“Guys, while you are phasing out your beloved hardcover books and converting them into electronic copies (either by repurchasing or OCRing them)—make sure to backup!!!! I cannot say this loud enough because I just lost my own main backup hard drive due to stupidity. Among many other things I lost all the e-books that weren’t still stored on my reading device.” – Alexander Turcic of MobileRead, commenting on a forum thread about p-book trashing.
The TeleRead take: Our sympathy to the honest and helpful Alex. There but for the grace of God go many of us. Best of luck to him in recovering from the crash! Of course, this is a classic illustration of why so many e-book readers hate the current DMCA and similar legislative atrocities, which, if you stay within the law, can complicate the task of backups.
Related: Preserving your e-books: Free backup service could help. Screenshot is of the software for Mozy’s online backup service.
David, thank you for your sympathies. I think I took it well considering that I lost some years-old collections 😉 I mean I am still smiling, heh.
To explain what happened – I was going to clone my main hdd with Acronis to a bigger unused hdd; unfortunately, some hdd jumpers were incorrectly set causing Acronis to simultaneously write to both, master and slave (=my backup drive) hdd. It took only a few seconds till I noticed – but it was already too late. The partition table got erased and with it all meta information on the disc. I tried to run a few recovery tools, but the results were pitiful, to say the least.
Will definitely take a look @ Mozy in the next few days.
Alex
Best of luck with Mozy as a solution, Alex. Let us know what you think of it. Others seem to like it, and this weekend, learning from your experience, I may well install it myself. I assume you can easily retrieve the public domain titles lost on the disk, but if not, maybe others can point you to their current locations. I’ll be curious what happens with DRMed books. Hopefully most will still be available from the lockers of stores. A pain in the rear just the same, though. Oh, for the day when all e-books can be owned for real. Thanks. David
In a disaster, e-books are typically safer than p-books. I lost all my p-books to Hurricane Katrina, but the few e-books I had at that time were fully recoverable. Most places don’t have to worry about storm surge, but a fire is possible anywhere. Insurance is obviously one “backup” for p-books (e-books too in principle, although I shudder at the thought of convincing an adjuster of their value). E-books need multiple copies to be safe, since all hard drives will eventually fail. USB memory sticks are so cheap now that they are good backup options, but they need to be kept off-site to be maximally safe. Services like Mozy are attractive because they are easy to use and automatically off-site.
I have had a major crash just about every 5 years over the past 25 years and my mantra is BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP! I back up to 2 external hard drives and subscribe to 2 online backup services – Carbonite and Connected Data Protector. The cost is less than $20 per month and my bacon has been saved in a major way at least 3 times. Twenty bucks is a small price to pay for piece of mind and oh, btw, everything is automatic and done while I sleep – terrific.