I could say it’s because I’m a DBA and SysAdmin and it’s an occupational hazard, and frequently do. I could also say it’s because I’m neurotic. 😉 But it’s probably the most honest to say, “Because I once experienced a catastrophic data loss…”
For whatever reason–pick one or more above–I’m compulsive about backups of my home equipment. I actually use two different backup programs for different use cases:
- “My house burned down.”
- “I accidentally deleted a file.”
- “My computer is so dead that I can’t boot it to get the data off it, so I bought a new one.”
- “My hard drive died.”
For the first three, just about any cloud-based solution will work. The first product I started using I picked for a highly dorky reason: Neil Gaiman, my author crush, tweeted about it. Crashplan protects me against data loss caused by stolen equipment and burning houses, restores accidental deletions, and when my old laptop died it painlessly put my data on the new laptop. (Okay, yes, I could have cracked the case, put the old drive in an external enclosure, etc. The point is that I didn’t have to.)
However, it’s not really intended for use #4. Well. You could use it for use #4, after reinstalling the OS and all your apps, or putting the vendor image back on and reinstalling your apps, or whatever. However, what I really want for use #4 is something that pulls an image. For that, I use Acronis, which I picked because my office uses it.
Acronis has a cloud service, but my main desktop has iTunes, and multiple season passes of NCIS and Doctor Who and the like, so I’m using 390 GB. I’m a little… iffy… about uploading 390 GB worth of data a second time. I also haven’t compared the cloud storage prices. However, I <3 Acronis as of last week, because my hard drive failed. In my main desktop. The one with all that data on it.
I replaced the hard drive with a similarly-sized non-dead drive, booted it off the previously-burned recovery media, set it to restoring, and went to bed. The next morning, it was like nothing ever happened. Well. I had to reapply a Windows update and recover a file.
So, my point is… Neil Gaiman is hot enough that I buy backup programs because he tells me to? 😉
Seriously, that could have been painful and traumatic, and instead it just ran overnight and all was love and goodness. Because I do backups. Backups FTW!
