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One concern about storing your data online is that of trustworthiness. After all, you vigorously guard your computer against spyware and hackers so that your data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Just as your data must be secure when it resides on your computer, it must also be secure when you transmit it to an online backup provider as well as when its under the backup provider’s watchful eye.

For example, I have an estate planning document that details all of my personal information including account numbers, passwords, insurance policies, and Social Security Numbers for each member of my family and more. This information would be vital to my survivors should I pass away. However, if it were to fall into the wrong hands - yikes! If I were to upload it as part of an unencrypted backup, theoretically, it could be intercepted. Likewise, if the online backup service provider doesn’t have safeguards in place to ensure that data is secure once it reaches their facility, then my data is vulnerable.

That’s why it’s important to choose your online backup solution wisely. This means a little work on your part. Look for military grade encryption and read the provider’s privacy policy. In addition, online backup plans range from free plans to paid plans with a variety of options available. Use caution with free plans as they may support themselves with advertisements. If you don’t want targeted ads, read the privacy policy and terms and conditions page with an eye out for advertising policies. If you are not comfortable with the terms or level of privacy protection offered, keep looking.  

Once you’ve found a trustworthy online backup provider, you’ll likely need to sign up for an account and download a desktop interface. Use extra care when creating a password for this online service by creating a hard-to-crack password with plenty of numbers, symbols, and upper and lower case letters. In addition, don’t let Windows memorize this password - you must memorize it. Otherwise, anyone with access to your computer could have access to your online files. Plus, if you must recover data in the event of a complete crash or if you must access the data from a different computer, you won’t have the benefit of a working operating system or stored password.

For data that isn’t sensitive such as family photos or recipes, consider using the online storage offered by your Internet Service Provider or other service providers such as Microsoft Live Spaces. For example, my ISP offers 500 MB of free online storage along with automatic backups. In addition, if you have a Microsoft Live Spaces account, you can store files on the “SkyDrive.”

It is the online backup service provider’s best interest to safeguard your data. With a little research on your part, you’re sure to find the right service for you.

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I must confess that I’m terrible at regularly backing up my data. I know it’s necessary but honestly it’s a pain. I do have backups of some of my more critical files such as my manuscripts, family photos, and important financial documents, but my day-to-day data files are largely unprotected. I keep promising myself that I’ll do better.

What’s involved in backing up data and why is it so much of a hassle? First, it’s really not that much of a hassle once you have a good system in place. In my case, I have a writable DVD drive that I use when I get around to backing up the data. I usually use the backup software that is associated with my DVD writer - Nero I believe. As part of my goal to start backing up my data more often, I have set up automatic backups using the built-in Backup and Restore Center. However, since I’m backing up to DVD, I need to remember to insert a DVD before the backup is scheduled to occur. If I forget, I’m out of luck.

Another hassle with backing up data is picking the data to begin with. My computer has a “My Documents” folder just as yours does but much of my data isn’t necessarily located there. It’s easy to overlook data files that have been stored outside of My Documents.

Once you have gone through and identified the data that needs to be backed up, most backup software will remember and will check for changed files. This means that if you haven’t changed a file between scheduled backups, then it won’t be backed up again until a change has been detected. Therefore, the initial backup takes far longer than subsequent ones.

Online backups are becoming increasingly popular. The main benefit of using an online backup versus a DVD or tape backup is that your data is completely off site and accessible from anywhere in the world. For example, if my laptop had the backup DVD in its drive and was stolen, not only would I have lost my laptop and all its data, I would also have lost the backup DVD! Similarly, if I had my backup disks in a drawer in my home and the house burned down, my computer and the backup will likely be lost for good. But what if I had an online backup? I could buy a new computer and restore my files or head over to a friend’s house and access my important files.

No matter what type of backup program you use, backups are only good if you keep up with them. Restoring your financial data from two years ago won’t do much for you. Keep it current and keep a copy off site should disaster strike.

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The Windows operating system comes with several utilities that can help you to solve or prevent computer problems. One such tool is the Backup and Restore Center that comes with Windows Vista. Windows XP Professional has a similar option though if you have Windows XP Home, you will need to install the backup utility from your installation disks.

In Windows Vista, the Backup and Restore Center is located in the Control Panel. In addition, you can go to the Start button, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and choose Backup Status and Configuration.

First, you will need to turn on automatic file backups. Do this by clicking on the “Set up automatic file backup” link.

The utility will then scan your computer for backup locations such as a DVD-R drive. Next, you will see a list of file types to backup including photos, videos, music, documents, e-mail, TV shows, compressed files, and other files. Make your selection and click to the next screen.

The next screen allows you to set up an automatic schedule for backing up your data. You will need to make sure to place the media device in the selected drive. For example, if you’ve set up the backup to write to the DVD drive, make sure that you have a blank DVD inserted in the drive.

The built-in backup utility is pretty basic but it’s easy to use. It is designed to make backups of data files - not system or program files. The utility will make a full backup the first time you run it followed by incremental backups according to your schedule. For example, during subsequent backups, the utility will only backup files that have been changed since the previous backup. This reduces redundancy and ensures that your changes have been backed up.

