Today is World Backup Day

Well we have a day for just about everything else  – why should Backups be forgotten ?

World Backup Day (WBD) was proposed about a week ago by some members of Reddit, the social bookmarking Web site, and has caught on in the way things do online: A Web site was created within hours and there’s already a dedicated Twitter account.

More importantly, WBD is supported by a handful of organizations who are using the day to make special offers and product announcements.

WBD’s timing one day before April 1 isn’t coincidental, and nobody should be made an April’s Fool if their hard drive dies or they accidentally wipe 10 years of family vacation photos. However, those behind WBD are keen to point out that aim of the day is to raise awareness about backup, and not simply remind people to do so. After all, backing up should be done every week or even every day.

Sadly, backup is one of those dull and monotonous tasks that few of us take seriously.

A survey last year showed that:

• almost 90 percent of home PC users don’t do regular backups,
• around 67 percent had lost data because of it.

Another survey suggested that one third of home users don’t even backup at all !

As for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), a survey from Symantec earlier this year showed that around half don’t have a disaster recovery plan should catastrophic data loss occur, and only half of SMBs surveyed back up their data weekly. Only 23 percent back up daily.

There are essentially three ways to backup data when it comes to workstations:
to an external hard disk (such as a network-attached storage device),
to a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray disc,
or to using an online cloud storage provider.

Some of the best:

Dropbox – As well as syncing your data across PCs, it also backs up to dropbox’s online servers

dropbox provides 2GB for free, or up to 100GB for a yearly fee

LiveDrive – No storage limits here, livedrive offers unlimited backups and you can also install it on unlimited computers,

for just £10 /per year from some resellers on ebay (e.g. this one)  it’s  a no brainer.

Panasonic SD SDHC Camcorder

We all know the horror – accidentally deleting photos from memory cards.

While there are many file-recovery programs out there to get your files and photos back, when similar happened to me with a SDHC camcorder, none of the programs I tried would find any video.

The 16GB SD card in question had been full of video, then formatted and a further 3GB of footage recorded on.

The usual suspects Ontrack EasyRecovery and PC FileInspector failed here, not showing any previous footage other than the current 3GB.

At the stage of giving up, I found panasonic’s software (though probably works with any AVCHD / SDHC SD card based camcorder.

Lo and behold,  despite the oddly translated english in the menus and the fact that an initial scan found nothing – I ended up with a directory containing 15GB of .MTS files after 30 minutes of crunching.

You can get Panasonic’s recovery software below:

Panasonic SDHC recovery [ 3.6MB]