With a significant part of Australia under water at the moment, over the next few weeks as the water eventually recedes and drains away, home owners and small businesses will be returning to their homes and offices to find what electrical equipment was left behind has been damaged by water.
Ideally they will have taken anything with a hard drive that contains precious information with them, but when you aren’t given much time to prepare (some towns would have been given more notice than others) it is highly likely that many people will be calling data recovery specialists over the coming weeks hoping that they can recover what is still stored on their hard disks.
What I thought we could therefore do for this weeks post is list a few sources of information that might provide useful tips if you are looking at how and what you can do to salvage your PC that has been damaged by water.
The reality is that insurance (if in place) will cover most of the hardware that has been damaged, so that may result in a new PCs and laptops provided to homes and businesses. However data is never covered by insurance regardless of how much you value it at. I am unsure if you can actually insure data (via an insurance policy). So people will be looking for assistance to be able to get their data recovered.
As a side note, when you eventually make your claim and receive your new equipment, this is the best time to get an offsite backup service in place so that if you end up in a similar situation over the next 12, 24 or 36 months (and we all know that Australia is well known to being prone to natural disasters), then your data will atleast be able to be salvaged so that you can get their businesses started again really quickly.
Appreciating that data is not going to be the first priority for these poor people, if they are small business owners then they will need to start looking at rebuilding their businesses and so finding previous records of transactions, contacts, accounts and books will be important to them.
Tips For Handling Storm-Damaged Hard Drives File corruption and data loss often occur as a result of a flood, fire or other natural disaster. Yet even if business plans, financial spreadsheets or important emails are “lost” or appear to be “gone,” they are most likely recoverable if the appropriate steps are taken from the outset. Ontrack Data Recovery™ (www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au) operates data recovery labs equipped with cleanrooms to recapture data that has been corrupted or seemingly destroyed.
Rain and seawater harm the data stored on hard disk drives, tapes and other storage devices in two primary ways. First, they cause electrical damage, which makes data inaccessible to the user. Secondly, when computer media is submerged in water, water may leak through the protective seal of the hard drive, spreading dirt and other contaminants onto the storage area.
Visit this link to access the rest of the article and tips…
The second article is focused on dropping a cup of water, coffee or other liquid on your laptop. It provides a step by step guide on what to do and what not to do:
If you’re tempted to down a soda, water, glass of wine, coffee, or other liquid while typing away at your keyboard, you may end up paying the ultimate price—liquid spilled into your computer from an accidental knock, a few drips or a dropped cup. If this happens, don’t panic. Instead, follow these simple instructions as quickly as you can to try to salvage your computer.
The third article is US based but still very relevant.
Here are some tips on how to preserve water damaged hard drives so that as a business or individual you can retrieve your data and shorten the time it takes to get your business or life back on track.
And finally below I have two videos which will tell you what not to do if you get water spilled onto your laptop or hard drive. Some really good tips. Most importantly the best thing to do however is contact your local PC technician who can assist you to make the best decision.
Both videos have been sourced via the US. If I find some local ones I will replace them but atleast this gets us started.
Having used Carbonite in a number of capacities over the past two and a half years, I can honestly say that Carbonite and online backup in general is a fantastic resource for anyone who has important information sitting on their PC(s) at home or work. The automation that it offers is simply irreplaceable. I have a couple of hard drives and I will only backup to them every few months. Most people would probably backup to their external drives less frequently. So having something automatically do it for me is brilliant.
Now, over the past two years, Carbonite has made some major improvements to its software and there is plenty more to come. Good products need to stay good and that comes from picking the right improvements to make and prioritising them for your customer base.
Therefore, what I wanted to do in this week’s blog was to collect a wishlist of Carbonite improvements. We could then then look into forwarding these over to Carbonite in the US for their consideration.
So to get the ball rolling, I thought I would start with mine. We don’t allow for comments on this blog, however we do via Twitter and our Facebook page. So if you do have improvements that you would like to see, simply drop us a line via @carboniteau or via our facebook/carboniteaustralia and we will review them and list them here on our blog.
The key improvements that I would like to see include:
Cross Platform Restores
What would be truelly great would be to be able to restore files from your Carbonite subscription to either a PC or Mac. I realise that you can do this for individual files using Remote Access, but if you had a PC subscription and your PC died and you then purchased a Mac, you would not be able to restore that data to the Mac. You would need to first restore it to a PC and then transfer it to a Mac.
