BACKUP (OR) BE DAMNED

Dick Pountain/10:45/05 October 1995/Idealog 15

I'm worried that this column has become too exciting in recent months, and since I'd hate to give anyone health problems associated with over-stimulation, I've decided that this month I'll talk about backing up your datazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..snnrk..unghk..mnmnmn. Sorry, I think I must have drifted off for a second there. No seriously though, why is it that most of us (and I include myself here) find the subject of data backup so crushingly boringzzzzz? After all the data on our hard disks is the only thing that's worth a damn about the whole computer - I can't eat Word 6 but I can sell an article and buy dinner. Yet many of us persist in leaving that data at risk of being dispatched to the great bit bucket in the sky, thanks to hard disk failure, or virus attack, or dare I suggest it untested tape backup systems that fail to deliver when the crunch comes.

You'd think that everyone would be screaming for PC manufacturers to incorporate cast-iron, fool-proof backup into their products, and yet most desktop machines are sold without even so much as a tape drive as a standard fitting. The manufacturers would tell you that this is because they're in a price war, and that punters don't value backup that highly, which goes right back to my original question. 

I've been pondering some possible reasons for this indifference. Could it be machismo? If that were the case then surely PCs would be painted Ferrari red, not beige. As hazardous occupations go, sitting at a desk wiggling your fingers rates fairly low on the scale, RSI notwithstanding - in fact a sewing machine offers greater risk, since that at least can drill holes in the back of your hand. To inject a little danger into life with your PC, either lick your finger and stick it in the power socket, or forget to back up your hard disk... Somehow I don't think so. A pity though, for if this were true then I could make my fortune by selling a new game, a cross between Doom and the Datacrime virus, which wipes your hard disk if your character gets killed. 

Another possibility is some sort of deep-rooted psychosis. Perhaps in the second sub-basement of the Id, stuck in the cubicle between "Kill your father!" and "Rape your mother!" is a routine called "Lose all your data!". I doubt it. It couldn't be that we are just plain careless? Along comes the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, saying in soothing voice "I don't want to eat your data, I just want to play with it for a while..." And we believe it every time. If Ford made a car without door locks we'd think it mad, but PC manufacturers do the exact equivalent all the time.

It takes lots of knocks to teach you the value of backup. My first unforgettable knock came when writing a review for PCW back in 1981, on a twin floppy CP/M machine. After writing all morning I got the ultimate dreaded message "BDOS Error on A: Bad Sector" which meant the floppy I was saving to had died, and with it my article. I wept for a while, I chewed carpet for a while, then I wrote the whole damned thing again and every  word was like a dagger thrust. Did I learn the lesson - well sort of. Not well enough to prevent me some years later having to retrieve a Wordstar document from RAM, by trawling through with Debug, or years later still from reclaiming a large programming project as raw disk sectors using the Norton Utility (having inadvertantly saved an empty document over it).


Nowadays I have my text editor set up to automatically save every 100 words or 2 minutes. Which isn't enough - I then copy the hard disk file onto a floppy in A: every few minutes (I have an icon on my desktop which reduces this task to a single mouse stroke.) And if I go out leaving the house unattended, the floppy holding my current article goes in my top pocket with me.

As for bulk backup, I've tried the lot over the last decade. I had a tape drive, which refused to restore on the first and only occasion it was required to work for real. I abandoned that for Norton Backup and a huge box of HD floppies, concocting ever more complicated regimes to minimise the number of files to be backed up. Came the day when I needed it, Norton baulked, complaining that it couldn't find C9801221.CAT which it had left on the now defunct hard disk. For a while I even used a second PC, connected by a parallel cable and Laplink, containing a complete mirror of my hard drive.     

Recently the Datasonix people were kind enough to loan me one of their cute little Pereos miniature DAT drives (reviewed in PC Pro back in July). I'm still amazed that a single postage stamp sized Pereos tape cassette can hold the entire 600 Mbyte contents of my hard disks twice, once on either side. When I went on holiday this year I tossed the whole Pereos drive, with its backup tapes and the floppy containing the retrieval software into my suitcase - had I been burgled or the house burned down, I could have restored my whole work environment to a new PC in around an hour.

The Pereos software is simple and good, but it still asks too many questions for my liking. I really don't want to think about fancy backup schemes; just back up everything, often, please. Technology with the speed and capacity to do this is only just arriving. I see in my future a built-in Panasonic PD rewriteable CD drive, and an operating system that continually backs up the hard disk onto CD in the background (I'm sure Honeyball is about to ring me and say that NT can do it now...)