed to dig up.
The hard drive isn’t recognized in the BIOS - This could be a problem with the hard drive’s electronics, since the electronics typically are the first point of interaction with your computer’s motherboard. Hard drives also have firmware information on the platters, so you might have a problem with your drive’s read/write heads. This could be the likely reason if your hard drive is displaying the wrong information in the BIOS (i.e. you’ve got a Western Digital 80GB and your computer thinks it’s a Western Digital 500GB).
You might also simply have a problem with your computer’s motherboard. A possible inexpensive solution could be to simply replace the IDE, ATA, or SCSI cable and switch the drive to a different power plug.
Clicking, whirring, and other physical noises – If your hard drive begins to start making clicking, screeching, or otherwise mechanical noises then you you have yet another reason to begin preparing for a crash. There are several reasons why this could be happening. The heads are either unable to find a particular group of sectors that they’re looking for (this is characterized by an intermittent clicking sound), or they’ve become misaligned and are making contact with the platters (screeching), or they’re locked up against the platters. In either case, you definitely don’t want to continue using the drive. Turn it off and leave it off until you can get it looked at.
Whilst mechanical sounds are a good indication of a physical problem, head crashes can also be caused by electronic issues (and vice versa).
The drive is running extremely slowly – The most common causes of this is that you have too much software running or your operating system or computer in general is struggling under the heavy work load. If your drive is running so slowly that it can’t even open a folder to view files, you might also be having sector corruption issues. Also worth noting is that like with the head crash a PC that has grind to a hault is bet turned off altogether. Running the drive might make the problem worse. If your aren’t already backing up, it might be a good time to start. Copy your files using an external drive or online backup. You might even try using data recovery software as it may pull information more slowly from your drive and avoid causing damage.
The more you you are aware about possible issues and what to look out for the better prepared you will be to take action early action. When your system has had a hard drive crash, it will not be able to boot. You may even get a blue screen of death.
Diagnostics
So what do you do when it happens. Here are a few things to check. Mind you if you aren’t technical, then take it as soon as you can to a PC repair shop. The less you play with the better. If you are technically minded, then the following mind give you a hand.
- Check to ensure the power cable is properly connected to the drive.
- Check to be sure the data cable is properly connected to the drive.
- If it is an IDE drive, ensure the ribbon cable is aligned properly. Red edge of the cable is aligned with Pin 1 of the connector on the drive. Pin 1 is closest to the power plug, typically.
- Master/slave assignment is correctly set if this is an IDE drive.
Another step worth trying is checking to see if the PC can even see the drive. If this is an IDE drive, go into the computer’s BIOS and have it auto-detect the drive. If it can detect it, then we know at the very least that we have a working connection.
If your anti-virus provider gives you access to a reboot CD (I know AVG does), reboot and run a scan on the drive. The process will check the drive and the boot partition for viruses.
You might also try using a third-party disk management program (eg FDisk) to view the partitions on the drive. If no active partitions are found, then you have a real problem. You can try a data recovery tool to try and get some of the data back or you can take it into to a professional. Trying to re-partition the drive could cause you to lose all of your data. Speak to someone and get some options.
If you had found partitions, you might want to run a ScanDisk or Check Disk on the drive. Allow it to perform a full scan and fix anything it finds.
PLEASE NOTE, IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING PLEASE TAKE YOUR PC INTO A PROFESSIONAL RATHER THAN TRY AND SALVAGE WHAT YOU CAN ALONE. TWO MINDS CAN SOMETIMES BE BETTER THAN ONE.
What to do with your new hard drive
Once installed, you will need top reinstall all your software. If you managed to salvage any of your data, you can then restore your data. Some people will tell that you should just throw the old drive away, others will tell you that you should destroy it. If it has anything at all personal on it then totally destroy it. There are apparently miracle workers out there who can retrieve data from dead drives. The last thing you want is for someone to get access to your info.
