How often do you back up your files? Daily? You better. Anything longer is a wrong answer.

Here’s Part One of why:

My brother is in IT; when I was younger he excitedly told me about a new server he’d installed. It had 7 drives in parallel. You could rip one out of the server while it was on and no data was lost. It needed to be set up properly and maintained of course. Fortunately, my brother is the IT guy other IT guys go to for help.

I recently heard about a 100-200 person company that had a server fail. Upon investigation, it turned out none (okay, maybe one erratically) of their servers were being backed up. Fortunately not too much was irretrievably lost with the crash, but if a different server had failed first, contracts, client data, painstaking research would all have been lost. When was the last time you asked your IT support about their backup protocol?

Too often I get a question to this effect “Jared, my file has corrupted/is acting weird.” My answer is ALWAYS “Okay. Let’s take a look. You have a backup from yesterday, right?” Usually I don’t like the answer.

Files corrupt. It doesn’t matter which program. As they get bigger and more complicated, as they’re accessed more, things happen. The reasons aren’t important. There are ways to minimize corruption in ArchiCAD (don’t ignore error messages!). But backing up is the simplest solution. Yes ArchiCAD has a powerful backup file and autosave function. But when it’s Crunch Time, I want a bigger safety net. The servers and workstations should be backed up. But one never knows. And the IT guy might not be around at 3 am when you need access to the backup. And maybe your company only backups up 3 times a week. Or only saves old backups for a month. Either way, I’m sure your clients and bosses will have zero sympathy for you and won’t care who’s to blame if you lose weeks worth of work because of poor backup practices.

A gig of manually saved backups is cheap, easy, and quick. And worthwhile. Do you know the cost of a terabyte of storage? As of today you can get a 1 TB external hard drive from amazon.com for under $100. Space is cheap. Super cheap. And getting cheaper all the time. How big are your ArchiCAD files? In the past 4 years, I haven’t had one bigger than 50 MB. And a typical project for me is between 12 to 20 MB. One hundred 20 MB files is just .2% of a TB. So you can back up a file everyday for the life of a project and take up not even 25 cents worth of storage space.

02/20/11 update: I bought a 2 TB external hard drive from Costco this weekend for about $110 after tax, so it’s not 25 cents of storage but closer to 11 or 12 cents worth of storage for my typical project.

02/16/13 update: I just checked on Amazon and a 3 TB external hard is going for $129.99. Here’s the link. That means saving a back up file everyday for the life of a project costs maybe 8 cents. If a typical file size is 60 MB instead of 20 MB, that’s still only 25 cents. Security is cheap and getting cheaper. So seriously, why AREN’T you saving a back up every day?

07/16/13 update: I had to update all my Amazon links today. Long story. A 3 TB external hard drive is now just $119.99… and dropping.

Time Machine on a Mac is a great option. So are all the various online data safety options. If you don’t have things backed up on a well maintained server you should use one of these options. But again, using only that puts a lot of faith into something you might not completely understand. Every night before I leave work I save a copy of my project to a dated subfolder in a backup folder on my hard drive. And also to the same file structure on the server. No excuses. The server can crash, the building can burn down, my daughter can pour juice on my laptop, or it can be stolen from my car. Belt and Suspenders. I’ll have a back up. (02/16/13 update: soon after leaving SALA Archtiects I signed up for Carbonite.com)

And for the record I learned this the hard way. My personal computer, which I never bothered to backup (but always planned to) was stolen a year and a half after I graduated from architecture school (house break-in). Goodbye student work. I fortunately have two hard-copies of my student portfolio. The burglar didn’t see value in stealing those. But nothing digital anymore. Years later it still burns. (02/16/13 update: a few weeks ago I found parts of an earlier version of my school portfolio on some dusty CDs, but I’m still missing my favorite projects from the last year and a half of school. Those are truly lost and gone forever.)

Want more? Here’s the second part to this post: Save a backup every day? You’re crazy! No. You’re crazy not to.

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