As many young physicians might recognize, the title of today’s column is from a song by Prince Royce featuring Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull. This article, though, is about what we believe is likely an urgent matter for many of our readers – the issue of appropriately backing up information that resides on their personal computers. We were prompted to write about this after a colleague came to one of us in a panic after losing all of the information on her meticulously performed, but poorly conceived backup. For years she has been developing and storing her lectures on a flash drive, and every month she has been backing up her flash drive to her personal computer. She even set a reminder in her calendar to make sure that she perform those backups each and every month. Unfortunately, she lost her flash drive, and even more unfortunately discovered that what she thought were copies of files on her computer were actually only shortcuts to the files on her now-missing flash drive. All her files were gone.
We are going to organize our discussion in three parts: First, we want to convince you of the importance of making backups, essentially informational life insurance. Unlike life insurance, however, you have a pretty good chance of using your backups at some point over the next 10 years. Second, we are going to discuss locally based backups, and then lastly, we’ll cover cloud-based backups. This may seem like an incredibly dull topic to some, but we anticipate receiving emails of thanks over many years for the knowledge and actions that come out of today’s column.
Hard drive failure rates, derived from data published by companies that professionally manage large numbers of hard drives, is about 3%-5% in the first year. This remains at about 3% per year for the next 2-3 years, and then can go up to 10% or more per year as hard drives continue to age. That means that over a 4-year period, 15%-20% of hard drives are likely to fail.1,2 This fact underscores the importance of backing up your data, because there is a good chance that over time, loss of data will happen to you.
One strategy is to back up to an external drive. The drive can be either a flash drive if you have less than 128 GB to store, or a traditional external hard drive – a very affordable option for memory up to 4 TB (4,000 GB). There are many excellent external hard drives and flash drives from which to choose, but you also need to have backup software that will take the information from your personal computer and place it in an organized manner on your external drive. Many drives now come bundled with backup software. An example of such a drive is the Western Digital My Passport Elite . If the hard drive you have does not already have backup software, there are lots of good choices out there. Backup software solutions include Time Machine (built into all Mac Computers), and many software choices for PCs.3
While the speed of backup and recovery is fast – often just a few hours – there are two main issues that make external drives suboptimal as your main backup strategy. The first is that most people simply don’t remember to plug their external drive into their computer regularly; months and sometimes years can go by without backing up your files. The second issue, which is usually not considered, is that the hard drive usually sits on your desk next to your computer. Therefore, if there is a fire, a flood, an electrical surge, or even a simple spill on your desk, you may lose both your main files and your backup in one fell swoop. For this reason, if you choose to use an external drive as your backup method, you should back up to two different external drives and keep one drive in your office and one at home.
The best method of backup, and the one we recommend to everyone, eliminates the major disadvantages of local backups. This method is cloud-based backup. For cloud-based backup, you purchase a subscription with an annual fee, then you download software from the backup vendor to your computer. It usually takes about 15 minutes to set up the software by selecting the file folders that you would like to back up, then the software does the rest. The first backup can take a long time, typically a few days, as the speed of the backup is limited by the speed of your Internet connection. After that first time, though, backups don’t take long because they back up only the files that have changed since the previous backup.
The main advantages to cloud-based solutions is that once it has been set up, the software ensures that incremental backups occur automatically every time your computer is connected to the Internet. In addition, since the cloud backups are off-site, you are protected from an adverse occurrence taking out your backup drive and your computer when they are sitting next to each other on your desk. In addition, most cloud backup services also allow you to access your file from any computer or smartphone for access where and when you need the files.
So, let us end where we began, with lyrics from the music video, with which we agree, “Word of advice: Want a happy life … Back it up one more time.”
References
1. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for
2. http://www.pcworld.com/article/131168/article.html
3. The Best Backup Software at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2278661,00.asp
Dr. Notte is a family physician and clinical informaticist for Abington (Pa.) Memorial Hospital. He is a partner in EHR Practice Consultants, a firm that aids physicians in adopting electronic health records. Dr. Skolnik is associate director of the family medicine residency program at Abington Memorial Hospital and professor of family and community medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia.