As you make backups, you’ll eventually have several disks with various backups. Label your disks carefully with dates so that you know which one is the most current. You may want to store a copy off site so that you have a backup of your data in case your house burns down or some other calamity strikes.

If your computer completely crashes and you have lost data, you can easily restore your data files from your backup. To do so, go into the Backup and Restore Center and click on Restore Files and follow the prompts. Make sure to insert the correct disk.

Remember, your data is only as good as the last backup so schedule frequent backups at regular intervals.   

Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.

View the whole series of System Tools Articles:

• System Tools: Disk Cleanup
• System Tools: Defragmenter
• System Tools: System Restore
• System Tools: Backup and Restore
• System Tools: System Information
• System Tools: Windows Easy Transfer
• System Tools: Control Panel
• System Tools: Task Scheduler

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The answer to this question varies depending on your operating system as well as the backup utility that you used to create the restoration files. For example, if you are running Windows XP Professional, you may have used either the NTBACKUP utility or Automated System Recovery which is a sub-set of NTBACKUP. If you are running Windows Vista, the Backup Status and Configuration utility may have been used. To further complicate matters, third party backup software has its own set of instructions for recovering your data.

Let’s take a look at the built-in tools found in Windows XP and Vista and see if any of these solutions solve your problem. In the case of NTBACKUP, if you must restore the operating system, you will first need to reinstall your operating system before attempting to restore other programs, data, and files.

Automated System Recovery (ASR), which is part of NTBACKUP, allows you to restore data without having to reinstall the operating system. This option requires that you first have created the restoration using ASR. ASR then creates a restore floppy which is used when the time comes to restore the operating system. Keep in mind that this is only used to restore the system - not your applications and data. In addition, ASR is not available in Windows XP Home edition.

Moving on to Windows Vista, you’ll find that the Vista operating system has a built-in backup system in place which is found in the Start button >All Programs > Accessories > System Tools folder. This option is not turned on by default. The Backup Status and Configuration utility is designed to backup data files - not system or application files. In addition, it does not backup EFS files, FAT file system files, temporary files, Recycle Bin files, or files stored online such as web-based emails.

Both Windows XP and Vista feature a utility called System Restore that makes a backup of critical system settings and configurations. This utility is useful for restoring the system to a point in time where it was operating as expected. This utility does not make backups of applications and data. Restoring the system to a previous Restore Point does not overwrite or restore data.

Third party backup software allows you to backup a variety of file types to media types such as tapes, DVD-ROMs, CD-ROMs, and other hard drives. In addition, you can subscribe to online backup services where your files and data are stored online.

With all of these backup options (and this is just the tip of the iceberg), system recovery and restoring your files is dependent on the system you created the original backup with. No matter which utility you used to create the recovery files, you will likely need to launch that same utility in order to recover your system, data, or files. For example, most backup utilities have specific features for backing up files and restoring them.

Your best bet is to launch the original backup utility and look for a restore feature.

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RAID: What is it?

Most computer systems today offer some sort of RAID option, and the review sites make it sound desirable - but what is it, exactly, and how does it help?

It can be difficult for someone who is buying a system to determine what advanced features they might want or need, particularly if they don’t understand the terms being used. This guide is designed to help you understand what choices you might have and what those choices mean to you.

RAID is an acronym for “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks”. As you can probably guess from the title, RAID always requires multiple disk drives; if you’re only planning on ever putting one drive in a PC, you won’t need RAID, and it won’t offer you any benefit at all.  But RAID comes in multiple flavors, usually designated by numbers tacked on at the end, like “RAID1″ or “RAID 1″. Furthermore, RAID can be handled by a hardware disk controller, or an operating system driver. The RAID ‘array’ is the collection of disks in the RAID set, and is presented to the user as a single disk drive.

The simplest RAID configuration is RAID1, or “mirrored disks”. The computer has two identical disks installed, and the system is set up so that everything that’s written is written to both. This slows down writing to the disk, so if your application needs a low write latency, this probably isn’t the solution for you - but if you need low write latency, RAID is probably not the right solution. We’ll talk about that more a little later. The main advantages of RAID1 are increased fault tolerance and increased read speed. Fault tolerance describes the ability to withstand hardware failure, in this case, a hard disk. If one of the mirrored disks fails, you can simply boot to the other disk and keep working. Read speed is increased because modern computers have faster data transfer rates on their buses than disk drives can source. SATA may be 1.5 GB/sec or more, but most hard drives can’t source more than 10 to 20 MB/sec. RAID1 allows your system to read some of the data from each mirrored disk, doubling the throughput. It’s important to note that not all RAID1 implementations support this dual read, so make sure you ask. In addition, your disks don’t have to be identical, but then your storage space will be the same size as the smallest disk you have installed. That’s the drawback to RAID1 - you only get half the disk storage space that you have installed in your computer.

