Guy Kewney

I've recently discovered a nasty fact of life: breaking a computer isn't fun. I had an accident with a portable computer last October. I tripped over the power cord. The laptop landed on the floor and smashed itself. Weirdly, the disk was broken - at first.

Then, over two days, it sort of started working. Unfortunately, the display was broken. I could plug it into a CRT and work out what was going on, but the point of a portable is that you take it with you. I couldn't, because it was in fragments.

Don't do this. You end up in the hands of insurers, and they stiff you. But at least I had most of my data backed up, and work could continue. Which, of course, is exactly as it should be. But increasingly, this isn't the case.

The problem affects quite large business users these days, and we're not just talking about the problems of copying your important MP3s onto a simple read-only CD.

Backing up is such fun that a lot of people I know have chickened right out of doing it, and I've lost count of my friends who can't. They can make duplicate copies of an album, no problem, but back up? "What do I have to do, Guy? Do I have to run the back-up program?"

As little as a year ago I tried doing a genuine, straight-out-of-the-box back-up. I backed all the files on the 20GB disk onto my home server. The back-up program ran. It took 14 hours, because I was connected over wireless, a mistake you should avoid by plugging into the 100Mbps Ethernet.

But it ran, and at the end, I thought: 'I'll just verify that it has backed up', and restored the files. If I'd relied on that back-up, that would have been the end of my business, because the restore program simply corrupted everything, and I had to reinstall Windows. Just one of those things.

Fortunately, I'd copied all the important files onto CD or onto my internet back-up store, and was up and running again in 12 hours. The same applied to my portable. I was able to reinstall all my applications from the original discs, recover my data and carry on.

But it frightened me enough to revisit my problems with the back-up program; I went to a systems manager friend, who looks after a couple of thousand PCs, and asked him how to improve things.

I have to say that the picture he painted was discouraging. Four years ago, he pointed out, when the standard disk on a standard PC was under 10GB, you could back it up quite easily onto a cheap tape drive. A tape held 20 to 40GB, and the tape drive was affordable.

Today, people routinely buy plug-in Firewire disks or build Raid arrays and end up with a PC with 200GB or even a terabyte Raid. To back that up, you'd need a different sort of tape drive. To get something with a capacity of more than 200GB, you have to spend close to £3,000. People simply don't do it.

Worse still, even if they have the capacity, they forget how long it takes. If you want to back up a 200GB hard disk completely - all the videos, music and other stuff you've photographed and downloaded - you can set aside a week.

It'll take you an hour or more if you have a fast, industrial-issue LTO Ultrium 2 200GB tape drive. I don't know anybody who has one at home. And most people I know say they back up onto CD-RW.

That's around 10 minutes per 600MB disc - over an hour to save 5GB, a whole day's work to save 50GB, three days to make copies of all the data if we assume you have 150GB on your hard disk.

Then you have to have a spare machine to test that it all restores correctly, because if it doesn't you're stuffed, to put it politely. And trust me on this - you want to find out that there's a problem before you reach the point of panic and the broken machine is lying on the floor.

Perhaps two years ago, I'd have said most business users were aware of the issues. Today, I'm not so sure: I now know of several large business users who simply don't have adequate back-up hardware.

If you're a fairly typical home computer user, you may not even be aware of the problem of restore verification. You're certainly the exception if you do.

It would be a minor social observation if the people we're talking about - you and me - were just playing Quake at home. These days, it's serious.

More and more of us are working; time-sharing with flexible hours, or running our own business from home. The result of dropping that computer could be that you get fired or lose your business.

A friend of mine is running a business worth £50K a year using a single PC which is three years old and runs a very early version of Windows 95. It doesn't even support USB peripherals and can't write to CD-RW.

I asked her what she'd do if the machine died. "I'd go out of business," she said. "What do you think, should I back up the data, or something?"

I said yes, and I gave her a copy of Nero. A month later, I asked her how it was going. "I haven't installed it, yet; I've been really busy, I'm afraid," she confessed. "Any suggestions? I was thinking of buying a big box of floppy disks. That would work, wouldn't it?"

I'm thinking of changing my name and moving to Outer Mongolia. I reckon it's safer than being where my friend can find me when her machine dies. And the fan was making an ominous noise last time I was there.

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