NicJ.net

I like Wikis. What is a Wiki? Well, according to Wikipedia, it is “a website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration“. For example, you log onto a website, see that there’s a spelling error, hit the “Edit” button to correct it, and it’s instantly updated for everyone else. It’s a simple idea, but very powerful.

The website Wikipedia is a prime example of a Wiki — it is an online encyclopedia created by, and edited by, anyone and everyone. To date, there are over a million English articles on Wikipedia, and there are articles in hundreds of other languages as well. Anyonmous internet users create and edit these articles, keeping them up to date and accurate. I use Wikipedia almost as much as Google these days when I’m doing research. See below for other sites based around the idea of a Wiki.

A wiki allows for a community of people (often the internet community as a whole) to keep an up-to-date record of their knowledge.

So anyone, anonymously, can edit a wiki. Doesn’t this make Wikipedia, and similar sites prone to abuse, defacing, or inaccurate data? You bet’cha. But the great thing about a wiki is that as easy as it is to make changes, it is easy to revert these changes to a previous version (all old versions are saved, and there is good revision control). A wiki is only as strong as its’ community, but in the case of places like Wikipedia, there is a large global community of people who want to keep the content up to date, unbiased, and accurate.

There are also several other projects based around the idea of a Wiki. The Wikimedia Foundation has several free projects such as:
* Wikipedia – encyclopedia
* Wikibooks – textbooks and manuals
* Wikiquotes – quotes database
* Wikisource – source documents
* Wiktonary – dictionary
* Wikinews – news
* Wikispecies – directory of species

Very cool stuff.

I’ve also begun using a Wiki a personal organizer. I’ve converted much of My Documents into a wiki on a website that I own (that only I can read and edit). Why do this? Well, it provides me:
* A place to jot down notes on random things, like stuff that I might need to remember later. For example, notes on how to use X or Y, problems I’m working on at work (and how I solved them), how I did this or that, what I need to do later, ideas for projects, etc.
* Access from anywhere (home, work or my phone)
* Revision control (every change is saved)
* A simple interface to edit documents

I started using my wiki (I call it NiciWiki!) two weeks ago and I’m still using it quite a bit. It’s a bit slower than editing a document on my computer, but it provides the advantages above so I think it’s worth it.

There’s even a cool implementation of a wiki called TiddlyWiki that you can save on your hard drive — it doesn’t require any web server, and you can edit it any time (think storing it on a USB thumb drive in your pocket).

So there I am, sitting at my desk at work, and my computer explodes with the sound of BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Rats! I had to quickly smack the power button on my computer before my officemate got annoyed (losing all my work!).

Welcome to the world of backwards compatability — the Bell Character. A remnant of MS-DOS, many years ago. See, back in the days when there were just characters on the screen, no fancy-smancy graphical interfaces, programmers wanted to be able to add a little spice to their programs. So they decided that whenever this one particular character, ASCII code 7 (^G or if you hit control-G) was displayed on the console, it would also make the computer beep. Kind of cool, right? You could alert the user to something important if you needed. Your computer doesn’t even need to have speakers attached, all computers come with a small buzzer to make that ‘beep’ sound.

This ‘feature’ still exists today. I was searching through files on my computer (with ‘findstr’ on the command prompt), and it accidently searched a non-text file. And this non-text file had the character 7 in it, hundreds of times. So when findstr printed it out, it decided to make a hundred lound beeping sounds, in a row. There is no way to stop this. You can try it for yourself. Hit Win-R, type ‘cmd’, hit enter, hit ctrl-G, then enter. Your computer will beep.

I don’t believe there is any way to turn it off.

This sounds very cliche, but my life is very… digital. So many parts of my life revolve around bits of information stored on disks and drives in various places. Documents, pictures, music, emails, projects — the list goes on.

We live in an age where this is very common. But have you ever thought about what would happen if you lost some of it? All of it? How would you feel? Sure, losing some of your MP3s isn’t the end of the world. But what about the other stuff? Maybe I’m an outlier on the curve for this, but there is so much data that I have created (and continue to generate daily) that I want to keep forever.

How could you lose your data? Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy:

Problems:

1. Media failure: CDs get scratched, and may only store your data reliably for a few years. DVDs tell a similar story.
2. Hardware failure: Hard drives crash (the average lifetime is only a few years).
3. User failure: “oops! I hit delete!”
4. Catastrophic events (flood, fire) (but those are a bit harder to plan for).

I’ve always backed up bits and pieces to various places, but a few weeks ago I decided I needed to take a serious look at protecting all of this information. The problem will only get worse — I will continually produce data for the rest of my life, and most of it I will want to save. My “My Documents” folder is already 40GB and growing. Other data/media is nearly 500GB.

So what’s my backup plan? Let’s keep it simple — reduce the risks of Problems #1, #2 (media and hardware failure) and #3 (user error). Problem #4 is a bit harder, but there is an easy solution if you just want to plan for worst-case scenario.

