Backup hell

Chris Mellor relives those oh-so-not-glorious days of backing up your computer:

Ever tried backing up your PC to Travan tape? I made that mistake and it was a great introduction to the concept of geological time; the bloody thing stopped and started like a kangaroo tied to the spot with a bungee cord. It took so long to back up files that I went bald waiting.

The backup software was a dog and perfectly matched the awful Travan hardware. I tried restoring a file because I thought it a good idea to practise, but it would have been less painful burning my ear with a blowtorch. Finding the file in the backup software's catalogue, mounting the tape and then paring down my nails, my fingers, my thumbs, my hands and most of my arms while the backup software found the file on the tape and then restored it was an exercise in self-inflicted torture.

Just when you thought the glacial backup flow had completed, the software would proudly announce a verification run to make sure that the data really was backed up, and the Friday evening dinner date had better be put back another two hours while it laboriously and tediously examined every dratted bit of data on the tape that went through the drive as fast as a nervous nanny driving a Nissan Micra with newborn puppies on the front seat.

Of course, things aren't as bad nowadays, but we're still waiting for the ideal solution . . . I'd bet that half the folks reading this have no idea how recently they've backed up their data or (if they have) whether the backup is viable.

I'd had more than my fair share of tedious backup experiences (starting back in the dark ages, when I'd have to set aside an entire day — and a large stack of floppy discs — to run a backup). CD backup was certainly better, but it still was a largely manual operation and you had to babysit the process. DVD backup was another improvement, but you needed to be there during the task.

I tried using an external drive. That didn't go so well. It started nicely, but then faded badly. A replacement drive wasn't the solution, so I'm now backing up to a secondary internal drive, and still going through the DVD shuffle to make offline backups. There's got to be a better way.