While Hurricane Earl will most likely spare the Mid-Atlantic area (MacMedics territory), it will hit somewhere and it will destroy some data in some way.

Here in the Mid-Atlantic area, MacMedics clients and friends should un-plug their computer and remove and store back up hard drives in a dry place if you’re not going to be around when the rain and wind hits us.

Power surges via power lines and lightning hits via Comcast’s network seem to be the leading cause of damages to our client’s Macintosh computers.

This might also be a good time to enhance your back up plan by adding an off-site back up. MacMedics is now a Mozy partner, so click here if you’d like to sign up for that.

For our friends north of the Mid-Atlantic, MacMedics recommends that you back up your hard drive via a “clone” use Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner, as that way you can “test” your back up to insure you have a good, bootable copy.

Take that back up put it in a Ziploc bag and have it ready to go with you, if you should need to evacuate. Also, hurricanes bring the rain with them, so plan ahead to protect your computer AND your back up. If you have to leave, put a garbage bag over your computer. If you have a light roof leak, that might be enough to save your computer.

The important thing is to PLAN AHEAD. Your back up is not complete if it’s not:

1. Automatic
2. Redundant
3. Off-Site

We have tons of posts on Time Machine and we even have a free White Paper on it If you’d like a copy, let us know. If you’re not using an automatic backup, your data is at risk!

P.S. If you are going to be where the hurricane is, then you DO need to go get a Ziploc bag right now, and put it with your iPhone. That way if you get caught outside or you’re checking out the surf at the beach, your iPhone is protected. Take my word for it, and you’ll thank me later!!

If you have a LaCie external hard drive, especially the LaCie Big Disk from a few years ago, MacMedics strongly recommends replacing it. Several years ago when the largest inexpensive hard drive was in the 250 to 500 GB range, this type of “striped” hard drive RAIDs (also called RAID 0) were super popular. It allowed you to have a reasonably inexpensive LARGE single hard drive (made of of two smaller cheap hard drives). This design was driven by the effort to give users a low price on a large amount of space. Having a hard drive volume made up of two drives striped together is risky because it’s essentially a RAID system designed for performance not protection. You are doubling your chances for a major problem because you have two drives (working in tandem) instead of one. If one drive fails you lose the data on the RAID meaning that you lose all of your data (it would be far less risky to have TWO separate hard drives, that way if one failed you would still have the data on the other one). You are also in situation where two drives create twice the heat, thus increasing the drive temperature and decreasing the life span of your two hard drives in a single case.

Many computer users (both Macintosh and PC) don’t even know that they are using a RAID 0 hard drive system with TWO hard drives inside. RAID 0 is designed for speed and performance, not redundancy or protection. If you use a RAID 0 drive, you must ensure you have it backed up, because if a drive dies or the RAID controller fails or the RAID gets damaged by a corrupt directory or something, it’s bad news for your data. Read more about the different types of RAID systems here.

Data loss from these types of “two drive” systems are becoming more and more common, as these “Big Disks” start to fail from age. If you have a RAID system like this, you need to make sure you have a tested and automatic back up (using two striped or spanned RAIDs to back up one to the other is okay), to ensure your data is protected. Storing your data on a “performance” RAID is a VERY bad idea, and it’s equally bad to use such a drive as back up system. If you do lose your data on a “spanned” or “striped” RAID the data recovery costs are far more then if you were just working with a single non-RAID hard drive. Also, don’t forget that if your system is more than three years old, you should consider “retiring” it anyways, see our website at http://www.HardDrivesDie.com for more info on that.

This type of device (as pictured above) has no internal fan, so this device has history of “over-heating”. Hot hard drives fail faster, so using TWO hard dives inside one enclosure with no fan is just asking for trouble.

Hard drive prices are at an all-time low, so this is a great time to replace an order drive with a new, faster, more robust hard drive.

Update 10/1/10 - If you have one of these drives, it really should be retired. Not ready to chuck it in the trash just yet? Here’s a great idea for “retiring” a 2-Drive “spanned” RAID like the type mentioned above. Use the drive as an off-site back up! Buy a new larger drive, copy all of the data over, and then turn off the old drive, and take it off-site. This completes TWO segments of the “Holy Trinity” of data protection. 1. Redundancy AND 2. Off-Site Back Up. You only need an automatic back up system to achieve all three segments. Yeah, it’s an old drive, but it’s not going to age much sitting on a shelf (powered off) at your parent’s house.

Another great idea that you can use in conjunction with the idea above, is to buy a Drobo. A Drobo RAID device will allow you to copy all of your data to it, and you get some good data redundancy built in, as a Drobo is a “protection” RAID. If one drive fails, you still have all you data. Need a Drobo? We always have them in stock and most of us at MacMedics have one at home.

See this Blog post from a MacMedics client who had one of these LaCie “spanned” RAIDs and lost his data.