Backup strategies
It was a quiet Tuesday afternoon at the Realtime office in Cape Town in Wale Street. Suddenly, a distraught man rushed into our reception. "It's gone," he exclaimed to our receptionist, "it's all gone, everything ... I don't know what I'll do...". Lynn asked him to sit down, and he gradually regained his composure and told her the sorry story - a system crash, all his files gone, etc. Gently, she asked him, "Are there backups somewhere?" "Backups?" he said slowly, wonderingly, "yes, I suppose my staff must have backups somewhere .. Thank you!!!", and he raced back out of the office.
The amusing thing is that no one afterwards could work out for which of our clients he worked. It turned out he didn't work at any of our clients, he worked on another floor in the building, and in his panic recalled that there was a computer company on the fourth floor. One of my partners afterwards suggested that we keep a "data blanket" in reception for soothing future victims of data loss!
Not funny if it happens to you though! So let's look at some strategies for backups
Regardless of other strategies, you should be doing these regularly for all critical files. Contrary to popular perceptions, DVD's and CD's do not last forever, in fact many experts believe that their reliability is moot after as little ten years. So invest in a good brand - tests have shown Sony and Verbatim to generally have the best results. Use DVD+R's rather than DVD-R's - unlike CD's, there is a significant difference in the technology and reliability between +R and -R when it comes to DVD's. Finally, write to the DVD at the lowest possible speed. Writing at high speeds often produces recordings that do not play back well (there is an explanation why, but it's a long one! The same phenomena can be note writing audio CD's by the way - the higher the speed you write at, the less likely it will play in your car).
When you label your DVD's, write only on the clear plastic in the middle. Many koki pen inks contain acids that over a long period of time can corrode the surface of a CD or DVD.
Finally, the main point of doing DVD backups is so that you store some of them offsite - beyond the reach of burglars, fires, or (a perennnial favourite where I live) flooding. Best is in a safe deposit box at your bank; failing that with a trustworthy friend.
If the possibility of a disk crash destroying all your new and updated data since your last weekly backup is unthinkable, look at setting up a constant background backup utility, onto an external hard drive (if you can't afford an external drive, then invest in a 4GB memory stick and leave this plugged into a USB port, where it will look like a drive).
Look for a well-known brand of disk drive that is quiet - this puppy is going to be humming away in the background all the time, and some well-known brands of disk drive, like Iomega, are surprisingly noisy. I have a Seagate 400GB drive on my desk. If you live somewhere that has frequent powercuts (cough*south africa*cough), consider rather getting a smaller, more expensive portable drive, that is powered by your USB port (see Working without electricity)
(Note that once you have an external drive attached, there will be times if you're using a laptop when you want to unmount it, so you can take your laptop somewhere. Microsoft's default USB unmount facility - that little green thing in the system tray that you click on - will often tell you that the "Device cannot be stopped right now. Try again later". This places one in a dilemna - you do not want to risk just pulling the USB plug, but the only alternative is shutting down the whole system. If you're encounter this, invest $25 in a little program called USB Safely Remove. This will tell you exactly what programs have a lock on the drive, so that you can end them and safely unmount your drive).
Next, you need a background backup utility. An outstanding program is SecondCopy. You can set up a number of different "profiles" for different sets of data, specify how often they are to be backed up, and leave the whole thing running in the background. Great value for $29.95.
Important note: SecondCopy lets you set up both Simple and Exact copies. A Simple copy just copies all the files in one spot, to a folder on your backup drive. So if you create a file, then later delete it, it will still be there when you go to the backup folder. An Exact copy, though, synchronises the backup folder with the live one. When you delete a file, the next time the copy runs, it deletes the old backup copy as well.
On the face of it, it would seem best to have Simple copies for everything. After all, that's the idea, isn't it - getting back that file you accidentally deleted while slugging Camparis and chatting on your cellphone as you prepared the sales report, right? But now here's another scenario. Your hard disk crashes. You replace it, and restore the backup of all your photos - and good grief, they're all back: every single lousy stupid shot you ever took and later deleted. Hours of pruning await you...
The truth is, for many types of data, like word processing files and photos, you need to set up profiles to do both types of backup, to different folders. A Simple copy so that you can retrieve deleted files. And an Exact copy so that you can retrieve your files the way they were before the crash, without the dross.
Now here's another disaster. Your hard drive crashes. You've got all your data backed up, but before you can restore it, you need to reinstall Windows (it's midnight, and do you know where your original Windows system disk and access keys are?) - plus reinstall your email client, and all its settings - and every other program you have ever installed, plus reconfigure the settings for all of them as well. Hours of work and frustration...
The solution? Image backups. An image backup program makes a complete, compressed backup of your entire hard drive, system files, Windows, and all. If your drive crashes, you can restore the image backup to put your computer back to exactly the way it was at the time of the backup. No reinstalling Windows or anything else. Then all you need do is to restore your latest data backup.
The best program for this is Acronis. It also allows you to save space on your backup drive by doing incremental image backups. More important, in addition to being able to restore the entire drive, you can also just go in and pull just a few files out of the image backup (this proved invaluable the other day, when my iTunes library came up empty). Acronis costs $49.
In addition to offsite backups, it can be good to have online backups as well - to another place on the Internet. The difference between the two is as follows. Online backups allow you to have critical information backed up to another location (beyond burglars, floods or fires) frequently (haring off with copies to the bank is not something one wants to do all the time). The limitation here, though, is bandwidth - it's not feasible to backup 8GB of data online, at least not in South Africa! Whereas it is quite feasible to drop off two DVD's with 8GB of data at your bank.
One of the easiest ways to do simple online backups is to set up a free Gmail account, if you don't have one already. Then simply email your critical data to your email account. Gmail allows you to have over 2.5GB of storage, so there is plenty of space! You can send emails of up to 20MB to Gmail (note that your ISP may not allow attachments that large - in which case, log into Gmail, and send an email to yourself from within Gmail, attaching your data).
There are also a number of online backup services, many of them free, that allow you to backup files onto their servers. Some of these also offer desktop utilities that will copy your files regularly in the background (much like SecondCopy does, to your external drive). Only use a company that appears reliable and here for the long haul, and remember that critical data may need to be encrypted first. There is a comprehensive list of these services at Mashable, and there are rumours of a GDrive coming soon from Google.
If you have got high bandwidth access to the Internet, look at using Amazon's S3 service which costs just US$ 15 cents per GB per month, using say SecondCopy together with a utility like S3Drive, which lets you access the S3 space as a local network drive.
As a final thought, consider having an online backup of all your vital information. Think Hurricane Katrina. Prepare a document containing all the information you'd need in serious disaster - bank account numbers, medical aid numbers, blood types of your family, insurance policy numbers, phone numbers, etc. Then mail this to your Gmail account. Make sure your Gmail account has a password you will remember, like your first phone number. (Many people use automated password utilities, like the one in Firefox, in which case it can be surprisingly hard to recall a password you have not had to type in yourself for months).
Now, in case of a civil disaster, if you (or someone you trust that you can phone) can access the Internet, you will be able to retrieve all this vital information.
Hopefully if these ideas help you, you will never need to be wrapped in a "data-loss blanket"!
See also
