Data Loss in the News

Technology Thursday

Three items in the news recently should serve as motivation to backup your data. I recently discussed my own data loss and emerging new backup strategy for my systems at home. If one personal anecdote isn't sufficient motivation to backup those hard drives and make sure you have redundant ways to access whatever data you're storing on other people's services (for example, gmail, flickr, and so on), consider the following:

• There was a huge problem with T-Mobile/Sidekick data. The short version of the story is that T-Mobile and Microsoft somehow managed to lose all of the data belonging to users of the Sidekick device. How this happened and why more precautions against it were not in place is still a bit of a mystery. T-Mobile sent an apology letter, but already the lawsuits are starting. Just this morning Microsoft issued a statement saying that they think they'll be able to get it back. But, frankly, it should not take days for data recovery from these big companies that should know better.
• Snow Leopard, the new Apple operating system I discussed here, apparently has a bug that causes big data loss in certain configurations. While Apple has finally admitted that this bug exists, they are trying to downplay by suggesting that it's rare. However, if you read the description of how it can happen, it's something that any of us might do (logging into a guest account first). There doesn't seem to be a fix for it yet. By the way, based on this and a few other things I've seen, I'd still recommend holding off on the Snow Leopard upgrade.
• On a more minor scale, Facebook had a bit of a problem this week too. An outage cut off about 150,000 users from their accounts.

So in just these three recent stories you've got examples of 1) potential issues with your wireless provider and whatever data they store in the cloud, 2) potential issues with your operating system and whatever data you're storing locally, and 3) potential issues with social networking services and whatever data you happen to have there. And again, these are just newsworthy failures from this past week. My last post was primarily about backing up data on the hard drives of your home desktop or laptop computer. But we all store all sorts of data in many other places that we might want access to. Below are a few tips on backing up digital data:

• Think through an inventory of where your personal data resides. This should include any social media services you use, your own computers, your work computer (although, what are you doing storing personal data on your work computer?! really, don't be doing that), your cell phone, your mp3 player, your email accounts, and so on.
• Develop a backup strategy for each data repository.
• Implement that backup strategy! Ideally it would be something automated, but it may be something you need to do manually on a periodic basis. (I have both situations, depending on the repository--and, candidly, I'm not following my own advice completely yet.)
• Occasionally do a dry run and make sure that you can actually recover the data from whatever backups you've made.
• Think about and try to have geographic distribution of your backups; in other words, don't keep all of your backups in one place and make sure you have backups stored someplace other than your house (in case of fire or flood).

Good luck! It's a cold, cruel world when it comes to data loss.

Comments

[Katherine]

Oh, you have just reminded me of all the other data that I would be in trouble if I lost. And here I was congratulating myself for finally getting an external hard drive and backing up my laptop.

My wakeup call was having my latop stolen and all my data with it. Since then I've been much more diligent about backing up data.