1st World Problems in the 21st Century

    Data Asset Management


    Years ago when I owned my own photography studio I got in real good habits for protecting my business' number #2 asset ... our data. Not only were we shooting all of our photos digitally but we were editing them electronically. We were talking credit card orders. We collected every bit of customer data for pinpoint marketing that we could and that data wasn't just about them - it was about their friends and family too. All of our banking, payroll, state and federal taxes . All of our contracts with our customers our vendor contractors - including open account and credit line password and logins.


    We had a rigorous data asset management plan - from firewalls and password changes every 30 days to daily backup of each computer with redundant weekly backups held in a on site fire safe and two redundant copies off site at separate locations.


    One of the services that we promised our customers was that we would keep their digital files FOREVER. We did this because one of our first clients lost their house in a fire - luckily we had pictures of the family as they had grown up through the years but they lost everything. It was an honor and a privilege to be able to give them back those little things that their memories were built around.


    I should probably tell you that I do not trust the "cloud". Never had, probably never will. I had my identity stolen in 2004. It was stolen by an employee in the main office of the insurance company I was writing most of our life insurance through. She opened a line of credit and was able to get a home, auto, and cash loans. It took a decade to find everything she had done. Funny story with this .... I was contacted one evening by the FBI (as this crime crossed state lines) - so I answer the phone and he introduces himself as a Special Agent with the FBI so I figure it is one of my college buddies being an ass hat and hung up. He called back and I went through the list of buddies I thought it was. Admitted to the call being one of the fellas getting even for half a dozen pranks I may or may not have been personally involved with - eventually when the Special Agent stopped laughing and asking for details to a couple of the pranks I figured out he was serious as a heart attack.


    Anyway - why am I taking all of your time tonight with the long post?


    Well after I closed the photography studio I didn't have a need for the same level of asset management. I moved my client and financially data to external drives and refresh them every five years to guarantee the integrity of the data itself. But for myself I took a less robust and regimented approach. This weekend I have paid the price for not being proactive with my personal data management. On Friday night I lost my music drive - 30 years of music gone ... from the hair bands of 80s to the 90s hip-hop and rap to the Rat Pack classics and even the greatest hits from the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Beastie Boys, the Beattles, and so many more.


    No big deal - I do a regular backup of my music library as well .... ex-wife got the CDs


    On Saturday we went to the University for some homecoming festivities. Stopped at home and I notice the backup drive is not working and throwing some corrupt data errors. Not a big deal, my birthday is in a week and just like I change the smoke detector batteries on Christmas and 4th of July, I do my annual redundant backups on my birthday so I had already ordered new WD external drives. Late in the day on Saturday we head off to meet my 9 month old grandson AJ and my 1 and a half year old niece Claire at the pumpkin patch for a quick photo shoot. Get home and load the pictures on the photo external drive and reformat the camera SD card. Sat down to edit the photos and BAMMMMM blue screen of death and corrupt file warnings.


    So, now my Music external drive is dead - my Photography external drive is dead - my backup external drive is dead - and my redundant backup process is almost a year old.


    A local data recovery company will charge between $500 and $1500 to "TRY" and recover the last year of photographs but there really aren't any guarantees that they will be able to.


    Lessons learned ....

    • Computer hardware is just like appliances - when you buy more than one at the same time then they will die/malfunction at the same time
    • You BETTER be as proactive about saving the things that are important to you - you only have to be as proactive as what you are willing to give up. For me not having a redundant backup within the last year means that have to be willing to give up all the picture of AJ since he was born, 15 days of vacation with my mom and dad, two family reunions, and tons of photographs of my extended family and their Slingshots

    Take the time to figure out what you are willing to lose and plan to meet or exceed that expectation - be 100% proactive or you will pay for it

    So you very well remember the days when we paid quite a bit of money to get the 36 print kodak film developed and even more for double prints. One of my laptops crashed and i lost a big deal of pics and yes sir we are absolutely vulnerable...

    We moved from Springfiled, VA to Spring, TX (about 30 miles north of Houston on I-45) back in 2009. Naturally, I still haven't unpacked all f the boxes I packed and still can't find some of my old music CDs. The yet-to-be-unpacked boxes contain some old data drives I need to check and I hope my old CDs are in there, too. I really hate buying new CDs to recreate music I already bought.

    @Ross I really hate to hear that and hope you can recover the data.


    After doing that blue screen of death multiple times, iPhone deaths multiple times, I've started dragging my photos to dropbox. I doubt that it very secure, but I had tried external hard drives and windows home server for backups and kept having those fail too. Your point was well made.

    Alpha Supercharger is still spinning fine... it gets rode hard, every time.

    @Ross, I'm sorry to hear that, I hope you are able to recover everything. Losing files like that just sucks. I did notice that you failed to address one thing, though: is this going to delay our 2018 calendar? Asking for a friend. :D

    Quote from KayTwo

    @Ross, I'm sorry to hear that, I hope you are able to recover everything. Losing files like that just sucks. I did notice that you failed to address one thing, though: is this going to delay our 2018 calendar? Asking for a friend. :D

    LOL it will NOT delay the calendar! Just a speed bump in life that could have been avoided by being more proactive. If i can't revover all of the photos of my girls growing up, family vacations, etc. I will cry a little and be pissy but I'll only be mad at myself and just have to get more photos in the future to make up for those lost from the past ..... and have a more rigorous plan in place to protect those memories

    @Ross, been there, done that, paid the price. I was in the habit of backing up to DVD all my pictures every so often. I got lax, let it go for 16 months. Grandson, 17 at the time, was over and wanted to use my computer to download some music. He had a thumb drive. I didn't watch him do it. He thought he could download from a website to the thumb drive and not get a virus since he was saving it to the thumb drive. I thought he was going to download the music from his thumb drive to his phone.


