Save yourself from a computer crash landing
It's the digital equivalent of having your memories flash before your eyes in the moments before death, and it came to Gail Miller a few weeks ago.
She powered up her laptop as she'd done hundreds of times, but instead of digitized white clouds and the familiar Windows logo, all she saw was the blue screen of death.
''The first thing that came to me was that I had lost all the correspondences with my father before he died," said Miller about her father, Marvin, a Milwaukee pathologist who passed away in 2001 from Lou Gehrig's disease.
Like almost 70 percent of the Americans who use computers, according to Internet World Stats, Miller had never backed up the data on her hard drive.
''In my mind I thought I wasn't doing really important things," Miller said. ''So I never backed up."
Miller eventually had her information restored, including her letters and e-mails with her father, thanks to the data-recovery company Tech Fusion in Cambridge. But the service cost almost as much as a new computer, considerably more expensive than if she had simply backed up her hard drive on dollar DVDs, which she does now.
''I feel like I've learned a hard lesson," said Miller, who lives in Maynard.
PC Magazine editor Lance Ulanoff blames people's chronic disregard for backing up on the fact that it's not as flashy as, say, upgrading to high-speed Internet. It's also taking precautions against something that might never happen. ''It seems like buying insurance," Ulanoff said.
That insurance, however, has never been more important, as more and more facets of life -- not only memories, but music and data -- have become digitized. At one time, a proud shutterbug might scan one photo and e-mail it to a friend. Now people can upload hundreds of photos from a digital camera onto a hard drive in one operation. But if that hard drive fails or the computer is swallowed up by a flood or fire or theft, those photos are gone, usually never to return.
''I think many people have a false sense of security," said Dan Stolts, chairman of the Boston Area Windows Server Users Group. ''They think, 'Oh, my data's not that important that I have to back it up,' or their backup isn't working.
''Many don't know how at risk they are."
What's to lose? Your entire music collection, perhaps up to 10,000 songs, that you uploaded to your Apple iPod and then threw the CDs away. Or the hundreds of vacation, graduation, or wedding photos that are stored on your computer with no film backup. Or your banking records, if you use an online service. All could be gone in the blink of your computer screen because you did not take a few minutes and dollars to back them up.
Several years ago when people could rightly think that losing a hard drive wouldn't be catastrophic, they could also rationalize that it was too difficult, or costly, to back up their data. But consumers today have several cheap and easy options.
One simple way to back up data is to copy it onto CDs or DVDs, which are very inexpensive. But DVDs hold only approximately 4.7 gigabytes of information, while CDs are an even lower 700 megabytes. If you have a lot of media to back up, that could mean a forest of CDs and DVDs cluttering your home.
External hard drives are a step up, both in sophistication and cost: They connect to computers with one wire, and come equipped with technology that allows users to back up their data simply by pushing a button. They can range from less than $100 to more than $300 for several hundred gigabytes of memory. On Oct. 27, Dell announced that for $99 it will add a second, 80-gigabyte hard drive to two of its desktop computers to mirror the main hard drive, continually backing up data.
But even hard drives are no match for natural disasters or personal ones like a fire or even just a broken water line, if the leak reaches your computer. That's why services that back up your data away from home are gaining customers.
MIT graduate student Stephen Friedenthal's hard drive crashed in October as he was doing a thesis review for a committee that he hoped would recommend his work to NASA. Friedenthal, who also had his data recovered by Tech Fusion, had an external hard drive but backed up infrequently because the device was inconvenient to use. Unlike many hard drives that stay connected to your computer and can fit neatly on your desk, this one had to be reconnected and operated manually.
The 42-year-old Newton resident plans to avoid that problem this time around by backing up his data to the Internet. ''At first I didn't like the idea of having all my information on someone else's computer," Friedenthal said. ''Now I say, why not?"
The process is simple. A customer pays for an amount of space monthly (Ibackup, one of the most highly recommended online backup sites for consumers, according to PC Magazine and PC World, offers five gigabytes for $10, as does Xdrive), then chooses which files he wants to back up and how often he wants it done. That's it. The advantages are that the information is impervious to natural or home disasters since it is kept off site, and it's accessible from anywhere in the world.
The accessibility, however, is one of its drawbacks. Since it is transmitted over the Internet, there's always the chance it could be stolen. Also, if your Internet connection goes down, you won't have access to your information. If you cancel or somehow default on your subscription, Ibackup holds your backed-up information for two weeks and then destroys it, according to Raghu Kulkarni, president and CEO of Pro Softnet Corp., which owns Ibackup.
In addition, backing up data over the Internet is much slower. For example, it takes the basic Ibackup service 16 hours to upload three gigabytes of information, while a hard drive can do more than 10 times that in just over two hours. And Internet options offer less storage space.
Despite this, Kulkarni said that about 100,000 people use his company's services, and the number is growing. ''After almost every natural disaster we see an uptick in signings," Kulkarni said.
Apple's .mac service offers free backup as part of its $100 annual fee, although it makes available only 1 gigabyte.
Experts suggest a strategy that includes a combination of online, hard drive, and DVD backup, so that if one component fails, all will not be lost.
''Consumers have to pay more attention to the different ways they're backing up," said Melissa Perenson, an associate editor at PC World magazine. ''It's not backup if you get a virus on A and B gets hosed at the same time."
Professional photographer Dana Giuliani owns several hard drives and has shelves full of DVDs. He is so concerned about losing images that he brings a 30-gigabyte drive with him to events so he can download from his camera's memory often.
Giuliani, from Medford, has what he considers a sound backup plan. But his high-powered hard drives have only so much space and he still needs to purge pictures periodically. And unlike photo negatives, which are a nearly perfect storage medium, DVDs don't last forever. Cheaper ones fail in 10 to 12 years.
Because of scenarios like this, companies are working so Giuliani won't have to rely on a flimsy piece of plastic much longer.
''People don't want to erase anything," said Pat O'Malley, senior vice president at Seagate Technology, a leading hard-drive manufacturer. ''They just want to leave it in their device. So I think that's where [the technology] is going."
In the late 1990s, a gigabyte was considered a lot of space. But Seagate recently introduced an external hard drive with 500 gigabytes of memory. In a few years people will be talking in terabytes, which are 1,000 times larger than gigabytes.
Google's Gmail e-mail service already offers more than 2 gigabytes of space so a user might never have to delete an e-mail, and its capacity grows every day. Websites like Shutterfly and Streamloaders offer unlimited storage of digital media in various formats.
O'Malley thinks the beefed-up memory could be immediately useful in digital video recorders offered by
''When they were rolled out they had 40 or 60 gigs of memory, now they have 160," O'Malley said.
No matter how fast the technology grows, however, backing up information will continue to be the least glamorous aspect of home computing, and one that people will have to stay on top of.
''I'm lucky, because I'm kind of a geek when it comes to keeping my computer up to date," Giuliani said. ''But most people are running on luck. My wife has her PhD and I'm always reminding her, 'Make a copy of that.' "
