Loose Ends About Safe Backups

Picking up loose ends about various aspects of helping seniors protect their data by backing up safely:

Last week I told about a client who has a home business and several workstations connected over a LAN. He had three hard drives go bad in a short time on the server that stored his backup data. The first one to go down was a data storage drive. It was removed, successfully cloned, and replaced. Then the replacement went down, and shortly thereafter the main drive signaled that it was about to leave the party.

My client is a bit happier this week. Following my suggestion, he took the two drives with his data on them to an IT professional who has access to the appropriate forensic software. The data was recovered. So far, so good. The next issue is what to do with it. No decision has been made yet, but my client is weighing the tradeoffs of using an active workstation that has a slot for another hard drive as a part-time server. That is, he would install a data drive that all users would have access to, but since this is a low-use station, it would not be burdened with backup chores. I have advised against this policy and think that he should keep a dedicated server. However since I have also recommended that he not even go near the old server until he knows exactly why it started eating drives, his response is that his approach won’t cost anything. That’s a hard argument to overcome - until something else goes wrong.

The important thing here in terms of tutoring seniors is that he has instituted a change in protocol for how he handles valuable data. Procedures that seem obvious to me had not occurred to him. I just assumed that he kept at least the original data and a backup copy. That is what the server was for. But being a rather neat person, he had routinely cleaned up his drive and deleted files after religiously transferring data to the server. So when the server went down, he was left with no data at all. Some lessons are more painfully learned than others. I cannot remember the first time I lost a drive due to a head crash or the phase of the moon or whatever. But the concept of not putting all my eggs in one basket has become so natural I don’t even think about it - and I still lose stuff occasionally! Therefore it is good for tutors to be reminded again that their view of the world and what they think is important is not necessarily what the client thinks is important or obvious. If I had been more alert to my client’s work habits, then I might have been able to save him some trouble with a few simple suggestions.

The message is to avoid being fooled into a false sense of security by a client who seems to be sufficiently computer literate and savvy to survive the various bad things that happen. Clients can adopt the lingo and outward appearances of competence without really knowing correct procedures.

Another client asked me to help him back up data by collecting attachments from various e-mails he sends me, and when I get enough, burn a backup CD for him. The laptop he uses for his work doesn’t have a burner, and he doesn’t want to use an external one, but he wants copies of his work. He could solve his problem other ways, but I am rather pleased that he has come as far as he has, so rather than burden him with additional tasks, I agreed to the trivial task of once a week or so providing him with a service. I burn CDs and then close the sessions. He knows that we could use a rewriteable disc or one that can have more files added in multiple sessions, but he is happy with a collection of partially filled CDs that show where he was at a given time. He isn’t concerned about the fact that I have access to his files throughout the process.

Is this a good solution in general? Probably not, and I certainly did not set out to start a safe archival business, but it is a good temporary fix while he continues to develop the skills he is working on without worrying about everything all at once.

For more in-depth tips on tutoring seniors, see the complete tutorial here. I also have posted a tutorial on elementary decision theory for those who might question a physician’s diagnosis (important for seniors) or anti-terrorist activities (important for everyone) but haven’t had the framework to analyze the data. That tutorial can be found here.