How to back-up your compute hard drive
All hard drives will fail! While most drives will last many thousands of hours even a new drive could fail at any time. The only way that you can safeguard your data is to be sure that you back-up on a regular basis. While many automated systems exist, even the best of these may stop working depending on circumstances. When it is all said and done, the onus for backing-up falls on you, the user. You must pay attention to your back-ups if you hope to have them when they are needed. Listed below are several tools that will help you keep your data safe.
Most labs in Developmental Biology are members of the BioInformatics Resource (also called CMGM) and as such have access to a significant amount of shared space on a disk array kept in the basement of the Beckman Center. This space can be mounted as a volume on your desk top if you are using either Windows XP/Vista or Mac OS X (directions can be found here). To use this system you will need to have a CMGM account. You can apply for this account here. Presently this system holds up to 10 terabytes of data, allowing each lab to have 200 gigabytes which must be shared by all lab members (you do however have your own personal folder). It falls to each lab to distribute this space between themselves.
A second method is to use a commercial service to back-up your data. Many commercial back-up services will provide a limited amount of data space for free, and of course they will also provide additional space for a fee. The free space may go up to a few Gigabytes while fee based services are usually an unlimited amount of space for 50 to 100 dollars per year depending on the plan you purchase. Click here for a list of outside vendors. Please not that we do not endorse these companies, this list is for your convenience only.
A third method is to use an external hard drive. Both Windows and Mac OS X provide utilities which make backing-up to an attached drive easy and painless. This solution works better for desktop computers which never need to be disconnected from the back-up drive. Since in this solution both the computer and back-up are in one place you may want to consider having two external drives which can be swapped out on a weekly or monthly schedule, this will help to avoid data loss based on fire or theft which could effect multiple pieces of equipment. To view instructions for Apple’s solution click here, for Windows click here.