Do any of us need any more signs to be written on any more walls that redundant backing up of our data is the single most important thing we can possibly do? I hope not, because it seems that hardly a day goes by without another harsh reminder being driven home that it is imperative. Just this weekend many of us read with horror about the colossal explosion at The Planet, which affected over 9000 servers. Did you catch that? Servers, not sites.

Although most of the servers suffered no data loss, that was not true in all cases. My friend Ewdi wrote in his personal blog about another site owner who had “a secondary server (in the same datacenter – The Planet H1) with RAID 10 as a backup server where he rsync his primary server, however due to the incident, his backup server RAID array was corrupted and he was unable to recover it. Lucky him his primary server was intact, however this experience makes him rethink his backup strategy.” Indeed.

As you all will recall, Ewdi was my knight in shining armor when Gear Diary suffered its own massive server crash on March 1, and the lessons learned that day were very hard, but they were learned well. For Gear Diary’s data I now use a combination of FTP download to two separate laptops, I back one of those up to a portable 250GB hard drive, I burn DVD copies to store away from my home office, I am currently trying Sugar Sync, I back up the entire Gear Diary site nightly via rsync to an off-site server…and yet I still don’t feel entirely safe. You think I am paranoid? I think that after what happened I couldn’t possibly be paranoid enough.

I rely on Mac’s OSX Time Machine - the free backup solution that comes bundled with Leopard for my personal data, and I have found it to work very well. How well was proven when my less than three month old MacBook Pro suffered a freakish hard drive crash in the middle of the Microsoft Mobius event I attended in May. Irony much? Bad luck much? Well guess what? No one is immune and no one ever expects it when it happens. Every cliché you have ever heard about being safe versus sorry…there is so much truth in it.

That’s why when I was offered the chance to try the Newer Tech Guardian MAXimus RAID Mirrored Data Redundant Solution, my answer was a very quick yes. Described as a provider of “”live activity” backup/data redundancy of your critical data with Plug and Play simplicity on any Mac or PC,” the Guardian MAXimus has “pre-configured hardware RAID solutions” featuring “two paired lightning fast SATA (Type I/II) drives with up to 1.0TB each of storage capacity and a high speed Oxford 924 FireWire 800/400 & USB 2.0 chipset.”

In case you are like I was, completely ignorant about what the acronym RAID stands for, let me save you some Google time; it’s “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”.

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[Ed. note - Updated 05/22, see end of article.]

After my MacBook drama last week at Mobius, I decided it might be worthwhile to check into over-the-air backup solutions for my personal data. I use rsync via the Mac Terminal as one of my Gear Diary backup solutions, but never thought it necessary to do it for my personal stuff…until now.

One solution that a friend recommended was Mozy, which just so happens to give a 2GB free account so you can see if it will work for you. Today I signed up to try it out…

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Image courtesy of Scientific American

I saw this article on Scientific American’s  website regarding the hard drive above.  It was recovered from the space shuttle Columbia, and the data itself on the drive was also recovered; this data helped to solve a physics experiment.  The drive was 99 percent recovered by OnTrack Data Recovery.

Now the image above has to be the worst I have EVER seen of a hard disk. This image and story should tell you to do one thing….YOUR BACKUPS!

Do you have similar stories?  Do you have not so similar stories?  Do I have to remind anyone what happened here??