Seems like you always have the data crash right before you were going to do a backup. Always.

A friend of mine says, “Data that doesn’t exist in two places, doesn’t exist.” I used to add to this rule, “And floppies or Zip discs don’t count as a ‘place,’” but no sane people still use those. I’d say monthly I’ve had to tell people they are screwed.

I’ve wanted to get business cards made up that say, “Data Loss Therapist,” and hand them to anyone who asks, “Well, what do I do now?” But generally, after a drive crash, the last thing people want to deal with is a smart ass. But I read online once (so it must be true) that Drivesavers keeps a therapist on staff that used to be a police negotiator that talked potential suicides down off the ledge. I’m too lazy to look up if they actually do, but even if not, I like the story. But they charge $1,200 to get data back (if they succeed), so a great service for us wealthy types, the rest of you should make you do backups.

A few months back I decided it would be easier for me to take my backup drive into work rather than transferring the data some other way. Sometimes sneakernet is faster than any other method when you’re talking gigs of info. I set the drive on my desk, was looking for some cable or another or taking my coat off or something, when I knocked the drive to the floor. It heard a metallic “ping!” and knew I was screwed. I plugged the drive in, and nothing. Just click click click, like it was taunting me with the data it had just eaten, and reminding you need a backup of your backup, and in some other place than your primary one. One at home, one at work is a good idea,

Now, ostensibly, this was my backup drive, so I should have been mad at the loss of the $100 drive, not the data on it. And while, for the most part, I am sure this was true, I had no real idea what was on the drive. I’d back up multiple computers to this thing over years. Some of the computers didn’t even exist anymore and I had no way of knowing if I’d migrated all those files to a new one. I also know for sure they was some stuff on there I thought too large to make back ups of, like my music collection, since I have the original discs in this case it was only a matter of the time involved with reripping them (can you create a backup of time?). This is still an act of labour I have yet to recreate. Even at today’s ripping speeds, I have too many discs to want to do this in bulk.

I felt sick. I mean, actually sit down and try to move backward through time sick. Every drive eventually fails. It’s a law of entropy that all moving parts eventually break, whether a disc drive or a human heart. Eventually all things must die. It’s not a cheery thought, but a lot of truths are not pleasant.

A month or so back my girlfriend had the drive on her new Macbook go *poof*. Nobody expects a new machine to do this. It happened the weekend before she was going to do a full back up. We’d gotten her a drive just for this purpose, and she’d been using it fairly regularly for another machine, but for various reasons I won’t go into here, the one that failed hadn’t been backed up in some time. She said she was planning on doing it that weekend and I believe her, since that’s probably why her drive failed. That law of data consumption that detects when you are going to do a backup, and makes sure you wished you’d done it a day earlier than planned!

At a previous job, I had a secretary with a dead drive look at me and say, “Well, last time this happened you guys were able to get everything back, so I didn’t see a need for backups.” To me this is like saying, “Well, the last time I was shot I survived, so I’m not really afraid of bullets anymore.” This is the kind of person Darwin is calling home. After this woman’s first drive failure we’d hooked up and additional external drive, made sure she had a functioning floppy (and Zip drive), and had server sharepoints automounting on her desktop. She started crying and said she’d lose a year’s worth of data, everything she’d done on her job over the last year, if we weren’t able to help. I wanted to say, “Well, you’re fired then,” and take joy in this statement and mean it, but less than a smart ass, no one wants to deal with pure evil after data loss. So instead, I pulled that second bullet out of her, and was once again able to save her files. I’m pretty sure the only lesson she learned, once again, is backups aren’t really important.

Thankfully, most people aren’t this stupid. Catastrophic data loss happens to the best of us. Sometimes even more than once. We’ve all overwritten a full folder with an empty one named the same thing, accidently trashed files we weren’t done with, quit out of a program after hours of work without saving first, and trashed our favorite directory of porn because we were sure we had in burned to a DVD. The best of us learn from the mistakes of others, which is why I am writing this. Yes, to encourage you to do a backup today. In fact, there’s nothing else worth reading in this post or this site, so quit reading and go do it now!

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while, but held off, since I didn’t want it to sound like an “I told you so” to the girlfriend, the wound being fresh and all. I hadn’t really told her so, but I know it would have felt like I was pretending I had. And, like I said, I knew exactly how she felt since it’d happened to me. So why am I writing this now? Well, I finally replaced my backup drive, and got a card to connect it with, and as soon as I am done writing this, I am going to make sure I finally get at least one