Scott Gaidano, the co-founder of DriveSavers, a Novato, Calif., data-recovery company, regularly lectures people on the need to back up their crucial files on floppy disks, Zip drives or computer tape. But like most of his listeners, he didn’t fully practice what he preached.
When his hard drive crashed a week ago, Gaidano found he wasn’t completely backed up–and he had to scurry to find bits and pieces of files elsewhere. “It really comes down to, `Gee, I’m so busy, it takes so much space on my desktop,’ ” he said ruefully.
Gaidano’s plight was illustrated in dramatic and far more serious fashion the week before when the Stanford Graduate School of Business acknowledged that years of academic research had been erased from two servers–and that as many as 15 professors and students lost files that were not backed up.
In the aftermath of what Dean A. Michael Spence called a disaster, one immediate question was why the victims had not safely copied their files–in short, how people so smart could be so dumb. The real issue is whether many more of us invite the same fate.
Data loss happens more often than anyone wants to admit: Ontrack Data International, a Minneapolis-based data recovery company, estimates that it has handled 81,000 cases since it went into business 12 years ago–and that business is growing by 30 percent a year.
The stories are harrowing and faintly slapstick: In San Jose, most of the garbage billing records were wiped out two years ago when city officials loaded a flawed backup tape onto the system. The city council had to approve a $250,000 contract with an outside firm to reconstruct the files.
Not long ago, a telemarketing company doing business in Oregon reported that it lost 10,000 files when a systems administrator inadvertently deleted an entire directory structure. The data, which was later recovered, was worth an estimated $20,000.
Why, particularly in a valley where people make a good part of their living by computers, do computer users fail to back up their work? Why do they court disaster with their most crucial files?
The answers run the gamut of human excuse. In a networking environment, users often assume that someone else is doing the backup. The backup tapes themselves often go untested. Time is too short. And it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with the technology of proper storage.
But in part, the reasons come from a deep-seated belief that disaster will not strike. Despite the mantra of warnings about the need to back up files, an incident like Stanford’s is a little like a plane crash: It’s a rare catastrophe. And for busy people, the laborious task of saving files and storing disks is an irritating distraction.
“Backing up is a pain in the neck,” said Stu Sjouwerman, the vice president of Sunbelt Software Distribution Inc., a Florida company that sells software to undelete files on Windows NT systems. “It always has been, and very likely will continue to be so, until the tools to get it done come up to professional standards.”
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The case for backing up information on a home computer has long been made–and ignored. Nikki Stange, a former suicide counselor who now works at DriveSavers, likens it to using seat belts. Noting that only 68 percent of Americans buckle up, she adds, “I would imagine the percentages for backing up are even lower.”
With the help of experts, however, most personal computer hard drives can be reconstructed. In fact, Ontrack has a system that allows the company to access a personal computer by modem and perform surgery from a remote location.
The more difficult cases–because they deal with more complex files–occur in corporations, where the dictum of backup generally is obeyed. Here the fine points can cause heartache.
“I call it the nine-tenths problem,” says Stuart Hanley, the vice president of Ontrack. “They go nine-tenths of the way. They know they’re supposed to back up. And they spend money to have backup systems in place. But people often fail to really look at the backup.”
All this is made more difficult by human error. Because systems professionals tend to move around–the good ones are in heavy demand–a newcomer can be given a backup system that he or she doesn’t fully understand.
Several years ago at the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, a new technician was asked to perform the backup task. Each day, she did the job conscientiously–but on the same disk. Though the information existed in other forms, the disk was useless.
In fairness, backing up some files can be intricate and time-consuming. In many cases, technicians have to store a sequence of transactions–known as a log–before changing the database itself. Restoring such files can be like an archaeological dig that deals with a layer at a time.
For databases used in real time–say in the military or General Motors Corp.–technicians face a thorny problem of when to back up: With employees entering data at all times, an effective continuous backup is all but impossible: There’s generally a time lag of at least a day, which can be significant in a big company.
An answer for this is to have a “mirrored server,” meaning that the corporation essentially has an on-line spare. But this is an expensive route that smaller companies often shun.
For the personal user, some changes are on the horizon. The advent of Zip drives has made the job of saving files from a PC easier and faster. Iomega Corp’s typical Zip drive, for example, holds 100 megabytes of data–about 70 times that of a floppy disk.
More significantly, the rate of transfer from a hard drive is much faster. Iomega says the average transfer rate is 28 times faster than with a floppy disk.
In fact, there are signs that within a few years, the floppy disk drive is likely to be replaced by a higher-capacity drive–either Iomega’s or those of its competitors. Dataquest Inc., the San Jose research firm, estimates that the crossover will occur in 2001.
Will this change human behavior or make saving documents more likely? The people who deal with data recovery doubt it. They’ve seen too many warnings ignored.
“It sounds kind of simplified, but I think it comes down to human nature,” says Nikki Stange. “Preventive measures aren’t that rewarding. They’re boring and they take up a lot of time. There’s no immediate gratification.”