Making the service more generic in terms of platforms would make it significantly more flexible and would mean that it would match one of the key selling points of services such as dropbox.
Installation and Anti-Virus Programs
I have provided support for Carbonite since we launched it in Australia in 2008 and the single biggest issue we get from a support perspective is conflicts with Anti-Virus programs upon installation. It would be wonderful if Carbonite could work closer with the key AntiVirus providers to ensure that Carbonite installed smoothly more often and across more anti-virus services.
In many cases what results is a frustrated customer who then blames Carbonite for the issue (when in fact its the AV software restricting Carbonite access to the internet which is causing the issue).
Full Backup Doesn’t Always Mean Full Backup
I am not really sure how to solve this problem but the majority of PC users in Australia using Carbonite are not overly technical. One of the things they don’t quite get with Carbonite is that a full backup using Carbonite does not necessarily mean that every single file on your PC is now backed up. Carbonite allows you to actually do this (back every single file) but it doesn’t do it by default.
The ability to search for files by file type and then back them up by file type would be great. At the moment you need to find the file type first and then you can do this. However this isn’t always practical as most people have no idea what the file extensions will be. As an example Outlook emails files. In many cases Carbonite will pick these files up automatically but not always and then explaining to a customer how to find their email files isn’t that easy. What would be great is for Carbonite to work it out for you.
Finally, transfer from Windows Vista or XP to Windows 7. My understanding and (limited) testing was that the file structure of the ‘My Documents/Pics/Music’ etc in XP and Vista are quite different to Windows 7. So when a customer upgrades to Windows 7 and manually transfers their files across, Carbonite doesn’t automatically recognise them as the same files and so it either misses them altogether or backs them up again. I always tell customers to make sure they transfer them to the exact location they were in XP/Vista. A simple process that does this upgrade for you would be great.
So that is my start. Tell us what other features you would like to see added to Carbonite.
Your WordPress website is made up of the files that contain your theme, eg the code that supports your templates as well as the actual database that contains your data, eg posts.
In order to backup your website you will need to back both of these up. Lets start with your website files first. Contained in your files are
WordPress Core Installation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress Themes
Images and Files
Javascripts, PHP scripts, and other code files
Additional Files and Static Web Pages
If you are actively updating your website, you will be familiar with some of these components eg the Theme is the design template of the site that you or your web designer built or selected for you. Your images and files are what you have physically added to your site as content.
Your database on the other hand contains your posts and a lot of data generated on your site.
Your hosting provider will normally allow you to perform a full backup of your server. This will contain both your files and the database. Its normally a very simple process and if you use a host like say Hostgator, its a matter of clicking one button and the service then lets you know when its done. What it isn’t however is automatic, ie you need to manually run each subsequent backup.
Click on this Backups icon once you have located it in Cpanel and you will be taken to the Full Backups page illustrated bellow:
Another challenge with simply relying upon your host provider is the ability to retrieve and restore your backup quickly. Again depending on your host, it can take time to request a copy of your site’s backup. Its important that you know how to back up your own site files and restore them.
Copy Your Files to Your Desktop
Using FTP Clients you can copy the files to a folder on your computer (simple drag and drop). Once there, you can zip or compress them into a zip file to save space, allowing you to keep several versions.
Try and keep a couple of copies of your files so that if one gets damaged or corrupted or lost, you are not left with no way to retrieve your files. Use a combination of media such as online and local and external hard drives.
Database Backup Instructions
Back up your WordPress database regularly, and always before an upgrade or move to a new location or hosting provider.
Accessing phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is probably the most popular database management system made available by most website hosting companies. You will need to know where it is and how to access it on your website host’s interface or cpanel. Each time you create a website on your server, you are also creating atleast one new database and using phpMyAdmin to do this. WordPress stores all of its information in a MySQL database and phpMyAdmin provides the interface to access that data.
While familiarity with phpMyAdmin is not necessary to back up your WordPress database, these instructions should take you step-by-step through the process of finding phpMyAdmin on your server and then you can follow the instructions below as a simple and easy backup or for more detailed instructions see Backing Up Your Database.
On the homepage of your Cpanel, click on the PhpMyAdmin icon under “Databases”.
Select the database of the blog you want to backup.
Click on Export on top of the page.
Check Add DROP TABLE/VIEW/PROCEDURE/FUNCTION, Add AUTO_INCREMENT value, Enclose table and field names with backquotes in the Structure section. Leave all the boxes unchecked in the Data section.
