Back To Backup

While browsing through the paper few days ago I saw an article by David Pogue praising the online backup service called SugarSync (see interview here). While it looks like a very nice service indeed (at least for countries where upload is not a problem), the article itself sounded really strange, really old, like it belonged to a fifteen year old PC magazine. It was not only the language that made it sound old, though names like "Magic Briefcase" do bring back some memories. It was the topic itself of keeping your data safe and synchronized that sounded like it belonged to the past.

With that feeling, I have picked up a 1993 PC Magazine I happen to have on my shelf, and looked for reviews of backup solutions from back then. To my surprise, I have found none. It was a Perfect PC 93' Edition and the recommended hard drives ranged between 200 and 350 megabytes. I did not find, however, any references on how to make your data safe while using them.

I said, well, maybe back in those days people did not really have anything important to store on those drives. Maybe they mostly used the computer at work and the digital photography was not yet that popular. So I skipped forward five years to 1998, again, the Perfect PC edition. Now the drives jumped to the 8GB range but still, no mention of back up software whatsoever.

I found this to be somewhat strange. I mean, what is going on here? We are using personal computer for quite some time now and for many of us it's a most important tool in our life, but we still depend on this tiny, cheap, mechanical device that spins like crazy at 10,000 RPM almost every hour of every day. How could that be?

I think this has happened mainly for historical reasons. During the last thirty years of personal computer evolution, there were never a period of time when investment in quality of personal storage would be profitable, so it just never happened. Large businesses have RAIDs, tape backups, version control software and search appliances. What do you have?

Few years ago, the answer to this question would be - nothing. A typical family usually had one or two computers with a single hard drive and a DVD burner each. The most they were able to do is to burn their documents and digital photos every once in while and write the date on it with a marker. If the hard drive was to fail, it was very hard to even understand what exactly was lost and what was backed up, let alone completely restore it. Backup software was not simple to use and was generally unreliable. The incremental backup options were confusing, and did not work well since they required careful management of recorded volumes and very rigid discipline.

A small example to the point. My father, being an organized person, has stored all the documents he worked with on the D drive, reserved especially for this purpose. Once he had made a backup of his files on a CD and the "DBackup" directory was born. After he upgraded his computer, adding a new hard drive, he copied the directory to the new drive but left the old one as well "just in case". Soon enough, father changed some files in the copied directory and created some new ones. When there came backup time again, he had to backup both directories since they were no longer identical, causing the "DBackup" to reproduce with each hard drive related metamorphosis until it turned into a complete nightmare. It was never safe to delete an old copy for the fear that it might hold something valuable that was no longer available in the new ones. This directory continued to haunt father for years.

Even if you did manage to backup your stuff on CDs in an orderly fashion, you still could not sleep sound at night. As prices of recordable CDs and then DVDs went down, so did the quality and the reflective layer often deteriorated leaving you with a nice coaster with unrecoverable remains of your precious data in less than a year. You could purchase a tape recorder but, in most cases, no regular household could afford the price.

That was few years ago, since then we have seen that well known slope in price per gigabyte chart which changed the situation significantly. Drives grew larger and became cheaper. Every time you bought a new drive it was a double, triple and quadruple the size of the previous one. They were cheap too. One would think that keeping your data safe would now be easy as a feather. Mmm, no, it just meant that more data was lost every time the drive snapped, taking with it more photos, documents and home movies than ever before.

So finally, today, mid 2008, we have got a backup service David Pogue would consider useful. Only today, the latest edition of what aspires to be the most advanced operating system, the Mac OS X, would include such a basic feature as the TimeMachine, and couple it with the network hard drive. Only today we are starting to see the beginning of truly useful integrated back up solutions for home users that do not require superior technical knowledge and extreme discipline to use.

Well, it's about time.