Backups: Do you know what you are doing?

Today, early this morning, I received a phone call from Steven. He's not really a friend more of an acquaintance. His computer crashed. He's a Mac. I'm no Mac expert, but I can figure things out. It's an older iBook G4 14". He ran out of space, so he got one of the these terabyte external hard drives. Actually, it's not a terabyte hard drive but 2x500 Gig hard drive, configured to look like a 1 terabyte hard drive.

Last night his external drive crashed. Could I help him? His friend, the "computer techie" couldn't. He brought his laptop and his external drive. It was a Western Digital.

I took it apart, and connected each drive to my computer. I was able to recover fully 1 drive, and partially the second drive. I couldn't recover everything. Steven thinks that there's at least another 20 thousand photos that I haven't recovered. So he called: Ontrack. They estimated between $1500 to $5000 to recover everything. Steven's going to think about it over the weekend.

All that because his system was configured as: Raid 0, which adds all the drive together to have more space than a single hard drive. eg: 2x500Gb = 1Tb hard drive, instead of Raid 1, 2 hard drives configured to mirror and copy each other, so both are identical in case one crashes.

My Backup

1. Docking station. I paid: $39 Canadian on sale
2. A bunch of naked hard drives. I just bought a Seagate 1.5 terabyte hard drive on sale for $80 Canadian.
3. Today's: 11-Jun-2010. I create a directory called: 20100611, and copy everything to that directory.
4. I do full weekly backups, it takes a couple of hours.
5. No backup software. Just a straight copy so there's no problem with the recovery.
6. I have 4 hard drives that I rotate, so I have 3 month of backups, and can recover from any one of them. I know that it works, I crashed just a few month ago.