Dom Joly, the comedian, knew the minute he tripped over his laptop’s power lead and sent the machine crashing to the floor that his life was about to become complicated. He went, he says, “mental” about the files he lost from his hard drive — including a work-in-progress book, his digital music collection and many irreplaceable photos.
The hard drive is your computer’s cupboard under the stairs: a large, if unruly, storage space full of important stuff. Unlike a cupboard, a hard drive is a mechanical device that often proves to be a computer’s Achilles heel, so you must handle it with care. Joly says: “When I tried to switch on the laptop, I heard the click of death, a whirring noise that didn’t sound good. The hard drive was knackered.” This overtly technical term aptly describes the final throes of a hard drive.
“Most important were all my photos, about 5,000 of them: the births of the kids, first birthdays, dogs as puppies, holidays. No backup: it was a disaster. I was in meltdown,” the comedian says. “My wife was livid, my children were livid, even my dog was fairly upset, as there were pictures of him winning the village dog show.”
Joly sent his hard drive to the data-recovery firm Ontrack, which retrieved most of his files, but charges several hundred pounds. The pictures of the prize-winning pooch, however, had gone walkies. Joly’s plight highlights the importance of keeping computer files safe. Far better to make back-up copies of important photos, documents and music, especially as we grow more reliant on data and tend to pack our valuable digital treasure onto one computer.
Sentiment aside, we frequently forget the replacement cost of our booty. A recent survey conducted by Hitachi found that the average hard drive contains 380 songs, 380 photos, 16 films and 10 video games. “They will have a value of about £700,” says John Fox, its European business development manager, “and that’s increasing all the time.”
For most of us, a further bill of possibly £1,000 spent on recovering data from a damaged hard drive is an unrealistic expense. It is said that pain is the only tutor, but by taking precautions today, you guard against a digital disaster tomorrow. So what should you do? The obvious step is to archive the contents of your computer, either by duplicating them for storage elsewhere or by removing some or all of them entirely. Possible destinations include a second hard drive in your work area, CD or DVD discs, even an online data bank.
Whichever route you take, newer software can automate your path to safety — but first, ask yourself some key questions. How large do you need your treasure chest to be? Look at the sheer size of the files you would weep over if lost. How frequently do you need to update these digital valuables? Monthly, weekly or every time you amend a document? These questions will help to determine the best way forward, as our case studies (right) illustrate.
Murphy’s law suggests that two safety nets are far better than one, as Robert Bray, managing director of the clockmaker Sinclair Harding, found when his company hard drive and CD both failed. “I went through a range of emotions, starting with despair and anger,” he says. “All the technical drawings of our clocks were on the hard drive, and although I’d made backups to CD, they weren’t working either.” He was up the proverbial creek without a floppy disc. So, if you do intend to rely on optical discs as a backup, be they DVDs or CDs, invest in a reliable brand, label them clearly and test to ensure they work before filing them.
In the 21st century, storage is about so much more than damage limitation. The way we live and work today requires flexibility and mobility, having your files to hand whenever and wherever you want them. The holy trinity of a better digital life — flexibility, security and mobility — is what today’s technology can deliver, given a little thought. When you’re on the road, ever-smarter USB thumb drives and impressive online storage services mean that there is no need to lug a laptop around in order to dip into a crucial document.
“I travel a lot,” says Vicki Dickens, a translator from Ashford, Kent. “I don’t always take my laptop, but I do take a mobile phone, an MP3 player and a USB stick. If I am staying with a friend, I can play her my music by plugging it into her stereo, I connect the USB drive to her computer to access my files, and I can transfer pictures of a night out from the card on my phonecam straight onto her machine.” All thanks to the data equivalent of a duffel bag.
Though a USB thumb drive is feather-light, nothing beats the accessibility of online storage. Whether you merely want to upload the occasional presentation from your computer to the web, or intend to build your entire digital lifestyle around internet-based storage services, you have many credible options, among them the impressive diino.com.
Complete online backup for your files is the perfect insurance policy. Even if the house burns down, any computer can still help you to reach remotely stored copies of your tax records. You will, no doubt, sleep more easily for knowing that.
Want to venture into the world of online storage? Ensure that you choose a host with which you feel comfortable entrusting your data. Apple’s iDisk subscribers can be confident that the company is unlikely to go bust, taking their treasures with it, but if opting for smaller firms, assume the worst. Google and Microsoft are preparing online storage services, with GDrive and Live Drive expected imminently. Whether you want Bill Gates looking after your family snaps, or Google’s web-bots crawling through your personal effects, is a consideration you must weigh up.
Whichever route you take, online services should only ever be part of a personal storage policy that’s tailored to your own lifestyle. After all, if you don’t have day-to-day internet access, or broadband fast enough to upload your bigger files, you could find yourself stranded.
