Dick Pountain/12 August 2000 18:32/Idealog 73
One of my favourite Scottish Calvinist jokes concerns the sinner who dies, goes to heaven and is ushered into God's presence where he sees appalling scenes of punishment, torment and retribution - in terror he exclaims 'Forgive me Lord, ah didn'a ken', and God says 'Aye well, ye ken noo!' For some reason this joke comes back to me every time I think about the subject of data backup. I'm not really temperamentally suited to be a preacher, being quite keen on spotting sin but decidedly feeble at the teaching virtue bit, but backup is the one subject that can set me to preaching like Elmer Gantry. Looking through my database reveals that it's fully five years since I broached the subject in this column, and so much has happened since then (including a couple of 'ken noo' experiences of my own) that I feel obliged to revisit it.
In this morning's newspaper I saw an advert from one of the bucket-shop PC manufacturers, selling entry-level machines with 27 Gigabyte hard disks. Just what the, er, hell, do you back that up onto? My own desktop machine is a grizzled old 133 MHz Pentium machine of great vintage and robustness, with an internal Travan tape drive that I used to back up on for many years. However the machine has since had so many disk transplants that I can't sensibly back it all up on 600 Mbyte Travan tapes, only selected data directories. Indeed I deliberately restrict myself by not buying the biggest hard drives I can afford, because that would tempt me a) to accumulate more crap, and b) into kidding myself that a hard disk is itself a suitable backup medium (via mirroring or whatever).
It had become imperative that I buy some sort of rewriteable optical storage device for backup, but what? The decision was made for me once I decided that my new laptop, running NT4, was to become my main working machine. I either had to buy an internal CD-RW drive for the desktop and a small Ethernet, or a portable CD-RW, and I eventually plumped for the latter so I could back up even when away from home base. I did briefly entertain the idea of a portable Zip drive, mainly because Amacom makes a really sexy super-thin one that takes its power from the PCMCIA slot, but the fact is that 100 Mbytes is just nowhere near enough.
Some Web and magazine ad research turned up three promising portable CD-RW drives, the cheapest being made in the UK - I phoned the firm and got a recorded message that no-one would be there till next Tuesday. The next was made in Germany, but a phone call ascertained that a shop in Tottenham Court Road had some so I went and checked it out. It cost a lot of money, over £300, it was packaged in iMac-style transparent 'fruit gum' colours, and the blurb on the box said it came with parallel port drivers for NT4. I hate to buy expensive kit that looks like a kid's toy but I might still have bought it had my eye not strayed to the glass cabinet it came from, and there on the next shelf was a diminutive, matt black drive by Hewlett Packard called the M820. It was cute, it was quite a lot cheaper, and I bought it.
The HP drive has proved a winner so far. It plugs into a single PC Card socket, its NT driver installed without a hitch and it burned its first CD-Rs impeccably using the supplied Adaptec software. It took me a few iterations to work out a backup regime that works for me though. I keep a CD-RW disk called Daily Backup with seven folders named after the days of the week: each day I copy my entire working directory into that day's folder (perhaps overwriting two or three times). Then every Friday I make a compressed Norton Ghost image of my laptop's boot drive and copy that, plus the daily backup folders, onto a single CD-R as a permanent archive. That CD and a DOS boot floppy containing Ghost and a DOS CD-ROM driver give me a reasonable degree of security: should my machine fail to boot I can restore the Ghost image; should it get stolen or eaten by wolves I can stick the CD-R into any PC's CD-ROM drive and retrieve my application and data, without worrying about special restore software.
However the whole process is far more difficult than it need be. It took the burning of a couple of silver coasters to discover that the 24x CD-ROM drive in my machine can't shovel data fast enough to keep the CD-R burner happy and copy CDs, which came as rather a shock since they are connected to the same bus. Comrade Cassidy has covered this matter in his column recently so I gave him a bell: it appears the problem is the brain-dead driver software that wants to spin down the drive after every read so that it has to be spun up again, which accounts for that ghostly whooshing sound I heard while ruining those CD-Rs. The upshot is I have to copy the CD-RW to a spare hard disk partition and from there to the CD-R.
The CD burning software itself is also needlessly complex, using separate applications depending on whether you want Joliet standard CD-ROMs or Adaptec DirectCD UDF format (the former are universally readable, the latter needs a driver). Most of all I can't help still thinking, as I did five years ago, that by now the operating system ought to be doing all this stuff in background, automatically, as a matter of course. But for that to happen the manufacturers would have to care about my data as much as I do.
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