The most important thing you'll ever do.

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled blog to bring you this vital public service announcement:

ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP PLAN

{Rod Serling impression} Imagine, if you will, a computer. One that holds all your priceless memories... photographs of your child's first years, video of your wedding, snapshots from family vacations. Now imagine that you turn on this computer one day, and hear a loud 'clicking' sound emanating from within... your drive has disappeared; your files suddenly inaccessible. No, it's not just a bad dream. You've entered... the crash zone. {end Rod Serling impression}

Like the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner and that creepy thing on the wing of an airplane, you too WILL open your window one day to see the ugly face that is lost data staring in at you. Are you prepared? Do you have a backup plan - a strategy for maintaining redundant data both on and off-site? Or are you trusting to blind luck?

If it sounds like I'm a little preachy here, it's because I'm hoping that someone wiser than myself will learn from my mistake. I'm running a Mac Pro - a very stable computer that only crashes on me when I'm running a Microsoft application (a little tech-related humor there for ya). But system stability is not necessarily reflective of hard-drive longevity. I'd been keeping all my data - including irreplaceable business-related photographs from my commercial/architectural shoots - on one large terabyte external drive. And, like I preached above, I did have a backup plan... the problem is that I wasn't executing it. So when my hard-drive failed on June 1, I may have lost nearly three months of images and documents. I say "may have" because the drive is currently in surgery and the data "may be" recoverable... but like any other surgery, it's very expensive. (This is where I throw in the old adage that "an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure".) For the amount of money that I'm spending trying to recover the lost data (and there's still no guarantee of success!), I could have bought a second identical drive, a backup application to manage the process, and still had enough money to buy a new lens or two. Not to mention the peace of mind that I'd have right now. Okay, enough about me... let's make sure this never happens to you.

So what is the right strategy for you? In this blog entry, we'll talk about on-site data redundancy - in other words, making sure you have a handy backup right there next to you. We'll save the discussion of off-site data storage next time.

First things first - how much data do you have? Are you able to keep your computer's OS, applications and all your data (music, videos, pictures) on just one internal hard drive? If so, a single external hard drive hooked up via FireWire or USB 2.0 is the easiest solution. Hard drive storage space is getting cheaper by the day, so there's no excuse not to do this. Just be sure that the external drive is at least as large as your internal drive - preferably larger.

If, like me, you've got an internal drive for your OS and applications and a separate, external hard drive for your data, then you'll need either two drives (one to mirror each of your drives), or one large drive that has enough storage to copy both your internal and external drives. For instance, if you have a 250 MB internal HD and a 500 MB external HD, you should plan on getting a 750 MB external HD to store the information from both.

Now, we come to the second question - are you on a PC or a Mac? If you're using a Mac equipped with Leopard, you've probably already discovered the smooth and effortless backup application known as Time Machine. This is a perfect solution, but requires that you have one destination drive to hold all your data - so be sure to get one that's big enough to grow with your data storage needs. This shouldn't be a problem - you can easily get 1TB drives for $200 to $250 these days, so go big.

If you're running a PC or a pre-Leopard Mac, you'll need to look at software applications to help create, manage and execute your backup plan. On the PC side of things, there are a number of great applications out there, starting with Genie-Soft's Backup Manager. For the Mac users not able to utilize Leopard's Time Machine, Memeo makes a great backup application that's easy to setup and use. Both of these applications are able to backup across multiple drives, so you don't have to have one single, huge, drive. If you've already got a few 250GB drives, this is a great way to go.

Whatever you choose, just be sure to have a backup plan and follow through with it. You'll thank me someday... okay, maybe not, but you will be glad you did.

Sometime soon, we'll look at off-site backup - because all the backup in the world won't help you when little Johnny burns your house to the ground.