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Disaster prevention A Guide to Backup Strategies by Kai Chandler - Count the value not the cost. What’s the most valuable part of your PC? The monitor? The motherboard perhaps? If you’ve been using your PC for anything much more than accessing the Internet and playing Doom, then the chances are that it’s your data. If you are not convinced, then just think about it for a moment. How many hours would it take to type in those letters? Your personal accounts? Your share details? The family tree going back to the Norman Conquest? Or worst of all: the kids’ homework projects? The value of your time could far outweigh the cost of the entire PC. Of course, if you run a business from home, then the value of your data becomes even greater. It’s no coincidence that businesses often go to the wall a few weeks after their systems are lost. Unfortunately there are dozens of ways to lose your data. They range from fire, theft and flood to disk failure or human error. Believe me – we’ve all been there! The key to protecting your data is to backup. That means making regular copies of your data onto a removable medium from which you can later restore following any loss of data. Do not confuse this with Windows’ system restore function as that’s quite different. There’s no point copying your data to another folder on the same hard disk drive. It’s not much better to copy to a second drive on the same computer. What you should do is to save your data onto a removable medium that can be safely stored somewhere else, preferably in a different building such as a relative’s house or at work. Floppy disks, Zip disks, CD-ROM, CD-RW and tapes can all be used. The medium you choose will depend on the size of what you need to backup and your budget. As most modern systems have a CD-writer built in, writing to reusable CD-RW is worth thinking about especially if your backup set will be less than 500MB or so. What to backup? Make your life simple! You don’t want to be spending hours backing up your entire hard disk do you? Most of what’s on your hard disk doesn’t need to be backed up. Applications such as Windows, word processor, games and internet software can be reloaded from the original disks so there’s no need to back them up. Following the simplicity theme, why not store all your data in a common folder? I have a Data folder with subdirectories for my documents, my wife’s documents, my graphics files, emails and so on. Backing up is a doddle as I just have one folder with numerous sub-folders to back up. Full v. incremental
You can either do a full or incremental backup. A full backup is the most thorough – it copies all selected files to the backup medium. An incremental backup just backs up files that are new or changed since the last backup. Each incremental backup is much faster than the original full backup as there will be fewer files to save. Typically, a full backup can be followed by several incremental backups. If you have to restore, you would need to restore the full set and then each of the incremental sets. Do I need special software? No – the easiest way to do a full backup is to copy using Windows Explorer or My Computer. To make the most use of your media, it’s worth thinking about compressing the files first using a compression tool such as Winzip If you want to be a bit more sophisticated then the Windows backup function supports incremental backups. This varies between different versions of Windows but you can get full details by searching for ‘Backup’ in the Help system from the Start menu. You may find it easier to use a third party Backup program such as Orlogix Backup My PC which will be reviewed here shortly. A typical strategy to protect your data. A common strategy for backups is the ‘father, grandfather, son’ approach in which three generations of data are available. This reduces the chance of being unable to restore from any particular backup set. Here’s a typical rota: Week 1
Day 1 - Full backup to disk 1. Week 2
Day 1 - Full backup to disk 2. Week 3
Day 1 - Full backup to disk 3. Week 4
Day 1 – Erase and then full backup to disk 1. And so on. Depending on the importance of your data you may wish to store monthly or quarterly disks as well. Whichever way, don’t forget to label your backups with the machine that’s been backed up and the date! You know it makes sense!
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