Most people have seen the story circulating about the computer tech who screwed up and not only destroyed a hard drive full of information, but also destroyed the back up as well.

I am sure that there are those who will point to these errors (I say these because the tech made several mistakes) and use that for justification for not storing information digitally. Based upon the news reports I have seen, however, that is not the lesson to be learned here. Instead, the lesson to be learned is that part of a reasonable backup strategy is making sure that your backups work.

It appears that the owner of the records had, at first glance, a good backup strategy. The original electronic records were on a hard drive. A copy of those records existed on a second hard drive. And, a copy of the records existed on a tape backup of the original drive.

This plan is good in that it contains certain redundancies. Not only is there a hard drive backup, but there is also a tape backup.  It is not clear from the story whether any of backup information was stored off site, however that is an integral part of a good backup plan as well.

If they had such a good backup plan, how did this happen? Based on the reports, I see two reasons. First the technician accidentally erased the hard drive backup. I can envision a situation where a person accidentally erases original information. How, however, does the technician who just screwed up and reformatted a hard drive with critical information turn around and delete the same information from the backup?

The final problem of course is that no one regularly checked the tape backups to ensure that they were working properly. A backup solution is not a solution if you cannot restore your original files from the backup. You should regularly test your backups to ensure that they are working properly and that you can restore from them. This is especially true with tape backups because tape is an unstable medium. It degrades over time. Because of this, you should have any tape backups on a regular replacement schedule. Most manufacturers recommend replacing your tapes at least once a year.

About a year ago Nerino Petro reviewed the Hitachi Travelstar notebook hard drive upgrade kit. Nerino gave the kit a high review (18 out of 20). Recently my 40GB hard drive reached its capacity limit and I was looking to move to a larger drive. Based upon Nerino’s recommendation, I decided to try Hitachi’s kit. After doing so, I agree wholeheartedly with Nerino’s conclusion.

It is called an Upgrade Kit because the package contains more than just a hard drive. It contains a hard drive, a hard drive enclosure, and EZ Gig II software. The setup was easy. I simply had to secure the new drive in the hard drive enclosure, connect the enclosure to my laptop via USB, and restart my computer.

The kit uses the EZ Gig II software to clone your original hard drive. The great thing about the software is that it runs from the CD. After attaching the drive enclosure and rebooting, the computer boots from the CD and starts the cloning process. The interface is simple and requires only a few clicks to start the cloning process. To clone my practically full 40GB drive took a little less than 40 minutes. Surprisingly, the “time remaining” indicator on the cloning process was very accurate.

After the cloning process was complete, I simply swapped out my old drive for a my new drive and rebooted my computer. The reboot was flawless. It was as if nothing had changed. Additionally, because the kit comes with an enclosure, I now have a spare hard drive to use as a backup or for extra storage.

Overall, I was very pleased with the kit. The entire process took less than an hour and I now have a faster (7200 rpm) larger (80 GB) drive than I had before, all without any problems.

The only difficulty that I ran into was finding the drive I wanted. I found that several different retailers carry the kits, but their stock is not consistent. Some had drives with serial connectors, some had drives with parallel connectors. Some had only 5400 rpm drives, while others had drives in either too small or too large of a capacity (of course by too large I mean that it was more money than I wanted to spend).

After looking around for a while, I finally found the drive I wanted at Pexagon Technology. I ordered it from there, and received from them in a timely manner.

In sum, I would not hesitate to purchase this kit again if I needed to upgrade the hard drive in a laptop.