If you or someone in your household don’t back up your computers, you will eventually become one of those people who say “My computer crashed and I lost all my files–and precious family pictures. I am paranoid about computer backups. Not that I am that good at it, but I’ve tried to build redundancy into my backup system because I have had drive failures when I thought I had a backup. For that reason, I use a service called CrashPlan, which is free for a single users, and reasonably priced for a family plan. You don’t need to remember to back up (for the most part)–it backs up automatically in the background whenever the computer is on. I said for the most part, because you need to leave the computer on and connected to the internet for long enough periods that the backup can be completed.

For me, CrashPlan isn’t enough. What if the internet is down? What if CrashPlan were to go out of business? There are many reasons that any single backup point could fail. I have a sort of complicated set up. Because I am paranoid, I not only back up to CrashPlan, but I have two external drives connected to my network. I have two because my first drive ran out of room, so I got a newer, larger drive a couple of years ago. I still use the older drive to store photos and videos because the hard drive of my main computer no longer has room. 

My second external drive is used to store backups of my web site. These files are too large to store on my computer or my original external drive. I also back up my desktop computer to that drive. That drive is in turn backed up to CrashPlan, so there is some redundancy.

I recently discovered that my larger external drive was not working. I haven’t figured out why. Fortunately, by desktop computer is backed up on CrashPlan, and my web pages are also backed up by by web host. This is why I’m paranoid about backups, and why I think it is essential to have two independent backup systems. Also, backups should be automatic. Otherwise, you will forget to do them, or you will be busy at the time you should be doing them. Backing up my website files is not automatic for me, and I hadn’t backed them up since February. I don’t know how long my external drive has not been working, because I hadn’t checked since I downloaded my website files in February. Fortunately, I have the web sites backed up on line, and my web host backs them up separately.

I got my drive working again, and I backed up my website files again. I also made myself a calendar reminder to it monthly. Since then, my backup drive has stopped at least once more without warning. I got it restarted, but I can’t rely on it without checking periodically. I also discovered that the the program I use to back up (in addition to CrashPlan), which is supposed to send me an email when a backup fails, is not sending me the warning emails. That would have alerted me that the backup drive was not working. 

Wonder why I am paranoid about backups? What would happen if your hard drive failed tomorrow?

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