I've been running scared lately. The thought of a hard drive crash on my system terrifies me. Let me explain. I believe in backups. I am fanatical about them. Until about a year and a half ago, while I was using my previous computer, I always made sure every computer I bought had a tape drive. And, if it didn't, I would add one. But as drive capacities grew, and things like portable drives became more popular, it seemed that the affordable tape drives started to disappear. The remaining affordable models either used the floppy interface (pulllleeeeze) or a separate interface that came with the drive. Throughput on those cards was much faster than a floppy, but still slow when you consider the capacity of the hard drive to be backed up. The standard formats in the industry QIC-40, QIC-80, TRAVAN I, TRAVAN II, ... seemed to change daily, depending on what capacity was needed.

Heck, I thought I had hit gold when I found a 10GB Sony Superdrive, and even that would not back up my entire system on a single tape. So, I would create a "master" backup of everything as of a specific point in time, then create "differential" backups each day of the week, until the end of the week, where I would again perform a full backup. That worked quite well, but in the back of my mind, I worried about the media... what would happen if I ever needed to actually restore anything.

I had the opportunity to do a few restores during the last few years. Some were more extensive than others. And there were times when the restore would fail, usually because the tape had been worn (what other reason, other than drop-outs due to wear can be cited). It was a scary proposition at best, and it was about to get worse.

When I bought my new machine in December 2000, it came with Windows ME. For whatever reason, the drivers for my Superdrive didn't want to work properly with ME, and Sony was no longer supporting the drive. So, I left the tape drive connected to the server (where it still sits to this day). And at some time during the past year, the little bugger just refused to work with my tapes. The tapes cost a fortune and are difficult to find. So, I've been doing without a backup for over a year.

Until my birthday. I was in the computer store and saw the Veritas Backup Exec program, which apparently is being marketed by a company called Stomp. The program has been renamed, and is now called Backup MyPC. I wanted to buy it on the spot, but was unsure about a couple of things... like, did it backup to CD-R disks as well as CD-RW, and could you mix disks during a backup session. The store clerk was kind enough to let me get to the product website from a kiosk in the store. There, I found that Stomp offered a 30-day trial of the product. So the decision was made. I went home, and decided to download and try the "free" version, then return to the store to purchase the full package if all went well.

The initial backup was called the "Disaster Recovery" backup. It included the creation of two diskettes that could be used to reboot the system in an emergency. The initial backup also included a comprehensive backup of the entire computer. In my case, there were 7.8GB of data to be backed up. I wasn't in a hurry, so I popped a CD-R disk in the drive and walked away. When I returned, the disk had been popped out of the drive, and the program was asking for another disk. The entire first backup seemed to take about 5-7 minutes per 700MB CD-R disk. But since I wasn't sitting there the entire time, it took significantly longer. I used 10 disks to do the job (there was some compression going on), and then the program asked to verify the backup. So, the 10 disks had to be fed back in, one at a time, until all 10 had been scanned.

The total process, in actual elapsed time (remember, I wasn't hanging around the machine) took 18 hours. Today, four days later, I ran my first differential backup. That process was run on a brand new, unformatted, CD-RW disk. Total time to format the disk and backup 554 files (168MB) of data was 27 minutes, including verification of the data after the backup.

For the first time in a long time, I feel good about the safety of my data.


P.S. The very next day, Internet Explorer on my WIFE's PC stopped working. Even reinstalling the software did not help. I finally found a technical note on the Microsoft website that addressed the specific issue (inability to access secure sites), but their recommended fix didn't work. Finally, remembering that our two newest PC's were purchased at the same time, I searched for the affected files on my PC, found the one I needed, and manually copied it to my wife's computer. After reregistering the dll, this fixed the problem (it only took seven hours of mucking around), but left me with the realization that her PC will also need to be backed up.

I guess I'll be making that purchase sooner than later.