During late July and early August, Microsoft, CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and FBI issued emergency bulletins urging all system administrators to patch their web servers immediately. The press was alerted and asked to help spread word that internet itself was in extreme danger. Every security and antivirus company on planet was busy sending out notices to everyone they could find that problem had to be fixed immediately, or dire consequences would result.

The predictions were that internet speed would be reduced to a crawl for days while billions (trillions?) of meaningless packets were thrown at Whitehouse web site an attempt to knock it off air.

What was cause of this three-ring circus?

It's very simple really. The same old story. Microsoft had a bug in their web server code. Well, saying they had a bug dramatically understates magnitude of problem.

To put it into perspective, let's say you hired a contractor to build a new bank (you are bank manager). Naturally, your bank is outfitted with state of art technology (so says brochure), including a shiny, well-publicized security system. The project was expensive, but you're happy because, hey, it's new, improved, extra special XP bank. Besides, contractor is biggest one on planet and, frankly, you paid them an exorbitant rate to ensure that you got best there was.

After your bank is robbed, you find out that contractor had "accidentally" left an eight foot hole in right wall. This isn't just a small hole, it's a huge, gaping crevice leading directly to vault. It's in plain view to everyone, except, seemingly, contractor. When you confront contractor to ask them how they could do such a stupid thing, they politely tell you, after a three hour wait on hold and a $295 charge on your credit card, that it's really your fault because you didn't follow instructions in their special security bulletin two months ago. Didn't you send a couple of your employees to BSE (Bank Systems Engineer) classes to learn that they need to purchase extra-special, super spectacular BankNet knowledgebase CDs?

Don't believe for a second that this problem is unique to home user. At work I manage a staff of computer people which is responsible for about 500 gigabytes of data. In fact, we expect our data size to exceed a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) before too long! Some of my peers now manage sites which exceed 60 terabytes! Imagine how difficult it is to come up with a backup solution to databases of those sizes!

What I decided to do for my home computer system is simple. I separated my backup tasks into small, manageable pieces. These include: being prepared to recover entire system in event of a catastrophic failure.

- being able to restore each individual application (program), which is useful not only in event of a system failure, but also if application itself becomes unusable.

- backing up my own personal data files on a regular basis.

- understanding location of special data such as desktop themes, outlook stationary and ICQ skins so that I can back them up regularly.

- Ensuring that all of websites that I manage are backed up to my own hard drive regularly.

- keeping copies of this data in a second location in event of a complete loss (such as fire or earthquake).

Before you can start any of these backup procedures, however, you must figure out what device are you going to use as a backup media. You have several choices.

Floppy disks - In days long past, we all used floppy disks as our backup media. This was in ancient times (5 to 20 years ago), when volume of data was much less. Floppy disks are not a good choice for backups for following reasons:

- They are expensive (when figured on dollars per megabyte)

- They are small (slightly over 1 megabyte)

- They don't last long (I've found five years is about maximum amount of time).

ZIP or Jazz disks - You can use a device known as a zip drive to perform your backups. Zip disks were originally 100 megabytes in size, and have since been upgraded to 250 megabytes. Jazz drives went from 1 gigabyte to 2 gigabytes. I am sure that larger sizes will be released as years go by.

At first glance, this seems like a real solution to media problem. However, I have found several problems which make it less than desirable.

- I have found that zip and jazz disks do not last for a long time. I have attempted to restore data from zip disks which are over 2 years old and have discovered an alarming number of data errors.

- There have been may reports in news of problems with these products. In fact, Iomega has been target of at least one class action suit for drive failures.

- Zip and Jazz drives are extremely slow.

- The media (disks) are extraordinarily expensive.

Personally, I have had so many problems with these products that I would not recommend them to anyone - even my worst enemy. You must be able to depend upon your backups - otherwise, why do them at all?