Seriously—You Need to do Backups
I know I have posted on this before but I feel it is time to do a quick post on it again. If you have a computer and you keep anything on it whatsoever that you would get upset about if you lost it then you MUST do backups.
Sooner or later the hard disk, which is where your stuff is stored, *WILL* fail. This is almost 100 percent guaranteed. IT WILL FAIL.
In that hard disk there is spindle whizzing around at 7,000 rotations per minute (+/- 3,000 rpm depending on the disk make and size) for the whole time that your computer is turned on. Skimming over the surface of the disk at about a third the height of a human hair are the read/write heads. If these heads touch the spinning disks then it is all over red rover; you are going to lose data. Depending on how hard the heads scrape the disk surface and for how long and exactly where they land you may just lose part of your data or everything.
In this last week alone I have had two people who have had catastrophic hard disk failures on their notebook computers. In both cases the hard disk will no longer spin. Basically whatever is on these hard disks is lost never to be seen again unless it can be recovered by a specialised data recovery firm; and they charge about $350 just to start looking at the drive regardless of whether they can restore data or not.
Apart from physical issues with the hard disk there can be data corruptions caused by power spikes (causing loss of power to the disk at a critical time), operating system malfunctions (very rare these days), or viruses.
Backing up is easy and, these days, very cheap. A 1GB external USB drive is about $65. The easiest means of backup is to a USB hard disk using the backup utility built into every version of Windows since Windows 95.
Basically there are three main backup options and these are:
- Use the built-in Windows backup or some other client-side backup utility to do your backups automatically and regularly.
- Use a server-side backup service such as Windows Home Server to do your backups automatically and regularly.
- Use one of the new Web-based backup options where you data is backup up to “the Cloud” somewhere on the Internet.
You can find Windows 7 Backup by clicking on the Start orb on the task bar and then typing “Backup” into the search. Then select “Backup and Restore”.
If you have not used Windows 7 Backup before then you will need to do the Set Up.
Set Up will look for the backup option and recommend one. If you have a USB hard disk connected it will generally always pick that as the recommended backup location.
There is also an option to backup to a network device and this is generally the option I would recommend, assuming you have a home network and that you have some kind of network storage device on the network.
When setting up Windows 7 Backup I suggest the following:
- Disable “Back up data for newly created users”
- Disable “Include a system image of drives”.
- Set the schedule for a minimum of Weekly and consider Daily depending on how much you use your computer.
Using Windows Home Server: If you have a Microsoft’s Windows Home Server on your network (such as the Acer EasyStore Home Server) then you can configure that to automatically backup the whole of your computer over the network from the server side. To configure Windows Home Server backup simply go the Home Server administration console, Computers & Backup, select the computer(s) to backup, and then configure the backup. The first configuration panel will show you items that WILL NOT be included by default in your backup plan (but you can select and Add any of these that you do want backed up).
One of the problems with the Windows Home Server backup is that you cannot disable the restorable image backup of you computer. This has it upsides and its downsides. The upside is that if your computer gets fried then the restorable image on the Home Server can be used to re-create your computer on another computer. The downside is that this type of backup takes about 200GB minimum of storage and the first backup takes some time to complete.
Using Web-based backup: This involves a Web-based backup to “the Cloud” using services like Carbonite (here), Dropbox (here), Microsoft’s Skydrive (here), or Amazon Simple Storage Services or S3 (here).
If you were going to try Web-based backups I would recommend you go with Carbonite but one of the key downsides to all Web-based backup is that copying files into backup can take a lot of time to complete—especially the first time you execute the backup. After that first time it happens a lot faster. The reason it can be slow is that most ADSL uplink speeds in Australia are under 1024kbit or about 1/10th of the speed of the downlink (and some are 512kbit being 1/20th the uplink speed).
Also, if you are using a notebook and you often connect to the Internet using a 3G USB modem then you need to make sure your backups don’t happen over a 3G data connection or it might turn out very expensive.
Most of the Web-based backup services are free to start with but once you get over a certain amount of data you usually need to sign up for the ‘Pro’ version and begin paying something per month.
I think Carbonite is free for 30 days and then it is something like $5 per month but I understand the Carbonite tools and links are very easy to set up and use—however I should point out I have never used it personally.
Two upsides of Web-based backups are:
- That you can generally access your backed-up data from anywhere in the world where you can connect to the Internet.
- They are good for notebooks that generally don’t have a USB external hard disk permanently connected to them but do normally always have a connection to the Internet.
Other options: Other options are to backup to optical media (either CD or DVD) but this takes a degree of planning and management as tools such as Windows 7 Backup cannot backup directly to optional media.
You could also backup to a USB thumb drive. Especially now that 32GB thumb drives are available, although they are not cheap.
Another option is to have another hard disk in your computer and back up to that.
The bottom line here is that if you are not backing up your computer(s) and there is stuff on it or them that you would feel distressed about if you lost it then you should do something about it NOW!
The computer gods are perverse and sooner or later, when you least expect it, your hard disk will fail or the data on it will get corrupted.