Today, Dom Joly backs up everything on a separate hard drive. He also prints out his most prized photos and ensures that his music files and MP3 player are synchronised — in other words, they mutually update each other whenever connected. That way, he enjoys having his valuables with him constantly, and there is less danger of another traumatic data disaster. Once bitten, twice shy, Dom has adopted a new mantra: “Back up, back up, back up.”
Five fixes for storing your digital valuables
1 GREG THE STOCKBROKER Greg is a digital hoarder, with family photos, a huge MP3 collection and home videos rapidly filling up his computer. What he needs is straightforward storage as capacious as the Teletubbies’ tuck tent.
Fix: Maxtor OneTouch 300GB III — £134 from www.microwarehouse.co.uk
Plug-in, USB-based hard drives grow cheaper by the week. They often come with simple software that backs up at the touch of a button and will usually copy a computer’s entire memory, which Greg can reinstall should disaster strike. As stand-alone backup software, Acronis’s True Image 9 (£17 from www.amazon.co.uk) is excellent.
Hard drives vary in reliability, capacity and software. The robust and whisper-quiet Maxtor OneTouch range can hold up to a terabyte of data, but this 300GB model is ample for most families and smoothly synchronises computers at work and home. The bundled software is virtually foolproof.
Doors tip DiskCheckup software (download free from www.passmark.com) gives early warning if a hard drive is dying.
2 PATRICIA THE PART-TIME PHOTOGRAPHER Snap-happy Patricia needs an archive of her work that she can readily display on most computers and keep topped up. She used to burn CDs, but found their 700MB capacity insufficient for high-res photos.
Fix: LG GSA-2166D DVD burner — £53 from www.microwarehouse.co.uk
Traditional, single-layer DVDs will house a capacious 4.7GB per disc cheaply, while the newer, dual-layer type can squeeze in up to 8.5GB. Next-generation DVDs (Blu-ray or HD-DVD) will hold far more. The LG DVD burner writes quickly to all current-generation DVD formats, is practically whirr- and vibration-free, and comes with superb software.
To avoid being overrun by an ever-growing archive, Patricia should opt for rewritable discs, which can be reused several hundred times. Don’t scrimp, a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology advises, explaining that cheap, unbranded discs suffer burn failure rates of up to 40%, while Verbatim and TDK regularly top the quality-testing charts.
Doors tip Avoid exposing DVDs to extremes of temperature.
3 HENRY THE FREELANCE MARKETING CONSULTANT
As a man on the move, Henry likes to travel light. He frequently works on other people’s computers and cannot rely on instant internet access to all his e-mails and constantly evolving work files.
Fix: Kingston U3 DataTraveler 1GB USB thumb drive — £41 from easylaptopshop.co.uk
For Henry, a USB thumb drive is the king of bling in the storage world. By plugging this dongle into any computer’s USB port — unless a security-conscious workplace has disabled the ports — Henry can access a full gigabyte of his precious presentations. A new type of thumb drive, called U3 (see Doors at tinyurl.com/kdknq), will turn almost any host computer, except Macs, into a copy of your own machine. The Kingston’s intuitive software provides quick access to e-mail archives, music and favourites, yet leaves no trace once the solidly built widget is back in your pocket.
Doors tip Always password-protect your thumb drive in case of loss.
4 KATHERINE THE INSURANCE SALES MANAGER
With business booming, she fears the day the water tank bursts and the office is soaked.
Fix: Online storage at datadepositbox.com (1 cent per MB, per month)
Many people store photographs on album websites such as photobox.co.uk, but more sophisticated internet-based storage services provide off-site alternatives for backing up business documents. For up-to-the-minute protection, the super-slick Datadepositbox.com is a surprisingly comforting option. It automatically backs up files that Katherine specifies on her computer, as soon as changes are made. She will also enjoy online access to day-to-day files from anywhere — a safety net should she forget a crucial document at an away meeting.
Doors tip Note the time it takes to upload larger files, and invest in broadband.
5 ANNABEL THE EVENTS MANAGER Flexibility personified, she must meet half a dozen job descriptions, working with several gadgets in one day. If only she could share data files among them.
Fix: SanDisk Extreme III 2GB SD card — £77 from www.picstop.co.uk
A simple, if fiddly, SD card — the most common kind of memory in digital cameras — will provide Annabel with a vital link between gadgets and is probably the most versatile flash-memory format available. The card offers interchangeable data storage for cameras, PDAs, smartphones, voice recorders and many computers, slipping into a slot in each device (where compatible). Annabel could shoot reference pictures or even video clips of a location on her camera, edit them on her laptop, then e-mail the best from her smartphone to the boss without returning to the office.
Doors tip Transferring photos from a digital camera drains its battery. Instead, if your computer has a card reader, pop the SD card in and view the files.
