dennis' blog

I did just that until about a year ago. In that past year, I’ve had 3 hard drive failures:

• HP Pavilion, vintage 2004: this was my main work PC. It literally blew sparks one day. After that, the power supply was toast and the hard drive inaccessible. We wound up replacing the entire PC, because we could not justify the cost of replacing a hard drive and a power supply on a 4 year old PC.
• Dell workstation 360, vintage 2003: this was my wife’s PC. We wound up replacing the entire PC, because again, we could not justify the cost of replacing just a hard drive on a 6 year old PC.
• Dell Inspiron, just under a year old: this is my main test PC that I run virtual machines on. I had to repartition and reformat the drive, then reinstall the operating system. It appeared ok for a short while, then started failing again. It turns out that there were memory problems. Dell eventually replaced the RAM (another long story there, but not today) and now it seems ok.

I thought I was pretty good about back ups before all of these problems happened. Yet after so many failures in a relative short amount of time, you really find out whether your backup strategy is working or not. Mine clearly was not. Some drive images were several months old, some data wasn’t being backed up frequently enough and some not at all. I lost a lot of time due to:

• Having to reinstall Windows and/or numerous applications from scratch
• Getting data back from various places (source control, external drives, network)
• Simply not realizing what I did and did not have backed up.

At some time when we were discussing this mess, my boss Stephen said something to the effect of “If you don’t have a full drive backup, you don’t have a backup.” I now realize how right he was — don’t tell him! . 

Now I use scheduled backups on my daily working PCs and created a schedule in my Outlook calendar to remind me to back up the other PCs every two weeks. I bought a couple of big external drives (750 GB and 1.5 TB) and now have enough room for multiple drive image backups for each PC, so I can “roll back” to any of several drive revisions.

There are so many benefits to doing full drive image backups:

• You know you have everything backed up. No more “did I backup X before this crash”?
• It’s inexpensive: hard drives, including ready-to-use external drives, are cheaper than ever before.
• It’s easy: most drive image backup software today has true “set it and forget it” modes, with backup scheduling.
• Most drive imaging software today allows you to mount a drive image as a drive so you can view and retrieve individual folders and files from them, so drive image backups can also serve as data backup (within limits).

Remember to actually test restoring of your backup images, so the first time you try it isn’t after a drive failure. That’s a bad time to find out that it doesn’t work!