Backup Failure

Creating backups. Something everyone with a computer should do. Not only to preserve the items of (sentimental) value, but also to minimise the time and effort to recreate what went to the eternal data fields.
But even if you create backups, things can go wrong.

Many believe that storing the data on an external device is a backup. Well, it is, but only if you have the original data on another device. Backup means that you store the same thing (at least) in two places. If one of the devices (your computer with internal hard drive, or the external backup device) should fail, you have still one copy of the data, which you can restore or backup (depending which device went up in smoke).

The reason for writing this, is that my (off-site) backup drive got corrupted, and I lost all the data on the device. Thankfully, it was my backup, which means I can recreate that backup by two mouse-clicks.
In this particular case, I used TrueCrypt to encrypt the drive, since the disk is stored offsite. Should anyone steal the drive they can't access the data stored on it. For some reason the TrueCrypt volume got corrupted during a backup session, and there was no (easy) way of accessing the encrypted data. The hardware itself was still working properly.

Instead of freaking out (which is the thing to do, if this data was my only copy), I just (re)formatted the drive with TrueCrypt and re-initiated the backup. And if all goes well, my off-site backup is ready within a couple of hours.

Note that I also have an on-site backup. You can read about my backup strategy in this blog-post