Backup, Synchronization, and Recovery of Data

Abstract

Most people who have been around computers for a long time have horror stories of disk crashes and data loss. And even if your story isn’t horrific, you probably have an “Oh, $#!*!” moment or two when things go wrong and you lose an hour’s or a day’s (or more) worth of work. The thing is, the minute your hard drive was created, it started a countdown toward its mean time before failure (MTBF—a rating that measures the average amount of time before a hard drive fails); in addition, we as people tend to occasionally make mistakes, so we must make sure we have effective ways of backing up and syncing our data.