And The Data Goes Poof!

Remember the other day when I wrote about my network drive not working and that LaCie was sending me a new part to see if we could make an easy fix? Well the part came today and I made the replacement: no dice. Back on the phone with tech support.....

After a bit of a conversation and a few more quick tests, the tech guy determined that the unit was going to need to be sent in for work. The worst part: it was going to come back wiped clean of all my data. Thankfully, I've got a backup for this device so that data loss is minimal, mostly a week or two worth of podcasts I hadn't listened to yet; oh well. The bigger loss is my time, both in trouble-shooting this problem and in getting all the data restored once the device comes back.

Let this be an example and warning to all: you can never have too many back-ups! If you care about the data and consider it valuable and irreplaceable, do yourself a favor and invest in some kind of minimal backup. Get an external hard drive and a program like SuperDuper! so that you have at least one extra copy of your data if something goes wrong.

The level of ambition and redundancy in any given back-up scheme is a function of how paranoid you are about your data. For example, getting an external hard drive and making a copy of your computer's hard drive is great in that it provides a safe copy of your data when your hard drive dies (it will happen, sooner or later). But what about a fire? If the external hard drive is sitting right next to your computer, they both can get burned up. Or what about more global disasters like floods or tornados? Very quickly you can up end trying to manage multiple back-ups and keep everything sufficiently in sync. Even if the data is valuable, we all have a life to live and don't want to spend it messing with the tools we have for our convenience.

In our case, the back-up scheme isn't too crazy: the LaCie device has two hard drives in it that are always exact copies of each other. My first back-up rule of thumb is that any data worth having should exist on more than one physical drive because all hard drives will fail sooner or later. In the case of the LaCie device, two drives inside the device mean that I can put any data I like on that device and my data will be safe from a single drive failure. The data is not safe from theft of that device, fire, or failure. So, taking my paranoia to the next level, I have an external drive that I use to backup the LaCie on a semi-regular basis. The problem with "semi-regular" is that it happens when I feel like it and it is a pretty manual process. In this case, all the data that is lost will be from the last time I backed-up the LaCie a few weeks ago. Also, I use SuperDuper! to backup our household computers to the LaCie device every evening. So, as you can see, sadly, the bulk of my backing-up centered around this device that failed.

Lessons learned from all of this?

1. I don't think I'll be buying another LaCie product anytime soon. Technical support has been great but I have problems with the device everytime the power glitches and now this. I was hoping that by using a simple RAID 1 device data recovery would be easy and I wouldn't be dependent on a particular vendor for the safety of my data. It looks like that is not the case.
2. In an ideal world I'd replace the external hard drive I use to back-up the LaCie device with another LaCie device. I know this contradicts the above statement and we don't have the money for another external device so it isn't going to happen soon. A second device would have allowed me to removed the hard drives from the broken one and send it for service without any data loss (much less my time).
3. Off-site backup for valuable data is something we're looking into. We're looking into one now called Mozy. I haven't figured out what data we'd put up there but I'm thinking we're going to go for it. The big catch for us is that our upload speed is slow enough that it will literally take months for us to get all our valuable data uploaded. The good news is that once it is there, it should be safe from virtually all problems. This service is the last resort in case our house is destroyed; neither we nor it seem set-up for on-the-fly data recovery for a whole hard drive.
4. I'm looking into getting a cheap uninterruptible power supply for the LaCie device so that if our power does go out, I can shut the unit down safely and not have to mess with all the problems it has been giving me.