Summer Heat and your Precious Memories

Your photos, home movies and other valuables: It’s simply not worth the risk

6ABC News in Philadelphia shows heat indexes

Written by Robert Blanda, Creative Director, CaddisArt, Inc.

With the incredible heat and humidity on the East Coast, power levels coming into your home or office have been dipping into “brown-out” or “blackout” conditions. These power dips cause terrible havoc on computer equipment, especially hard disks where your important data is stored.

While some of you only may have small amounts of data, others have terabytes and terabytes of family photos, home movies and documents. In the case of small to medium sized businesses, we all too often see situations where hard disks are unattended, have lack of redundancy or worse yet, no backups to speak of.

Rewinding back to the year 2003, my family photos were stored on an external USB hard drive. This is where they lived and I felt comfortable knowing that they were accessible over our little network in the house. Mind you, these were the only copies of our children in their toddler years which included photos and movies. Then it happened.

I’d like to say that it was probably about 250 gigabytes at the time of data that I didn’t have a second copy of. I literally lost every photo and movie that was on that dying drive. It began to click, make weird noises and eventually stopped working. There’s a time period of my children growing up that I simply do not have a record of and I want them back.

Precious Memories: they are more important than you think.

At the time, I kept meticulous backups of all business records, invoices, tax documents and other important data. I guess I didn’t think my “home media” was as important and it wasn’t backed up. My family wasn’t too happy about it either – they trusted me to keep the data safe, and I was to blame.

We still call it the “Hard drive crash of 2003” to this day and I’d give anything to have those memories back.

What most people don’t realize is that in addition to keeping backups, it’s important that you remember that power dips or brownouts are actually a bit worse than complete blackouts in some respects. If you’re copying files from your camera to your local disks and you suffer a brownout, you could actually lose the entire drive due to corruption of data while the files are in mid-transfer.

When your local electricity goes out, or dips, it’s important to have a UPS or “Uninterruptible Power Supply” to keep a steady stream of electricity to your computer while you’re doing the transfer. If it dips, your system simply doesn’t know what to do and can write incomplete data and corrupt portions of your hard disks. Don’t get me wrong, you could get lucky and still have all your data. It’s been known to happen.

However, data is the backbone of any business or family memory and should be treated the same. In fact, I’ve found the latter is more important.

In some respects, New Jersey has very similar weather to Florida; high humidity and high temperatures. The air conditioning units in our area put a tremendous strain on our antiquated power system (our offices are in an historic district.) On extremely hot days, the power dips down below the 110V level or blacks out entirely.

Uninterruptible Power Supplies are worth their weight in gold.

The word of advice here is to invest in a UPS for your computer, albeit PC, Mac or Linux. In my opinion, every single system should have one regardless of how important you think it is. Computers these days need clean and constant power, and that’s what these systems do. They are inexpensive for a single system and can save you from some serious headaches.

Price you ask? A single desktop computer system with one monitor and an external drive will only require a $75-$90 investment. However, if you’re in a more professional environment, you may want to consider something that can gracefully shut down your computer and make sure there will be no data corruption in the process.

Let’s imagine that you have a pretty beefy computer used for video editing or graphics production. This computer will typically have 2-3 monitors, a DAS (direct attached storage device) and most likely some other external peripheral like a backup drive.

For less than $230, you can cover your entire system in the event of a complete power loss for about 18 minutes. Here’s the best part: when the UPS battery begins to drain, you can set a threshold for your system to gracefully hibernate until the power comes back. These are pretty smart little systems and I highly recommend you purchase one for your home or office use. Here’s a bonus – Companies such as APC will actually provide an insurance policy against any hardware loss up to $25,000. It’s included with your purchase.

Granted, there are much higher end UPS systems that are designed for data center use that I won’t cover here. They get into the thousands of dollar range but are an absolute necessary item for protecting data. From there, there’s diesel generators and huge power grid setups. The sky is the limit.

In conclusion, don’t assume that your family photos or data isn’t important enough to host a small UPS system for $75 – make the investment.