Crashes and Backups and Recoveries

I’ve been using PCs for more than 25 years and in all those years I’ve learned that a hard disk crash happens when it happens.  You might have an idea that it’s impending but you can never be really sure.

There are several ways to make sure that your data survives a hard disk crash.  A common (enough) solution with today’s generation of PCs is by using RAID on the PC.  The additional expense is for the second hard disk.  The RAID controllers built-in to the motherboard usually use SATA hard disk drives.  You can also use IDE (also called PATA drives) if you had a RAID card installed in your PC.

The advantage of this method is that with a RAID, you would have a more robust setup for your data, as the data can be stored in two drives (if mirrored).  In the most common RAID configuration for a small office PC or a home PC, the data is read and written at the same time to two disks, and this redundancy means that your data will not be lost even if one hard disk fails.  It is very unlikely that the two disks would fail at the same time.  Very unlikely, or you’re just very unlucky when that happens.

Another hardware solution is to have a dedicated hard disk for the backup.  This can be with the use of an external hard disk connected via the USB or a Firewire port.  This is relatively more expensive than a RAID because aside from the cost of the external casing, the RAID hardware is typically already included on the motherboard and BIOS.  External hard disks are sold at a premium because of the additional hardware/software combination which allows for “one-touch” backup.  In this solution, even if the PC’s hard disk fails, you still have a copy stored somewhere.

Of course, you would have to follow backup schedules religiously for the data to be updated.

Another common possible solution is a backup software, which allows unassisted incremental backup on a regular basis.  This should go well with a second hard disk as repository.  The repository may or may not be an external drive.  The backup can even be on tapes or DVD’s, and it could be backups of folders or files only, a drive, or a partition.

With these solutions, there is security of data in case of a hardware failure.  The remaining downtime would be in retrieving the data, or copying the data back to the computer.