Backups, Schmackups
I really don’t like backing up my computers. See if you agree with my reasoning:
1. Doing a backup is a big user of my time. I have many better things to do. Work is piling up. Backups are slow.
2. If I break down and do a backup, I end up with stacks of discs that go in a box and I will likely never see again. That seems wasteful somehow. Those discs aren’t that cheap, and a penny saved is a penny earned.
3. There is just not that much important data on some of my computers. I have CDs that came with the computer so I should be covered.
4. I can’t remember the last time I had a problem with my computers. I start them, they run – just like my car.
Oh! I also don’t like car insurance.
You pay this enormous sum of money year after year, and day after day you drive to and from your home safely and avoid accidents and that money is just gone. Talk about waste! That is…
Until you have an accident; probably wasn’t even your fault.
It may be one of those ‘life lessons’ we all have to go through, because until you have that accident, you don’t realize what you had… and how long it will take and how much it will cost to get back there… if you even can. It will never be ‘exactly the same’.
In our digital age, business computer users have more communication electronically than we do on good ol’ paper. Your computer is full of unique emails, documents, data, numbers, contracts, agreements, manuals. Not to mention the applications you have that have, most of which have surely been patched, upgraded with electronic downloads, reconfigured, customized. Top that all off with device drivers for printers, networks, USB devices and displays that were automatically updated and aren’t on some disk somewhere.
A daily full backup should take about 15 minutes and cost about $4.00 in discs. If you just backup the changes since the last time you did a back up (called an incremental backup), less than 7 min and about $1.00.
Reinstallation of Windows XP, with drivers and all the security and application patches from Microsoft will take 345 minutes – assuming you have a very fast internet connection. That’s just XP! Add in the time to load your applications. Oh, and your data is STILL gone. One-of-a-kind pictures, email addresses, correspondence… the list of what you lost is huge.
Sure, there are data recovery companies out there. Costs to recover data from a crashed hard drive starts at $1,000 and usually ends up $4,000-$5,000. None of them will guarantee you’ll get all your data back. Sometimes it is just gone. What value do you place on irreplaceable data/images/documents stored on your computer?
I haven’t even touched on the cost of down time while you’re rebuilding your computer. All that time you thought you were saving just came back with interest due.
So, while I hate doing backups, I hate even more having to spend more time and even more money rebuilding them to some partial state of functionality again. Diligently, regularly, I do my backups – knowing that if something does happen, I’ll be prepared.
If you’d like to revise or improve your own backup plans, I hope you’ll call me at 612-710-2617 or email me at bhayes@criticalcomputer dot com.
P.S. I also pay my car insurance, though I wish it was only $1.00 a day.