Check Save as file. If you want the SQL file to be zipped, select “zipped”.
Click Go to download your SQL database to your computer.
So there you have it, how to backup your WordPress files.
This week’s post aims to give you a few real life experiences on what it costs to get your backup back when your hard drive fails.
Our first story comes from Temora Computers who know a thing or two about helping people out with their computers. They quoted an interesting report produced by Google and Carnegie Mellon which found typical failure rates of 2 to 4 percent and a high of 13 percent, in contrast to the less than 1 percent you’d expect based on vendor. You can read the whole report here.
For most of us, these reports simply reemphasize the need for smart practices. Keep your drives cool and, most important, backed up so that if failure occurs, it’s merely an inconvenience and not a financial or emotional disaster.
In their experience it can cost well over $1000 to get your data back and they believe that the more desperate you are for the data, the more it potentially cost you.
One particular customer I remember speaking to had recently purchased a new PC. It was actually designed specifically for her. She had had the PC for just over 12 months when it had died on her. It cost her $1200 to get her data back and 2 weeks of waiting. I think there is another post on this website about it.
My personal experience has been a lot more tame and less expensive. I had had my current laptop for about 4 months when Vista came out with its first major update. Must admit I was on dialup then and it took me a while to get the download. I had waited up all night or this. The download started running but I was so tired that I turned the laptop off to get some sleep. Next day when I went to start it, it wouldn’t start. Cost me $50 to get my data back and about 48hrs of waiting. I got it all back other than my email.
I had taken it back to where I bought the laptop and I think they just felt sorry for me.
I lost everything with the failure of an external hard drive that was 3mths old. Paid $2500, experience was ok but sickening wait for six weeks to see if it was retrievable. I’m now protected by Carbonite
Six weeks is steep and it could knock your business right out. And paying what is probably the 2 X cost of the PC can hurt a lot, let alone the impact it can have on a businesses cashflow. This particular customers moved on to Carbonite, and is now happy and backed up.
Another Flying Solo user wrote:
I heard the DJ’s talking about this on the radio the other day. One of the jocks was quoted $1250+ Gst to retrieve his data.
My external crapped out once also, but luckily my flatmate worked at a computer shop and fixed it at home for nothing. Only took a couple of hours from memory.
This guy was lucky enough to have assistance from a friend. I wonder if he got it all back if what he did after wards in terms of getting some ongoing protection.
For business users who have servers, the following message from Google’s finding is worth reading:
Google’s findings do support one tip: If you encounter a scan error during a routine error check (by running Scandisk, for example), your drive is 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives that don’t show such errors. IT pros recommend replacing a drive with scan errors.
In summary, no matter how much you spend on your hardware, there are never any guarantees. Even though you have warranty on the hardware, the data is not covered and it is most likely that if the hard drive is salvageable, the repair centre will simply wipe it and start again, deleting everything from it. Alternatively, they will call you and advise that if you want the data it will be an extra $xxxx.
Personally I would prefer to be in some control of how I can get my data back.
Following some discussions with one of the 2nd tier banks in Australia, I was advised that they offered their members a software tool called Virtual Safe which enables the user to store a list as well as photo’s of all of their valuables for insurance purposes should they get stolen or the house be damaged by fire or water etc.
Keeping a list, whether it is in soft form or simply on paper is a great idea, because what are the chances you will remember every piece of jewellery you own and how much its costs or is valued for. What about all of your other valuables, equipment and even important documents eg Property Titles.
What occurred to me though, is what good is a list if it is stuck within your house if the house burnt down or on your PC if your laptop was stolen.
Not much good at all.
There are several services available in both Australia and New Zealand that can assist businesses and the every day public to create a register of their valuables. In some cases, they come out and do it for you, sometimes software is involved and for a little extra, they can also store a copy of the list for you. After some further digging, I found plenty of free software that does this thing and several online services as well. One online service enabled you to create an almost anonymous account that you could then use to store details and photo’s of your belongings. Not sure if I would trust it though. The idea was right. Maybe if it was offered by the insurance company I would be a little less suspicious.
As mentioned earlier, keeping the list in the house or on the PC is one thing, being smart enough to keep the list outside of the home is another. Cost effective services such as Carbonite enable you to not only backup your key documents online, they can also assist you to backup any software you are using to create your insurance investory list or register. This is as simple as backing up the database which would include all descriptions and photos. Best of all, with the encryption methods Carbonite implements to secure your precious data, you would know there would not be any funny businesses going on.
