November 2004

Saved!

Continued from page 1

By Simson Garfinkel

Children's CDs are just a few of the CD-ROM images that I have sitting on these drives. I also image practically every piece of commercial software that I buy, as well as those "installers" that I download when I purchase software over the Internet. That way I can uninstall and reinstall the software if something goes wrong -- or when I buy a new computer system. (It's also important to save the corresponding activation codes.)

One of the problems that I've noticed with children's old CD-ROMs is that many of them won't run under Windows XP, Mac OS 10.3, or other modern operating systems. So in addition to archiving the CD-ROMs themselves, I've also taken to archiving all of my old Microsoft and Apple operating systems. When the hard drive on the kids' computer died last year, I reinstalled a copy of Windows 98, and they were up and running by the end of the weekend.

Backups are a problem for information stored not just on CD-ROMs but also on computer hard drives. Back in the bad old days of computing -- say, ten years ago -- most small-business users and many home computer owners religiously made backups of their data. But in recent years, hard drives have become so reliable that many people have simply stopped making backups. Alas, living without backups is living dangerously, as there are many potential ways to lose your data: fire, flood, thieves, software crashes, errant spyware -- and, of course, the biggest threat of all: human error.

Now that we are all living in the 21st century, backing up computers is a chore that no one should be forced to remember. I've taken care of this by programming all of my computers to back themselves up automatically. A script that runs every night copies the contents of my documents directory to a different Zip file on that same oversized external hard drive. This backup proved to be invaluable this past summer, when my computer crashed while I was running Quicken, and the program's database was corrupted. And my Zip archives, in turn, are automatically copied from my home computer to a computer sitting under my desk at MIT -- just in case my home and its contents are suddenly wiped out.

A few years ago I designed a peer-to-peer backup system based on this concept. The idea was to let businesses back up their servers, desktops, and laptops onto the spare disk space scattered throughout their offices. The network would automatically keep track of what had been backed up and where -- and, of course, everything backed up would be encrypted to prevent accidental data compromises. Home users could arrange for backups between their desktops and laptops or, even better, could back up their systems to those of their friends next door.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find anybody to fund my idea. Nevertheless, many similar systems are now under development. Within a few years, it's likely that we'll all be using disk images and peer-to-peer backups to archive our most important information -- and probably everything else, as well.