    Needless to say, he clicked on a link that installed a virus. It wiped out my hard drive, and rendered it useless. I bought a new hard drive, a "green" one. I didn't realize that it actually would slow down to try to conserve energy (it was truly "green"). Yeah, I bought the fastest computer so I could slow it down with my hard drive. I bought a black after that (Most computers come to you with a blue drive, while gaming people prefer red ones. Red is fastest, but not much different than black). I mirror the two every quarter. I have two passports that I alternate between and do a back up on them every month.


    The reason I do this is I'm not willing to lose the pictures. My wife takes lots of pictures, and we lost 16 months of them in that one error in judgement. While it's possible I could lose some, it shouldn't be more than one month of them the way I'm doing it now. As for the cloud, I think it's fine for unimportant things. For anything that matters, I don't trust it either.

    On my home computer the only thing of value that I worry about losing are my photographs. My entire system is backed up using Time Machine (yes I use a Mac) to a local hard drive and my photos are also backed up using Carbonite. my very best photographs are also saved to my Smugmug account.

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    Quote from KayTwo

    Only problem with that is, like we talked about when you visited, those old pictures you showed me of your bride are starting to fade with time. Couldn't hardly make out the details! :00008172:

    Sadly my bride is startin to fade a little and ya can’t even see me anymore ;(

    I might not be right but I can sure sound like it

    Unfortunately, as any technology ages, retrieval devices for that particular technology also age and eventually, it becomes almost, if not totally, impossible to retrieve anything stored using that technology. As an example, you might have an old RLL hard drive, but I imagine you'll have trouble finding a system with a working controller to operate that hard drive. Eventually, you may not even be able to find a system that a working controller could be installed in. That's why it's important to refresh and transfer data to newer storage devices every year or so.

    Are those 8" floppies or the newer 5.25"? I remember buying my first 5.25" floppy drive for my TRS-80 and thinking how much storage I had (less than 100K, IIRC)! IIRC, I paid around $1000 at the time because I had to buy the expansion interface AND the floppy drive. A few years later, I bought my first hard drive and thought I was in hog heaven having 20 MB!As I recall, the hard drive cost me the same as my first floppy drive, around $400 for the drive.
    FWIW, I still keep a combo 5-14/3.5 floppy drive, just in case I ever need to use it, but I'm not sure I could find a controller that will work with the newer motherboard slots.

    Modern software makes it easier to compress and store data, but I prefer to just copy my pics and data to my storage media w/o additional compression. That way, I avoid any reliance on software that may or may not run properly on a newer system, possibly complicating any retrieval efforts.
    Admittedly, I should still go ahead and signup for some online storage capability, if for no other reason to have a backup outside my home.

    Eat your hearts out computer geeks! Here's my original 1981 Osborne 1 computer with CP/M operating system, dual floppies with dual density upgrade for a total of 160k storage per disc! No hard drive. Built in 5" black and white monitor. If you drop it off a 2 story building it takes 10 minutes to hit the ground...




    Remember folks - this isn't a rehearsal, this is The Show!8)

    Edited once, last by SlingLow ().

    Quote from SlingLow

    Eat your hearts out computer geeks! Here's my original 1981 Osborne 1 computer with CP/M operating system, dual floppies with dual density upgrade for a total of 160k storage per disc! No hard drive. Built in 5" black and white monitor. If you drop it off a 2 story building it takes 10 minutes to hit the ground...

    2 stories here - While stationed at the US Army Intelligence School, Ft Devens, MA in the late 1970s, I worked an overnight shift processing test results using a tape-drive-equipped IBM 5100 Desktop computer (pre-PC era).
    From IBM's archives - IBM Archives: IBM 5100 Portable Computer
    IBM Archives: IBM 5100 Portable Computer (continued)
    IIRC, the IBM 5100 came with APL as its main programming language.


    Later, when I was stationed at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA, I bought an Atari 800 computer system (Atari 8-bit family - Wikipedia) and spent all of the cash I had. [Side story - Pilots from the Naval Post-Graduate School would come into the computer store, play Atari's Star Raiders (Star Raiders - Wikipedia) for a few minute and after almost falling out of their chairs during simulated turns would immediately buy an Atari 800 since the flying experience of Star Raiders was so realistic. It was a very fun game.] A short time after I bought the Atari, the owner of the computer store showed me a KayPro II semi-portable computer (metal case vs the Osborne 1's plastic case) with its 9" display and dual floppy drives and told me that if I learned to program dBase II on it, he could give me all the programming jobs I wanted at $40/hr, but I just didn't have the cash to buy the KayPro and a copy of dBase II, which would have cost sround $2000. At that time, $40/hr was more than 4 times what I earned in the Army including all pay and benefits. I should have told him I'd learn on his computer if he supplied a copy of dBase II, but I wasn't confident enough as to how quickly I could learn it. After I got out of the Army and became an Army civilian employee, I finally got around to learning dBase III.

    data recovery is complete. I'm a lucky SOB as they were able to recover 90% with the majority of the unrecoverable files being photos of the exwife!


    At about $1.00 per GB it wasn't cheap but for getting back most of the pictures of my family and friends, it was worth it