Alexander's

My girlfriend and I not only enjoy taking photos, but we also relinquish in leaving through old photos. Starting with my grandparents’ youth, over my parents’ high school and wedding photos up to my final year in high school it’s all there on Film.^[1]

Then I got a digital camera and for the next five years there are no more pictures. In 2003 a simple hard drive crash destroyed all my digital photos.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, but it was a valuable lesson.

Hard drives die — preferably when you have important data, looming deadlines and no backups.

Go on and ignore me, but in the last month I’ve personally witnessed the death of five HDDs and heard of four more that happened to my close friends. In one case the main hard drive died. So they tried to restore form the backup, only to notice that the backup disk had problems as well.

I’m very sure that within the next two years one of my friends will loose data due to a hard drive problem. For a scary graph you should look at some figures about RAID reliability.

So within the next two years you might loose your work data, your photos, your music and all the other stuff you take for granted.

Except for sheer luck there is only one way to avoid this — a reliable^[2] backup solution.

I’m not all that great when it comes to backups and computer safety but in the next couple of posts I’ll try to explain what I did to secure my data and why I think it works well (for me).