Not too long ago, I, Mr. Check-me-out-I’m-so-technical-and-cool, had a catastrophic data loss.  As implied by the use of the word ‘catastrophic’, I lost some stuff that… I did not want to lose.  At all. Lost, lost.  Too bad.  Sucks to be me.  How could this happen to a guy who does this for a living?  I’ll tell you how: procrastination.

I knew that off-site storage was necessary.  I have space on remote servers in secure locations… one of these days, I’m going to figure out a good way to, uh… hey, I gotta go pick up the pizza!

But, it’s worse than that.  I actually have a mirrored-disk, network-attached storage (NAS) box specifically for backups.  I have external drives specifically for making local backups, too.  So, short of my office burning down, I should be covered, no?  Uh… no.

Turns out that my backup software to the NAS box had been failing silently because of some change in the client configuration.  Moreover, I’d procrastinated on replacing the batteries on my UPSs– they’d been pulled out for that reason (see where this is going?  no surge protection?) Now, mix that with my preference to use “logical volumes” for my storage because of their flexibility in sizing and storage, and toss in a completely unusual (but nonetheless real) power surge/outage.

What you get is a garfed logical volume (i.e., the physical device with the filesystem information on it survived but was irretrievably scrambled…) and the local backup external disk gets completely fried at the same time.  No network backup.  No local backup.  And the data itself has vanished.  What did I lose?  Well, my company books and tax records, for one thing.  (The actual happy ending is that because of my paranoia level, I had actually imaged my drives not too long ago to yet ANOTHER drive that I kept unattached.  I was able to reconstruct most of my data, but it took hours of work and validation.  Who knows what miscellaneous data I’ll notice is missing at some point.)

As W. famously said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee… that says, fool me once, shame on… shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”

So true, Mr. President.  So true.

Well, I can’t get fooled again.  So, no more procrastinating.  First order of business was to order myself a shiny, new UPS.  I went with the CyberPower 1500AVR.  At less than $200, and with the juice to run my (excessive) pile of gear for at least a half hour, it’s easy and inexpensive insurance against some putz putting his backhoe into the power main.  Still, they’ll think of something that I haven’t.

So, it’s on to my data.  Firstly, I forced myself back into a rational storage model.  Being your typical ADHD type, I have a tendency to keep EVERYTHING and keep it wherever it happens to land.  Forever.  Don’t know what it is?  Better just leave it.  You never know.  Right?

No, no, no… that’s not OK.  What I need to do is to keep my documents in, say, a DOCUMENTS folder.  Branch out by use (not… say… document type or date).  OK, so, ‘business’ and ‘personal’.  Business can have ‘clients’ and ‘financial’… and so on.  Everything goes into one of those folders.  EVERYTHING.  Is is a photo?  OK, it goes into personal/photos.  Or a separate photos folder.  Not both.  That file that I can’t identify?  My system to create an “unidentified” folder with dated sub-folders.  Everything I find that I can’t identify goes in those.  If, after a month or two, I still don’t know what it is and haven’t needed it… it goes.

Great, so, now I’ve got all my data in one place on my system… that is… my desktop system… which… doesn’t include my virtual systems… or my MacBook… oh boy.

Enter on-line storage and synchronization.  After some checking around, I went with Dropbox.  Other good options include: mozy, Jungledisk, Ubuntu One, Amazon S3, and many others.  Dropbox appealed to me because of the drop-dead ease of installation, the cross-platform clients, and what seems like a pretty reasonable price for all that (about $10/mo. for 50GB of storage as of this writing).

Basically, Dropbox puts, what looks like, another folder on your system.  In this case, though, if you drop a file in there, it’s copied up to their storage and synced to any systems that you also have connected to your account.  Drop your resume into that folder on your Linux box and edit it on your Mac, output the PSD to the Dropbox folder, and open it up on your… iPod Touch?  Virtual XP instance?  Anywhere you can get to a browser?

I’ve always had a tendency to roll my own solution for this kind of thing, but the technology has advanced to the point that there is no way that I can justify the kind of effort it would take to get something like that righter than they have for that kind of money.  $120/year?  That’s one internal hard drive.  Dropbox installed and was doing its thing in about 5 minutes– on three systems.

So, we’ve got reliable, filtered power and offsite storage of critical data.  The last thing I needed to address was local backups.  Given the inexpensive drives available these days, it only makes sense to me to keep very complete backups locally so that I can do a complete recovery if the problem is a fried disk.  So, I had that pretty well covered already with FSArchiver for complete images and Back In Time for scheduled backups to the NAS box (a D-Link DNS-323).

Maybe next time some super-freaky, never-happen-in-a-million-years thing happens, I won’t have to spend the day engaged in self-loathing and fear.  I’ll just restore my stuff and keep on keepin’ on.  In the meantime, my next project is to write a little script to make sure that my backups are actually taking place.  If they’re not, I need to make something to pester me about it.

I’ll probably do that tomorrow… d’oh!