Monday, January 10th, 2005, 3:35 am
Backup Fallacy
Hard-drives are far more fragile and error-prone than computer users imagine. From my survey amongst friends and colleagues, it appears that almost nobody retains a remote copy of personal data. If errors were ever to strike, the result would be devastating. I have seen people losing their in-progress Ph.D. thesis, Masters dissertation and work documents. All it takes to prevent such tragedies is one of the following routines:
- Backup on CDR.
- Backup using a remote FTP server. To store only the recent differences, search by the
last modified
field. - Free software packages like Rsync.
- Occasional hard-drive to hard-drive copy/mirror (volume sharing, redundancy).