Something useful for a change

Economics is a field that takes a certain sick pride in being as useless as possible, but, contrarian that I am, I’ve actually got something useful to contemplate today, namely the economics—or at least the management—of keeping typhoons, CUC blackouts, or other random disasters from wiping out all the precious data on your computer. And, face it, for many of us, our lives have been reduced to the magic little 1’s and 0’s on hard drives; our work, our financial records, our correspondence, our photographs, and even our music is entirely digital. And it can all disappear in an instant. Zap–gone…forever.

I’ve survived three hard drive crashes thus far, and my pals have their tales of woe, too. After my most recent crash, I learned the hard way that the zip drives that have been so popular in Saipan are fatally flawed. Lucky for me, I had run three redundant backups onto zip disks. The first two backups could not be restored. If the third had failed (it didn’t), I would have been wiped out. I investigated the matter with some credible computer experts, who said that my horror story is just one of many. My zip drive went into the garbage after that.

So I turned to burning CDs, which has its merits, but in modern times, a 680 megabyte CD is a mighty tiny capacity. It would take 59 such disks to absorb 40 gigabytes of data. Never mind the cost, I don’t have time to feed 59 sequential disks into my CD burner. DVD burners are now on the scene, and a typical DVD holds seven times the data that a CD will, but I’m not tempted.

No, I’ve opted to use external, USB hard drives to back stuff up, and, folks, this is the way to go. This wasn’t really an option until recently, since these drives were outlandishly expensive. But now? Cheap. You can get a good external drive for $100 to $150 or so, and we’re talking about 80 to 120 gigabyte capacities. There are even bigger drives with bigger capacities, but for most of us, the 100 gig range is sufficient, at least for now.

There’s just so reason not to do this. If a typhoon is boring down on you, you can stash your external drive someplace safe, thus disbursing your precious data. And, unlike a CD or DVD burner, you don’t have to sit there and feed disks into your computer, you can go pound beers at Pau Pau beach while your backups are being completed. Furthermore, the backups enable you to easily retrieve files that you accidentally delete (my specialty) or that you misfile and lose (my other specialty). And, here’s another advantage: You can archive files directly to your external drive without burdening your primary drive with them. My bloated photo album is on my external drives, since I use notebook computers and their humble hard drives can’t even hold that much data.

I have external drives made by Maxtor and Western Digital, and I’m happy with both brands. Incidentally, my Maxtor drives work with Windows 98 systems, my Western Digital drives do not. On a related note, if you get an external hard drive, you’ll have to decide whether you want to format it in the FAT32 or in the NTFS format. You can do your own research on this, but I use FAT32 only for Windows 98 systems; my primary computer is Windows XP, and NTFS is the way to go with this. That evil rat Bill Gates is cooking up another operating system, so who the heck knows what we’ll be dealing with in a couple of years. (Why is Martha Stewart in prison when Bill Gates is walking free? Who is the monopolist? Who is a bigger threat to your financial health…and even your sanity?).

Hardware is nothing without software, and my favorite backup software is a freebie: Western Digital’s “Data Lifeguard.” You can download it from Western Digital. The version I have does have one quirk: It won’t launch correctly if the external hard drive is connected to the computer (go figure). I found a work-around: First I launch Data Lifeguard, and then I plug in the external drive’s USB cable, and I’m in business. It only took me about 11 hours to figure this out, so I’m happy to share my 4am “Eureka!” moment with you, since it would be a shame to keep in secret. Using Data Lifeguard, if you want to backup your entire hard drive (and I often do just that), it takes just a couple of seconds to start the process. There’s no goofy compression or proprietary imaging formats to mess with, you get straight, readable copies of all your files. Sweet. Really sweet.

Hopefully, the blessings of affordable external drives will make catastrophic data loss a thing of the past. The CNMI’s climate is ruthless on computer components, as many folks keep finding out the hard way. Sure, maybe economics is a useless science, but the economics of guarding your data have never looked better.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com)