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Protecting The Family Jewels

Written by: Andy Marken

Article Overview: Warning Will Robinson !!! Data, photo, content loss is about to occur.

Protecting The Family Jewels

Yes it really is the second part of Lost in Space and it really is another warning. Just like the robot alerting the Robinson family though we realize the effort will probably fall on deaf ears.

But just like the coming of Jack Valenti’s (sorry – FCC’s) mandated broadcast flag in your HD TV programs next year there is another inevitable coming:
- you are going to have your system infected by a worm, virus or Trojan horse that will kill all of your data and content
- you’re going to have a hard drive crash
- lightning will strike a power line near your house and cook your entire system
- You are going to accidentally delete a file (maybe your vacation video file you’ve been working on for weeks)

Death, Taxes, HD Loss
Won’t happen to you? Let’s face some facts:
1. In the first half of the year virus scribblers unleashed 4677 new viruses or 26 a day and that was an increase of 21% over last year! No wonder security software companies do such a brisk business.
2. It doesn’t matter which operating system you use – MS, Apple, Unix, Linux – these people who find it “fun” to take over your system or just destroy your data find ways in.
3. Protection software only protects you AFTER the stuff has been unleashed and has infected hundreds or thousands of systems. It isn’t proactive.
4. Seagate just announced a five-year warranty on HDs but “your mileage may vary.” And when the drive goes south they may swap it out for you but what about all of your great, irreplaceable content?
5. According to people who keep these kinds of statistics lightning strikes somewhere in the country over 30 times a day.
6. According to Contingency Planning Research you are the cause of 50% of all computer disasters (Figure 1)

If you work for a big company you don’t worry about those sorts of problems because you’ve got people who are paid big bucks to protect you from yourself. If you’re in a small to medium sized business (which is most of us) any protection is usually haphazard at best. If you have a stand-along PC or home network like we just set up in our house only about 10% of you have any form of back up according to IDC.

That means all of the TV programs you time-shifted for later viewing, all of the digital family photos, all of your vacation videos and all of your family records can disappear in a heartbeat because of some outside force or your own “Oh *&*%$” action.

Having two hard drives completely die in our years of storage and video marketing and losing more files than we care to think about we are paranoid about backup at the office, at home and on the road.

Basic Protection
So once the wireless network was working and our entertainment systems were up and running, everyone in the family was responsible for backing up his and her operating system, settings and applications onto DVDR media. That stuff hardly ever changes so realistically you could save these basics, make a couple of copies and forget about protecting them in the future.

Each of us created the system/app backup on a bootable DVD disc that could be restored from Windows or DOS command line so we could quickly recover the basics when the system crashes. Is that really necessary? Of course not if you have all of the discs of everything you loaded on the system.

But according to the folks at Verbatim, studies show that if you had to reload your OS and applications on a new HD it would easily take over eight hours. That’s more fun than we care to have since the bootable DVD can put everything back good as new in less than 30 minutes. Trying to remember all of your little adjustments and setting modifications would probably be a never-ending project.

Really Personal Stuff
For our new wireless network and PowerCinema-enabled PCs we installed NTI’s BackupNOW! software but there are certainly other good solutions available but we liked the fact we could use it on the individual PCs, on my notebook we use for business travel and on our entertainment center PC.

Since almost everything we write, use, view, listen to and exchange today is digital everyone in the family has his or her personal files that they want to protect…just not on my computer. So we all have password-protected files and folders we are individually responsible for.

The wife and kids have the software automatically schedule their personal file backup (Figure 2) to DVDRW media (one of the few real applications we’ve found to justify RW Vs R discs since most of the time we never really want to purposely overwrite data on our system). With 2:1 compression the software does automatically, we have roughly 9.4GB of capacity on a 4.7GB disc which is about the same as the new double layer +R media and a lot less expensive.

This gives us multiple copies of the full HD image as well as files and folders.

Centralized Backup
Our main family PC is where we keep our Instant TV for time-shifting individual programs and writing them to DVDR for “later” viewing. We also use it for all of our Instant DVD video hardware/software for post-production.

It takes time to backup all 250GB of our family jewels but it would be impossible to replace that stuff if the drive died or a virus or worm ate the files. It’s pretty easy though since the software automatically spans the backup across multiple discs if complete recovery is ever needed.

Unnecessary Someday?
We recently read The IT 100 report in BusinessWeek and if you believe all of the really smart people all of this work may become a distant memory. According to those who stare into crystal balls we’ll have online music services, video on demand and you won’t really own hardware/software you’ll just rent it.

That sounds beautiful from the perspective of the content provider and the content owner. Trouble is they don’t take into account human nature.

In the US lots of families can’t park their cars in their garage because it is full of their stuff. Around the globe, people in apartments rent storage spaces for their stuff. As computer and entertainment devices become to look/perform more and more alike they have one thing in common. They will have bigger and bigger hard drives so people can store their stuff. We’ll buy more CDs, DVDs and memory cards to carry our stuff with us.

We may not mark our areas like wolves do but we make it pretty clear our stuff – music, video, web downloads, data – is ours.

Valenti and the Hollywood crowd as well as the FCC and broadcasters would prefer to keep their entertainment (stuff) and merely rent it to you. But somehow we believe they underestimate the consumer. People want to own their own stuff.

And as long as code-writing monkeys continue to unleash worms, viruses and Trojan horses we’ll simply have to keep backing up and protecting our stuff!

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