The Myth of Backing Up

Tell the truth now…. Are you backing up your computer’s hard drive on a regular basis?  Weekly?  Monthly?  Hmm.  Have you ever backed up your computer?

I bet you haven’t.  And I bet most of the people you know don’t backup either.  Ask around.  I’m not talking about the IT folks at your place of work here --- that’s in their job description, though I could tell you some horror stories, but I’ll do that in another column.  I’m talking about family, friends and neighbors.

Yes, as I suspected.  Nobody’s backing up anything, including you.  PC Makers know it too.  That’s why you never see any ‘backup software’ bundled with a computer --- but oh yes… they all come with an anti-virus package.  A tape drive unit standard equipment on a PC?  Please.

It’s what I like to call “The Myth of Backing Up”.

I caught an episode of HBO’s “Sex and the City” over the summer that illustrates this point.  A distraught Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) is talking to a friend over the phone about how her Apple PowerBook crashed taking with it everything she had ever written for the last several years.

“Did you back-up your work?” her friend asks hopefully.

“You know, you never hear anyone mention the word ‘back-up’ in regular conversation, but apparently everyone is running home at night back up their work in private!” Carrie fires back.

I don’t know about you, but I took that as a “No”.  As I said, nobody’s backing up anything.  Not even on TV.

So why aren’t we backing up?  I mean, don’t we have important stuff on our hard drives?  Finances, term papers, pictures from the new digital camera, even the aspiring Great American Novel.  At the very least you think all of the MP3’s that people spent hours ripping or downloading from Napster would be worth preserving.

The heart of the matter is that backing up your hard drive is major chore.  On the scale of chores, I’d have to rate it right on up there with cleaning the bathroom tile grout with a toothbrush.  People want to use their computer.  They want to do their work, play games, browse the web, and forward lots of joke e-mails to each other.  Nobody wants to fire up the ol’ PC and spent hours backing the thing up on Sunday night.  It’s a pain.

Besides, hard drives are much more reliable now.  With more reliability comes more complacency.  I remember when “MTBF” (Mean Time Before Failure) ratings were posted clearly on drive manufacturer literature.  The MTBF was expressed as the total number of hours the drive was expected to run before experiencing problems.  The saying used to be “It’s not if your hard drive will fail, it’s when”.  Today, I rarely ever hear of a hard drive going bad on a home computer.  Oh sure, Windows 98 may ‘crash’ on regular basis, but I bet (after scandisk runs) it boots up just fine after that.

But… (and it’s a big “BUT”) when computers do lose data, it’s like magic.  It just disappears.  Those bits and bytes don’t exist in our physical world.  “Poof” they’re gone.  We all can tell a story about the time we were working on something important on the computer and forgot to save a document.  It wasn’t pretty.  Now imagine that feeling magnified by 100 when your whole system goes up in smoke.

Scary huh?  Doesn’t matter, you’re still not going to run out and buy a tape drive.  I think you CAN get people to backup their computer though.  All you need to do is to make backing up easy, seamless and affordable.  How?

My solution: You get someone else to do it for you.

It’s not an original idea.  You can check out the @Backup service from the folks at Skydesk.  Microsoft is proposing a similar type of offering with .NET and Sun MicroSystems (and partners) have their ONE initiative.  There’s two ways this would work:

1.  Assuming you have a fast connection to the Internet, your data is backed up to a service when idle or not in use.  Leave your computer on at night and everything you’ve worked on for the day is automatically backed up.  Accidentally trash a few files?  No problem, just sign on and access the service’s web site and copy back your files.  This what @Backup offers.

2.  The Internet is going to be your new hard drive.  You will be accessing your data from a variety of different Internet enabled devices.  If the powers that be have their way we will all be renting software and renting data space as.  It’s software as a service.  And part of the service will be backups.  No muss no fuss.  This is part of the .NET and ONE concepts.

Don’t believe me?  Well, let’s revisit this article in three years or so and see how I do.  Until then, remember the three B’s of computing.  Backup, Backup and Backup.

Until next time,

FatCharley

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