Q: I’m trying to be good about backing up my company’s books, but I’m worried that I’m not doing it right. Are there any common mistakes I should be watching out for?

A: The mistakes are more common than most people realize. Here are the biggest “gotchas” that I’ve run into with customers over the past year:

1. Backing up onto floppy disks

Floppy disks were okay ten or more years ago when that’s all we had to work with, but they should be considered too unreliable for storing important information these days. They are particularly susceptible to being damaged by a dirty or dust filled disk drive, and the magnetic information stored on them fades over time.

If your only means of backing up is a floppy disk then it’s time to upgrade.

CDs, DVDs, removable flash media (memory cards and USB drives), and external hard drives are all much more reliable. High capacity backup tapes are generally more reliable than floppy disks, but they suffer from some of the same limitations, are expensive, and are generally considered inappropriate for consumer use.

2. Improper storage of backup media

If you must use floppies, store them where they won’t be exposed to magnetic fields, dust, humidity, excessive heat, excessive cold, or excessive light. Certainly don’t use a fridge magnet to hold them to the side of your filing cabinet like one lady I know did, and who spent a couple of weeks re-entering her books by hand after a computer crash wiped out her hard drive and her backup was unreadable.

Don’t leave floppy disks on the dashboard of your vehicle where they will literally warp and melt in the sunlight. While a writeable CD might not melt on the windowsill, the ultraviolet in the sunlight will interact with the dye layer in the CD and render it unreadable more quickly than you’d believe.

Do you own a USB thumb drive that uses flash memory? Flash memory is very robust, and I highly recommend it. Just make sure you don’t leave it sitting in the sun or some place where a beverage will get spilled on it (I’m guilty of this). And don’t even think of running a thumb drive through with the laundry – they don’t like that, and I’m on my third thumb drive as a result.

3. Making only a single copy of your backup

So… What happens if you only make a single copy of your data, and the disk or media it is stored on becomes unreadable? What happens if your single backup is destroyed in a fire or a flood? How many hours of manual data entry will it take you to replace your work? Can it be replaced at all? (e.g. Pictures of your kids.)

Make at least two copies of your data when you back it up, with at least one preferably going to a different type of backup media. With my photos, I create three separate copies on DVD. One stays in my office, one goes into a closet in my home (a separate building), and the last copy goes to live with a relative. In addition to this, I keep copies of all of my finished images on a rather large portable hard drive that is only ever connected to my machine when I need to pull a file off quickly (this is faster than pawing through a pile of discs).

4. Migrate your data forward

My first computer, an Atari 600XL with a heart-stopping (at that time) 16 kilobytes of memory, backed up data onto standard cassette tapes. I used to write a lot of fiction when I was younger, and while I’ve still have a few of my old backup tapes stored in a box somewhere, the computer and tape drive itself is long gone. I’ve no way of reading the data and retrieving my old work.

Since the Atari I’ve used 8 inch floppies, 5 ¼ inch floppies, 3 ½ inch floppies, super floppies, (approx 120 MB apiece), JAZ disks (just over 1 GB), ZIP disks (100 MB apiece), QIC80 (250 MB) tapes, and an external SCSI (Small Computer Serial Interface) hard drive to store my data. Guess how many of these formats/devices can be read by a new computer system on the market today?

If you guessed “zilch”, you guessed right.

NEVER assume that the compact disc you backed up onto today will be readable ten years from now. New computers will probably use a more efficient storage media by then and optical disk drives (at least as we know them) will no longer be compatible with their predecessors. Whenever you buy a new storage device, set a couple of days aside for copying your really important stuff from the old format to the new. This way you’re never stuck with data you can’t get at.

5. Software changes over time as well

Software companies are always adding new features to their software, often at the expense of compatibility with files created using older versions of their software or related hardware.

For example, the latest version of the software for my Canon digital camera no longer supports files created with the Canon D30, a three-megapixel camera they sold many moons ago. I know a photo studio owner in Edmonton who nearly had a heart attack after he discovered this problem. Of course, he had also misplaced the disk for the original software, and he had also deleted said software from his system during the course of the upgrade. This left him with almost ten thousand “digital negatives” that he no longer had access to. He was lucky enough to find a third party application that could open these files, and he promptly migrated them over to an open format, in this case, TIFF (Tagged Image File Format).

The best policy is to assume that whoever makes your software of choice is going to screw you at some future date, and to back up your data in as many different formats as the software allows. This way if the application loses compatibility with older files in the future, or, God forbid, the company that makes it goes under or is bought out and the product discontinued (e.g. M.Y.O.B. bookkeeping software), then you’ve set the odds in your favour when it comes to getting at your data.

6. Storage manufacturers lie. All of them.

Remember how CDs were initially marketed as “lasting for life”? Well, we know that was a total bunch of hooey now, don’t we? There have been countless incidents where music collectors have discovered their precious collections physically deteriorating in front of their eyes. And these are factory pressed CDs which are supposed to be much more durable than recordable ones.

CDs and DVDs of the recordable variety seem to have an average life span of 2 – 5 years. This depends largely on the brand, and you get what you pay for in this department. Don’t count on a CD lasting more than five years. Besides, after five years, the next storage format should be out and it will be time to migrate your data forward, right?

Don’t ever believe a manufacturer’s rated life span for a product – you can’t get too paranoid with backups.

7. In backup veritas (verify your data).

So your computer said the backup was successful? Do you believe it? You shouldn’t. If the laser in your optical drive (or the write head in your optical drive) is just the slightest bit out of alignment, you’ll have a backup that only reads in that particular computer. Which won’t help you out at all if the building and computer are destroyed by a fire or carried away in a tornado and your backup media is unreadable in the replacement system. Always verify that the backups are readable, at least periodically, using a different computer.

Perform test restores of your backups as well. It’s better to discover any problems on your own than with, say, some nice fellow from the Canada Revenue Agency standing behind you and drooling on your shoulder.

Keep in mind that the value of the information that you are saving usually greatly exceeds the value of the computer it is stored on. Proprietary business and accounting information may take tens of thousands of dollars worth of labour to replace. Other data, like that picture of your child having his first bath, is literally priceless and is gone forever if your computer hard disk suffers an unrecoverable crash before you have a chance to save your files.

Back up early, back up often, and as Fox Mulder from the X-Files always likes to say, “trust no one”. Set aside some time to test your backups and make sure they’re usable. Backups are one investment that you’ll never lose on.

Sean McCormick
A+, Network+, Linux+, CTT+, I-Net+
MCSA, MCSE, LPIC1