This post is a friendly reminder regarding the importance of regularly backing up your computer. Data disasters happen. Are you prepared?
I recently had a chance to put my backups to the test. I have a secondary computer here that I use for games, fun, and general messing around. I use it a few times during the week, but mostly on weekends. This week, I happened to fire it up on Tuesday evening. My attention drew elsewhere after initially pressing the power button. When I returned to find it hung on the disk detection screen, I knew there was a problem.
On this PC, I used a RAID 0 array for the C drive. For my non-technical readers, RAID is a technology that lets you combine multiple hard drives for either speed, data redundancy, or a combination of both. In my case, I used RAID 0 to combine two physical drives into one logical one. Basically, this means the operating system and applications consider the two hard drives to be one. The advantages to RAID 0 are that it lets you combine the capacity of two hard drives and increases disk performance, generally, by a noticeable amount.
The main disadvantage to RAID 0 is the fact that if one of your hard drives fails, then the data on the remaining drive(s) is useless. This is so because RAID 0 splits the data, like your videos, pictures, songs, and operating system files, between the hard drives (two or more) in the array. If part of the data is gone, like when a hard drive fails, you're toast.
Aware of the data loss risk, I used RAID 0 on this computer for the disk performance improvement. Having made the decision to go with RAID 0, I knew regularly backing up the C drive would be important. Keep in mind, regular backups are important regardless whether or not you are using RAID. I believe it's especially important when using RAID 0, however, because this level of RAID does not provide any data redundancy. Other levels of RAID do and I'd recommend them for storing important data. I won't go into the differences here, but you can check out the Wikipedia articles above or do some general Internet search to find out the benefits of RAID.
The drive that failed was a Western Digital Raptor Raptor 150GB. When a hard drive fails, it can be time consuming to track down exactly which drive is the culprit in multi-drive systems. I had a good idea which one was at fault because the hard drives in this system are in individual trays, each with their own indicator lights. The light on the faulty drive was lit solid when the computer was trying to detect the installed hard drives at startup. To verify this drive was bad, I removed all other hard drives from the system and downloaded the Western Digital diagnostic tools from their site. Each hard drive manufacturer generally has a similar tool they offer for helping your identify hard drive problems. I ran the tool and it verified the drive was bad. Check out the screen shot below. I ran the full scan, like the software suggested, and eventually received another status code (0222 & 0225) indicating the drive failed.
I replaced the drive a few days later with an updated Western Digital model. I've had good luck with Western Digital in the past. One friend of mine has sworn them off completely. Why go back to a manufacturer that failed on me? The simple fact is standard hard drives are mechanical, and thus will eventually wear out and fail, no matter who made them. I, for instance, tended to avoid Maxtor drives before the company was bought by Seagate. Ask ten tech guys what their favorite brand of hard drive is and why and you'll get ten different answers. It's a lot like asking someone about their favorite kind of car.
For my backup solution, I chose to use Acronis True Image Home to back up to an external hard drive. I started using Acronis True Image a few years ago when it was at version 11. They recently released version 2010, which is what my latest backup was created with. I've used Acronis software many times at work to backup and restore data to various machines, but this was the first time I had to use it to recover personal data that would otherwise be gone for good without a reliable backup. After booting the PC from the Acronis recovery CD, I selected the backup archive on my external hard drive and chose to restore it to the new internal hard drive. About an hour and a half later, I saw the message below.

Even before I started the restore, I was confident I'd get my data back. It's always a relief to see this screen, though! After this, all it took to getting back to normal was removing the Acronis CD and restarting the computer. Everything was back to normal.
Lessons learned:
I got lucky because I took the time to set up a backup schedule and made the necessary adjustments to it throughout the years to make sure backups were getting created successfully. My backup solution, which was a USB external hard drive plugged into the computer I was backing up, worked out fine in this case. When creating backups, however, you need to consider all possibilities. Instead of an internal hard drive failure, where would I be now if the house caught on fire or if someone stole all my computer equipment?
With the wide availability of high-speed Internet service, many online backup service providers have emerged. Their goal is to back up your data, encrypted over the Internet, to a secured data center that's protected against fire/flood/theft (hopefully!), rather than an external hard drive sitting no more than 6 feet away from your PC.
Advantages to a service such as this include:
- Safe, offsite storage of your data.
- Having your data available on any Internet connected PC, secured by your account credentials.
- The ability to retrieve older versions of your files (this varies by service provider)
There are some disadvantages, too:
- It can take a long time to back up all your data over the Internet.
- Limitations of the service provider, such as storage limits or platforms supported (Mac and Linux not supported by all).
- Cost, which is usually a monthly or yearly fee.
- Doesn't back up your entire computer (just photos, documents, etc.)
- Generally limited to one computer backed up per account.
Despite the drawbacks, I think I'm going to look into a service like this. It's one thing to lose the hard drive of my secondary PC. I'd be pretty unhappy, though, if I lost all the digital photos I have from the last ten years or so. If I subscribe to one of these services I'll post a follow-up.
I kept the geek level to a minimum in this post so all readers, regardless of computer skills, can understand the importance of backups. If you have a technical question, feel free to ask it in the comments.