It’s Time to Protect Your Digital, Portable World

• Moment Capture Expands
• Losses in a Heartbeat
• Family Photos May Push Backup

This past holiday season marked the first time that computers edged out TVs on the family “must gift” list. More specifically, notebook computers.

IDC, the international research firm, believes this trend will continue as we focus on being continuously mobile, connected and productive.

Because of the size of homes, notebooks have long been the home entertainment/work tool of choice for years in Asia and Europe. The big drop in prices, new power and battery life, build-in WiFi capabilities and widespread availability of hot spots have made them increasingly popular in the U.S. Of course it doesn’t hurt that manufacturers are throwing in a bag of easy to use creative audio, photo, video tools onto these portable and ultra-portable systems.

Suddenly we have the majority of the entertainment industry right in our hands. More and more people use their notebooks not just for office and school but also reach out and capture more and more information and entertainment on their own terms. Increasingly, we use the systems to timeshift TV programs, edit and store our videos as well as sort, view and store family, vacation, event photos.

Digital Moments Increasing
According to Kristy Holch, group director of InfoTrends, we’re taking (and storing) more pictures with digital cameras than we historically did with analog (film) cameras. She points out that the trend that began in Japan more than four years ago and two years ago in Europe has finally swept the Americas and there is a dramatic increase in the sale and use of cameraphones.

In 2004, more than 20 million digital cameras were sold and the demand should continue through 2008 when InfoTrends estimates that nearly 80 percent of the U.S. households will have one or more of the cameras. The reasons for the growth were pretty obvious at this year’s PMA show which featured higher resolution cameras, units that combined both still and video and universally lower prices.

But the big news at the show was the number of camphones that had very good megapixel capture. While we just bought a new camphone, we got the camera capabilities because there weren’t a lot of non-camera cell phone options. But Ms. Holch said many users are opting for camphones for the capture capability. Her firm’s research found that nearly 35 percent of the camphone users say picture-taking is their most-used feature on their phone, after calling. In fact, on the average they take 20 pictures a month.

While some of the photos are printed – an estimated 10 percent. The majority are simply shot and stored. So where do we store all those great moments and memories?

Right! On the computer hard drive and increasingly that means the notebook hard drive. The same computer you take back and forth to class or take on business trips.

Disaster is Inevitable
We all “know” notebook computers are more susceptible to loss, theft or hard drive accidents than desktop systems. It should be second nature to backup and archive all of the data on the mobile computer’s hard drive. But it isn’t!

To emphasize the point, the FBI says laptop theft is the second most prevalent computer crime (following identity theft) and less than 2 percent of stolen laptops recovered. In fact, over 2 million laptops are expected to be stolen in 2005.

Contingency Planning Research (CPR) estimates that the number of mobile system hard drive losses is more than 10 million annually.

While a lost or stolen laptop can be replaced, the data is unique. Business information is usually the most current information the company has and is often times confidential. That’s bad but photos of the wife, kids, weekends and holidays can never be replaced. And while theft and damage in transit seem to be the most logical reasons to protect hard drive stored data, CPR has found that user and system errors are the leading notebook disasters (Figure 1).

Protecting our data against ourselves seems to be the key reason for practicing sound backup/recovery.

The loss of class assignments or business contracts can be a major headache but InfoTrends sees an even bigger problem when video and still family and personal moments and memories are simply dropped into hard drive folders. They note that less than half of the digital photo/video users have any archival plan (Figure 2).

This means that when the notebook disaster strikes, data isn’t simply lost but the memories are gone…forever!

Better Save Than Sorry
Most people think it will never happen to them. But when you go mobile, you aren’t operating behind a firewall. There is the very “real” possibility of a virus that can erase hard drives in seconds.

Having personally lost all of the data on a 40GB notebook hard drive three years ago (70 percent of it was mirrored on our office system), we’re firm believers not just of backup but backup/recovery. CPR’s results came home to roost We were surprised two weeks ago when our daughter called asking how she could recover six months of family sporting events and vacation photos. She had accidentally erased the files from her old hard drive when she was upgrading her system.

She could have sent the drive to a fairly expensive drive recovery service. Instead, the memories were just…memories.

There are many ways to insure backup of critical data and we’ve looked at them all. Our solution has been NTI’s BackupNOW! Deluxe Suite. The newest version – 4 – provides full image backup and individual file/folder backup capabilities for our home entertainment network and personal notebook. It also gives us more email and profile backup/recovery tools than we know what to do with but they are probably really important and we should probably read the user’s manual to see what they do.

With our home network it enables everyone to can quickly create backups of their emails and critical data files or their complete hard drive. This makes it very easy to quickly recover individual files that have been accidentally deleted. When the inevitable happens and we replace (or upgrade) one of the hard drives, we can use the recovery disc to restore the entire system to its prior state.

When we travel on business, we backup all of the important stuff and irreplaceable photos on CD and DVD. But with the new version’s remote-online backup/recovery capability we can also use the software to archive files to our office or home server sites. In a pinch, we can even retrieve files from the FTP server.

A new feature we’ve found to be great for every member of the family is NTI’s new EasySteps interface. It really is a 1-2-3 process (see screens). On-the-fly data compression is very useful since we don’t like to carry a big box of CDs or DVDs with us all the time. The new version of BackupNOW! Deluxe Suite lets us store up to 1.4GB of vital data on a single CD or up to 9.4GB on a single DVD disc.

Verbatim’s new double layer DVDs let us store over 18GB on a single disc. So with two discs we’ve more than saved all of the documents, data and images on our notebook hard drive.

Since we regularly have about 12GB of family photos and videos (more than a single layer DVD can hold) on our hard drive along with client presentations, news as well as product photos; the new version saves us from shuffling discs. The software spans the backup over multiple discs without the time consuming file partitioning and disc numbering we used to have to do. While we’ve had backups interrupted before, the NTI suite now includes intra backup restart. So if the process is interrupted – happens in the best of families — we don’t have to start over at ground zero.

We admit we’ve never been real good at archiving minor things like tax returns. But 2-3 backup copies of the kids playing soccer or our vacations is a smart move.

Especially when we hear stories of Governor Schwarzenegger, FBI personnel and others “misplacing” their notebooks. True the Governor is back but his staff isn’t holding out high hopes for the computer.

Add to that the way airport security people “check” notebooks and a solid backup/recovery program becomes cheap insurance. It’s something professional photographers/videographers or regular folks who care about their photos and videos should practice before they mutter those immortal words…*&^&#@ #$@#%!

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