Protect your Data!!

Protect your data!!
You sit down at your computer and turn it on. A strange cryptic message like “Hard drive not found” or “Operating System not found” appears…your hard drive has lost all of its data. Data, that little word that stands for all your documents, all your tax returns, all the photos of your children, is gone. Your heart sinks down to your feet, if the floor hadn’t stopped it, it would’ve gone even lower. You panic. You call your friend who is a “computer guy”, he works on it for a couple of hours, but nothing helps. Your data has disappeared.

If you haven’t had that happen to you, you probably will. I’ve seen it many times. On rare occasions, I’ve gotten the data back, most times I sympathetically told the owner of a couple of different options. Forget the data and move on (I don’t say it quite like that, because I’m sympathetic) and then there’s the “Data Recovery” solution. There are companies that will recover your data for a fee, a very hefty fee. They are usually fairly successful. Usual prices start in the $600 and can go above $1500 for a standard IDE or SATA hard drive.

A hard drive is just a piece of machinery, it has moving parts in it that wear down and fail. It has magnetic particles on the platters that can develop bad spots; they have circuit boards where capacitors or transistors can fail. The bottom line is hard drives, just like other mechanical equipment, fail. I’ve had the main hard drive on my home PC fail, so I know personally that sinking feeling.

Now the bad part, it could have been prevented. I don’t mean the hard drive failing could have been prevented, remember it’s just a piece of electronics, I mean the data loss could have been. In this post, I’m going to discuss drive cloning.

Cloning, frequently known as “ghosting” (it became known as such because of one of the earliest cloning programs was Ghost, developed by Binary Research and later sold to Symantec) is a manner of “cloning” a hard drive to another. Cloning is also known as imaging. What the process does, in essence, is it makes an exact reproduction of one drive to another, that’s why it’s called “cloning”. That way if a hard drive fails, you can put the clone (the second hard drive) into operation and keep on working. A hard drive can cost anywhere from $65 to $250, depending on size and type. That’s a whole lot cheaper than a data recovery service, and gives instant piece of mind instead of panicking over lost data.

The way it works is, you buy a hard drive and put it into your computer as a “slave”. You’ll need to look at documentation on how to do it, but it is fairly easy. I recommend having the slave be the same type as the master (original) hard drive, i.e. an IDE slave to an IDE master or a SATA slave to a SATA master, but it will work going SATA slave to IDE Master or vice versa. Then you get an cloning program (see below) and install it.

I strongly recommend every person have two hard drives. Personally I don’t recommend mirroring, where everything that gets written to one hard drive is simultaneously written to the other. Why? Because in the case of a virus outbreak (see post http://atotalnetworksolution.com/blog/2008/computer-viruses/ ) or malware attack (see post http://atotalnetworksolution.com/blog/2008/malware-description/ ) the virus or malware is written to BOTH hard drives. With a slave setup, most of the times the bad software is NOT written to the second hard drive.

I mentioned above that I have had my hard drive fail on my home PC. While I still had that sinking feeling a little, I didn’t panic. I just swapped the slave to the primary and kept on computing. (I immediately went on line and ordered another hard drive to replace the failed one!)

Cloning programs:
Ghost is a purchase product.
These three are free products:
Seagate DiskWizard http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard
DriveImage XML
SelfImage
(For companies or organizations with 10 computers or more, Altiris’ Deployment Server is a great option. Email me at randydover@gmail.com for more information on Altiris’ Deployment Server.)

Seagate DiskWizard is a very good product. It is supposed to be used if you have a Seagate hard drive. While I am a proponent of Seagate hard drives, and recommend them, I have used Seagate DiskWizard on computers that did not have a Seagate hard drive. I have not used DriveImage XML or SelfImage, so I can not comment on them. Seagate DiskWizard puts an icon on your desktop and you launch it and step through it to create a clone. Ghost is pretty easy to use also, (actually a little easier to use than DiskWizard) but it isn’t free.

Cloning should not take the place of backups. Cloning works great, but the data stays inside the computer, (unless you’re cloning to an external hard drive) on the hard drives. You should make CD or DVD backups periodically and keep those outside of the same building as your computer. See my post on backing up your data: http://atotalnetworksolution.com/blog/2008/backup-your-files/