We bought a iRobot Roomba Vacuuming Robot last year to try to try to help keep the copious quantities of dog hair in our house under control. These are the ultimate in geekly gadgets and they are simply amazing to watch in action. They use simple algorithms that ensure they clean the entire room (such as following walls, spirals, and randomly changing direction after bumping into something); however, they are by no means efficient in how they do so. In fact they hit some areas of the room many times and other areas only once or twice. They are mesmerizing and hilarious to watch!

For the most part our Roomba works very hard and she cleans reasonably well. It’s not a perfect clean by any stretch, but it’s virtually effortless on our part, and we’ve had very few problems with her. Until yesterday anyway. I had some company coming over for dinner last night so I fired the little dude up in the afternoon in order to give the living area a quick once over. The poor thing couldn’t figure out how to make forward progress. She just stayed in the middle of the room, spinning in circles. Her sad cry for help at the end is rather pathetic…

I have put in a support ticket on the iRobot website and they have been very helpful so far. The initial indication is that one of the proximity sensors on the front has failed. Fortunately the entire robot is modular and each component can be easily removed for cleaning or replacement. Many people figured this out and have learned how to hack their Roombas to do fun and crazy things. I haven’t tried any of these hacks yet, but maybe someday…

Sep 22 UPDATE – iRobot tells me that Roomba is dead and that I need to replace her. RIP Roomba.

If you’ve ever had a hard drive failure you’ll know exactly why I’m writing about this topic. If you haven’t, know that you will, and I hope for your sake that you will be prepared for it. Hard drives die. It’s a simple truth, and not a matter of if, only when.

Backing up your stuff is a very personal thing. I probably go way overboard on this, but I’ve made a conscious decision that I don’t want to lose any of my important files, ever. Mostly that means my original images and other photography data, but it also includes all of my other important documents such as personal letters and financial and tax data. I even include the settings for some of my favorite and most important software iin this category. I have all kinds of presets and defaults for Lightroom in particular that would be just plain painful to figure out how to reset if the main drive on my computer were to fail, so I make sure to back that up too.

Backing up your stuff doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. You don’t need to run out and buy a NAS box (network attached storage) to connect to your home network, and you definitely don’t need to shell out the cash for a Drobo (but that would be awesome!) or a hardware Raid system.

Backing up can be as simple as buying a second drive and manually copying your important stuff over every couple of weeks. This could be a second internal drive in your desktop machine, but these days it’s far easier to pick up an inexpensive external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire.

Using a simple backup strategy like this will protect you from a single drive failure. Keep in mind that this will only protect the data that you have up to date on the backup drive, so if it’s been a couple of weeks since you did your most recent copy, you may still lose a lot of files. For me that would likely be hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of new photos. It’s also important to be aware that this will only be protection against a drive failure. It won’t protect you from a natural disaster such as a fire or a flood unless you store the backup drive somewhere other than in your house. It’s easy enough to keep it in your shed, your car, or over at a friend or relatives house, but doing so makes it that much more likely that your most recent backup will be from weeks ago instead of just days…

A much better strategy would be to buy two external drives. Keep one of them connected to your computer, and store the second one at an off-site location. Use software that will automatically copy your important files to the connected drive at regular frequencies, and swap out the two drives every couple of weeks.

Although my personal backup strategy is much more complicated than this (in order to ensure absolute redundancy), the basis for it is essentially this second alternative. I like to do a backup every night using a an automatic backup program called “AJC Directory Synchronizer“.

There are many other programs out there that would also do the trick, but this one works and it’s not very expensive. Windows users should also check out “Cobian Backup” (it’s free!). I’ve never used it but it gets great reviews.

Of course Mac users should check out “Time Machine” and “Super Dooper“. The combination of these two systems working together will make your life so much easier than anything available for Windows…