But first, you have to decide what to backup. I can think of three categories of data:

Categories of Data:

1. My personal documents. This includes school work, source code, emails, financial information, etc. I want to be able to save this stuff forever. Additionally, data from the websites needs to be backed up. Losing it would be catastrophic. This is priority 1.
2. Media. Movies, music, pictures, TV shows. If I lost this stuff, not a big worry — I just lose time re-acquiring. I can imagine that in the future this won’t even be a problem (bandwidth will be irrelevant). So not mission-critical, but helpful if I had some sort of redundancy. Priority 2.
3. Operating systems. When an OS crashes, it usually just costs time, but that can be one of the most frustrating experiences and ruin a whole day (or three). There are two classes of machines (for me): home and servers. I don’t mind losing my home machines for a day to do an OS rebuild, but losing my web server for a day costs revenue. Priority 3 for home machines, Priority 2 for servers.

A backup plan needs to be multi-tiered. One solution won’t work for every thing. So how do you protect yourself from losing data? What options are available?

Solutions:

1. Media. CDs and DVDs.Advantages: Cheap (both media and burners). Portable.
   Negatives: Unreliable due to scratching and life expectancy. Easy to misplace. Low capacity (5GB for DVDs). Staleness of data (it’s a pain to do backups each week).

   This solution should work for most people if they don’t need a lot of stuff backed up.

2. Hard Drives (External hard drive). A USB or Firewire drive that is connected when you want to backup your data.Advantages: Portable. High-capacity (500GB and growing). Fast.
   Negatives: Costly. Same un-reliability as media (3 years?). Potential to break (dropping). Same staleness problem as media unless you have it automated.

   Probably the best solution for most people who have more data than media will allow.

3. RAID. RAID basically trades storage on one of your drives for redundancy (a backup). The best part is, the redundancy is handled automatically — if one drive crashes, the other drives have enough information that they will continue to work with no service interruptions.Advantages: High-capacity (multiple drives can work together). Fast (depending on implementation). High availability.
   Negatives: Costs more than drives alone (you need RAID controller cards). Not portable (hard to move from computer to computer). Lose capacity (trading space for redundancy).

   Probably overkill for many people, but excellent when you have to protect a lot of data in an environment that you need high-availability.

4. Drives on other machines. Using free space on other computers (on a network) to backup data.Advantages: Cheap (utilize space that isn’t used elsewhere). Fast. Can be automated to provide daily (or better) backups.
   Negatives: You need extra computers to make this work.
5. Revision control (Keeping older versions of documents in case you need to revert to an earlier version).This solution is mainly geared toward Problem #3, User error.Advantages: Changes can be removed.
   Negatives: Extra space is needed for each version.

   I utilize this for source code where I may be required to back-out a change if I find problems.

My Backup Plan

So what do I do?

My personal documents: Since this is Priority 1 for me, I have four levels of backup.

1. My Documents resides on a 4 disk, 750GB RAID-5 array (4x 250GB Western Digital WD2500YD Enterprise Drives). These drives come with a 5-year warranty (most consumer drives carry 3 years). I can lose any one of 4 drives, and all of my data will still be safe.
2. Bi-weekly, I backup to an external hard drive. Afterward, this is placed in a fire-proof safe.
3. I’ve burned my most essential documents onto DVD and have sent them to my parents in another state. This protects against some catastrophic events (fire) — and if both my home and my parents go up in fire on the same day, I have more important things to worry about (the end of the world perhaps?).
4. Revision control for my source code and some other documents, keeping all old versions.

My web server data, which contains things such as the web pages, databases and server configuration files. Also Priority 1. This data has three levels of backup.

1. Important data from the web server is backed up nightly with a 7-day history.
2. This data is backed up onto a second hard drive on the same machine nightly as well. The second drive is essentially a mirror of the first drive.
3. Weekly, this data is backed up to my home server.

My media, which I would probably go “eh” if I lost it, but I’m utilizing free space from the above solutions to provide backup.

1. I’ve copied much of the data I had on CD and DVD onto the RAID-5 array (about 300GB total).
2. The rest is still stored on CDs and DVDs where I won’t touch them unless need-be.

My machine OSs. I have a home machine, a home server (which does backup jobs and TiVo stuff), and my web server (which powers this and other websites).

1. My home machine’s OS is not backed up. I don’t mind having to reinstall Windows if need-be. If I was worried, I could switch to RAID-1.
2. My home server backs up important configuration files to another drive nightly.
3. My web server has two drives. The 2nd drive does a nightly mirror of the first drive, so it can replace the first drive with minimal downtime.
4. My home server also downloads the web server’s important data weekly to its own backup drive.

The home machines are all backed up with UPS power supplies. UPS is very important for my home computer, which has 6 hard drives spinning constantly. When you lose power, some disks might have trouble “slowing down” and could incur errors. The UPS connects to the home machine and provides ~5 minutes of backup power (complete with the LCD monitor and networking if need-be), then automatically shuts Windows down gracefully.

Oh, I also backup my parent’s documents over the internet weekly — I don’t think they care all too much, but I’d like to make sure they’re safe, regardless.

So how could I lose it all? I’m sure there are flaws in my plan, but I’m protected on many levels against multiple problems. Nothing is perfect, but I do feel a lot safer knowing my data is safe.

Phew.

What do you do?