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If you recently purchased your first Macintosh, ignore this column at your peril. In the olden days -- back when a 20 megabyte hard drive cost as much as a new Yugo and was just as reliable
-- chants of backup, backup, backup emanated from every magazine article and software manual in the computer user universe. Echoes of those early warnings remain, but at first glance your trusty little hard disk drive can appear as safe and reliable as an attic closet. I intend to convince you otherwise. The consequences of computing without a safety net are only slightly less foolhardy than trusting the lottery to fund your retirement plan.
Hard drive failures can and do happen. Occasionally the hardware will break, but more commonly, the drive's directory will become unusable, leaving your Mac to stare at you with nothing but a blinking question mark where your beloved data once appeared. Besides a complete drive failure or theft, there are other, less overwhelming fates that can befall your data bits: overwriting a file, inadvertent deletions, forgetting which file contains a particular bit of vital information, and viruses are a few examples. The trouble may be limited to a small subset of files, but if one of those lost files just happens to contain your secret list of sure-fire lottery numbers, you have just dug your own grave.
The moment your new computer wakes up for the first time it starts collecting unique data. The Restore Software CD-ROM which Apple includes with each new computer will restore the original software, but not your personal data. Every bit of information you type, draw, download, or install is singular to you, and may be impossible to reconstruct. I don't know which information is stored on your hard drive, but mine has bank records, insurance records, employment contracts, thousands of email messages, names, addresses, birthdays, and anniversaries, passwords to thirty different services, web sites, and every single word I've written in the past fifteen years. Your computer may not have such a massive collection yet, but give it a few years.
Bits on a hard drive may be much more fragile than other storage methods, but they are also the easiest to move around. The best way to insure you never face
data-armageddon is to make several copies, and store them in different places.
When I moved from a 230 megabyte drive and several removable cartridges to a one gigabyte drive about five years ago, I had yet to experience a catastrophic data loss. At the time, a gigabyte seemed enormous, like I would never fill it. But with that much information on a single drive, I needed to be able to copy it and store a copy off site. Three days after I began making backup tapes, my brand new one gig drive failed. Before that I incident considered myself lucky, afterwards I considered myself very lucky, and smart.
Go ahead, buy a lottery ticket, you might get lucky. Just don't depend on
winning.
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"Gambling
With Your Data"
