I keep my whole life on my computer: appointments, phone numbers, notes, photos, music, emails, every report I’ve written or presentation I’ve made.  Honestly, everything.  I can’t afford to lose it.

 

 

My new MacBook crashed a few weeks ago, only 10 days after I bought it.  The hard drive had to be replaced.  I hadn’t made a backup yet.  Fortunately, I had all my data on my old machine from 10 days before.  So I only lost 10 days of data: emails, notes, a few personal documents.

 

Apple did an excellent job of dealing with this in general.  First of all, there was an Apple Store right down the street in Palo Alto when my machine crashed, so I walked right up to the genius bar, and the guy there helped me without even an appointment.  He was efficient, friendly, and clear about the diagnosis of the problem.  My computer was under warranty, so he took the computer right there to ship to Apple for repairs (I even dropped the computer off in California and had it delivered back to me in Michigan).  This was about as good a customer service experience as I can imagine.

 

The computer came back to me 12 days later, repaired, but with a new hard drive, without my data.  The good news was this: though I lost some files and emails, I was using Apple’s .Mac service, which kept continuous backups of my contacts, calendar, and bookmarks, so none of that data was lost.  (The .Mac sync capability not only backs this stuff up but makes them all consistent across my work and home computer, which is a very cool thing.)

 

I fortunately had a 10-day old backup, but I’m not terribly good about keeping a recent backup.  There are too many hassles around it, especially with a portable.  I think most people are even worse about keeping backups.  You could blame people for being bad at doing backups — no discipline.  But blaming people is unproductive and unrealistic.  People aren’t computers, and backup techniques need to take that into account.  Setup needs to be easy.  Backup needs to be easy.  And recovery of data needs to be easy.  Apple’s .Mac service does a great job of keeping it simple, but it’s just a start.  Backup should be fully integrated into the operating system so that configuration of backup is trivial, requiring minimal thought and planning.

 

RAID storage uses multiple disk drives to store data and can be configured for redundancy, so that if a single drive fails, it can be replaced without losing any data.  RAID drives may not make sense at this point for portables, but it’s time for them to be introduced into the high-end professional desktop machines and slowly filter down to other configurations.  Eventually, I see RAID configurations of miniature hard drives for laptops, at least for the larger models.

 

When I was younger, and labeling floppy disks, I thought it would be great if disks could come with their own screens and be self-labeling, maybe even let you browse their contents.  In fact, that’s essentially what an iPod is today -- a self-labeling storage device.  A lot of external hard drives are bought for the purpose of being backup devices, and it seems only logical that they should have the small amount of computing intelligence (and a wireless connection, to help laptop owners) needed to make them convenient stand-alone servers.  A very simple configuration should enable them to handle backups and to chain them together for more backup memory.

 

At that point, they can also offer other server operations.  Configured as RAID configurations, they can be the perfect repository for large collections of media (music and video), and the other machines a person owns can then sync to them, much like syncing an iPod, to pull a subset of the music and video.  Without this server technology, I’m currently stuck with either putting all my media on my laptop or the painful manual process of moving music and videos back and forth between my laptop and backup drives.

 

Finally, Apple ought to look at how they can provide as much data recovery as possible when someone brings in a broken drive.  I’m sure they avoid this right now for all the complexities it introduces, such as the problem with only being able to recover partial data.  However, taking responsibility for data recovery is likely to make them take seriously other approaches, like RAID drives and integrated backup in the OS, which would dramatically reduce the difficulty of helping people recover.  Perhaps by raising the importance of recovered data, hard drive manufacturers would innovate in the design of drives to improve the likelihood of data recovery.