I had a hard drive fail on Thursday. First Windows reported that it was a removable drive. That’s odd, I thought… I rebooted the machine, and everything seemed ok. Then a few hours later, desktop icons that pointed to programs on that drive went blank. Uh oh, I thought. Then File Manager couldn’t see the drive. Oh… damn… I thought.
I looked at the drive in the BIOS, and sure enough, the BIOS could see it. I spent some time working on it before I noticed that, while the BIOS could see the drive, it reported that it had a size of 0 bytes.
Resigned, I pulled the drive out – there’s nothing on it I can’t replace, although some of it will be a pain, so I’m going to pay for data recovery. I checked it against the company website – it’s one month out of warranty.
As I said, there’s nothing on this drive that I can’t replace. Everything vital is backed up to a cloud account. But it started me thinking about it: what if I had lost the writing I’ve done in the last while? I’ve been working hard the last year. I’ve completed one novel, and am within shouting distance of finishing a second. That’s two hundred thousand words right there. A year of labor.
Could I afford to lose that?
I use Microsoft OneDrive for my writing work. I’m comfortable that it won’t fail. While I’m not a storage or networking expert, I do know enough about modern cloud technologies to know that whatever I have in a big cloud service like Microsoft OneDrive, or AWS, won’t be lost due to hardware failure. It won’t even be lost with massive hardware failure.
But there is still a single point of failure. What if I lost access to the account? What if I forgot the password, or what if I was hacked? What if the cloud provider decided, for whatever reason, that I could not use their service any more? I would lose everything as surely as if I’d had a hard drive failure with only a single copy of those files.
I’ve decided that the risk is just too great – it isn’t likely to happen, but if it ever did, it would be disastrous for me. So I have to mitigate that risk. To that end, I have decided to do two things:
- I am buying a NAS (Network Addressed Storage – essentially a small server dedicated to storage) device. I have purchased a 4 bay device that I will configure as redundant storage. I will use this device primarily as backup storage, and I will back up my OneDrive documents onto this device.
- I am going to buy storage on AWS, and back up the critical NAS data there.
In this way, I will be covered from almost all eventualities. Risk has two parts: how likely is something? and what will it cost you? I have realized that the cost of losing years of work is not something I will bear. Redundant cloud storage and redundant on-premises storage will ensure that no matter what, I will not lose more than I am willing to pay.