At the beginning of every boxing match, the referee will typically tell the two combatants:
“Protect yourself at all times!”
This always seems incredibly obvious, I’ve seen quite a few boxing (and now mixed-martial arts) contests where a fighter stops when they hear the bell only to get their own bell rung by their opponent who kept throwing punches (or kicks). It’s not enough to play by the rules — you have to be proactive about defending yourself.
Similarly, when people buy a computer, most folks think that if it works, it will work in perpetuity. Many people don’t think, “Gee, the hard drive where I keep all of my digital photos might fail!,” they simply expect things to work. Reliably.
Every geek who works with computers knows that consumer-grade computers (even Macs) are not guaranteed to last forever. In fact, every component comes with two numbers associated with it: the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and the MTTF (Mean Time To Failure).
That’s right: every component in your new computer has a “death date” associated with it.
So even the manufacturers know the components in a computer won’t last forever… and believe me, they scope their warranties accordingly.
That said, geeks like myself are always getting panicked phone calls (or IMs) from friends & family members who have computer problems. And the worst of the lot is when people lose all of their data when a hard drive fails.
Of course, many geeks preach the gospel of backing up your data, but many people feel they can’t afford to buy a backup hard drive. But believe me, it’s worth it. Your collection of MP3s you’ve had for the past five years… how hard would it be to get all of those songs back? How about those digital photos you’ve taken for the past few years?
Don’t ask yourself how much a backup system will cost. Instead, ask yourself how much your data is worth. You might be surprised at how important it is to you.
So why am I ranting about the need for backups?
Well, I have been using my Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0Ghz) for recording HDTV shows over-the-air, including Redskins games as well as all of my favorite network TV shows like “Lost”, “Heroes”, and “The Office”, and that machine’s boot drive (the drive that actually holds the operating system which is needed to start the computer) FAILED.
“He’s dead, Jim”
Even worse, while medicated up and sick as a dog (remember — I’ve had the flu twice and the machine died during my second bout with plague!), I tried to fix the computer and wound up tearing the connector off of one of the (proprietary?) SATA cables in my G5 that connects the hard drives to the computer. Oh, and for some mysterious reason, video stopped working. So I died the math and realized that the fastest way to get back online was to buy a refurbished Mac Mini from the Apple Store.
The good news was that I had invested in two 750GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drives, as well as about 2.5 TB (that’s terabytes!) of Western Digital Caviar hard drives (even though the drive that died was a Western Digital Caviar SE16 
) in AZIO eSATA/USB cases. I kept all of my iTunes music, my MP3s, recorded TV shows, and so forth.
There is no way I’m going to lose this video clip of the Brunnell-to-Moss bomb that killed the Cowboys. No way.
When I upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard, I started formalizing a backup strategy. However, Time Machine lacks the ability to “plan” backups, so I used a combination of Time Machine (to back up my boot drive) and Backup (only available to .Mac, errr, MobileMe users). I would not consider Time Machine or Backup to be world-class solutions, but they gave me peace of mind, and when the system finally did give up the ghost, I was able to restore my G5’s environment on the Mac Mini via the Mac OS X Installer, which lets me say, “Hey, I have another computer that croaked… just copy over every thing from this backup and use that as the basis for this fresh new install on a different computer!”
So why did this come to mind today?
Today is “Restore Day” for all of my videos, photos, and music. I’ve been sitting here watching data copy over from backup drive to the new system, and given that I have multimedia I think is priceless — like photos and videos of family members who have passed away — I realize how lucky I am that I decided to invest in backup drives.
So take it from me, invest a little in an external hard drive, and even if you are just drag ‘n dropping copies every so often to back up the files that important to you, do it! If you have a Mac, then all the better: leverage Time Machine (or a Time Capsule) and back up your data. You will hate yourself if you lose everything, and believe me, I know I would be contemplating seppuku or self-immolation right now if I had lost all of my multimedia files!