Probably the most common RAID configuration is RAID5. RAID5 uses three or more disks to store “stripes” of data on. Basically, this means that your files are cut into blocks, and written successively to disks numbering one less than the total number; the last block is called ‘parity’. With the ‘parity’ block and all but one of the data blocks, your data can be recovered. What this means is that you can have a single disk failure (fault tolerance) and you can still read your data. In many systems you won’t even know the disk has failed until you see the alarm for it in the logs, or whatever means you’ve set for it to alert you. RAID5 can have an even slower write latency than RAID1, but the read speed increase is nearly linear with the number of disks, provided the controller can handle them simultaneously. So if you have three disks in a RAID5, your read speed will be about the same as RAID1; if you have four, it can be 50% faster, and with five, it can be 33% faster than that. In addition, RAID5 only uses one disk for redundancy, meaning it’s more efficient; with three identical disks, you get total storage equal to two of them. With four disks, you get total storage equal to three of them. As the number of disks increases (sometimes referred to as “spindles” in RAID jargon), the efficiency of RAID5 increase, but the likelihood of a multiple disk failure increases as well. Most systems won’t support more than 32 disks in a single RAID5 array. The drawbacks to RAID5 can be noise (four disks in your system are four times as loud as one!), write latency again, and the loss of a disk’s worth of storage.

RAID0 isn’t really RAID, because it’s not redundant, but it’s commonly used in consumer systems - it’s the fastest disk array, because there’s no parity calculation or duplicate writes. It works just like RAID5, only with no parity block, so no ‘wasted’ disk space, but provides no fault tolerance. It increases the disk speed of your system nearly linearly with the number of disks within the capabilities of your controller, so the more disks, the faster. But anyone who uses RAID0 needs to understand that if a single disk fails, ALL of the data on the array is lost, no matter how many disks are involved. RAID0 is not recommended for any system that stores failure sensitive data. It’s a good choice for ’scratch disks’ - places where programs write huge chunks of data while they work on them - because of the speed benefits.  The risk of a disk failure occurring is increased linearly with the number of disks, as well, so two disks doubles your chance of having a disk failure, and three triples it. Essentially, RAID0 is the opposite of fault tolerance, increasing your exposure to a disk failure, but providing significant performance gain. It can be a viable option if you have a well established and tested backup and restore process in place, however.

Two more RAID configurations that are popular with enterprise level systems are RAID0+1 and RAID1+5, sometimes written as RAID10 and RAID15. Both are combinations of other RAID systems, as described above. RAID10 describes a system composed of two identical RAID0 sets that are then mirrored to one another. This offers protection against the loss of a drive, and even more if they’re all in the same RAID0 set. RAID15 is the same thing with RAID5 instead of RAID0 - two identical RAID5 arrays are then mirrored to one another - this configuration can tolerate the failure of all drives in one RAID5 and one in the other RAID5 array. This is expensive stuff, and used in truly mission critical systems. Often, this type of redundancy is handled complete within an external chassis, so the user only sees a single extremely fault tolerant device from the OS perspective.

Hardware interfaces can change the game a lot. Dedicated hardware parity calculator chips can speed RAID5 calculations to the point where you don’t increase latency because of it, so your write performance increase is nearly identical to your read performance increase. Also, hardware controllers may have cache, which is RAM that can store data at a very high rate before ‘flushing’ - writing the data to the disks. This makes the disks+controller combination seem faster to the user. When deciding on a RAID configuration, make certain you ask if the controller has dedicated parity calculation controllers, and if it has cache on the controller; some systems use system memory for caching, or the system CPU for parity calculation, and these can both affect performance of your disks and other software negatively. Without caching, RAID0 is nearly the same between hardware implementations and software implementations. RAID1 is, as well. RAID5 can be significantly faster with hardware that calculates parity even if it doesn’t have cache.

When you’re shopping for a computer system and spending money that you’ve worked hard to get, you want to make sure you know what you’re buying, and know that what you’re buying is valuable to you. Now you understand RAID well enough to make that distinction. Happy shopping!

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Understanding Data Backup

When you set out with great intentions to create a data backup strategy that will protect you, it’s not uncommon to run aground on the rocky shores of backup terminology and the various data backup options

There are a lot of tools out there, and many choices to be made, but how to decide? Do we care if we have a ‘full backup’ or an ‘incremental backup’? Is RAID a backup strategy? What should we back up, and what should we avoid backing up? Do we need ‘off site’ backups? What about online backups? Read on, and find the answers to these questions and more.

There are many ‘kinds’ of backups, and it’s difficult to choose one if you don’t know what they mean. Some mean different things in different contexts. When we use a backup program, they usually ask us what we want to back up. We can select folders, files, or even entire drives for backup. We can then choose to do a ‘full backup’, or an ‘incremental backup’. A ‘full backup’, in spite of what it sounds like, isn’t necessarily a backup of everything on the drive. It’s a backup of everything selected to be backed up, at a point in time. Most programs require you to complete a full backup before you can start an incremental backup, because incremental backups are backups that contain everything changed since the last full backup or incremental backup. Some software includes the concept of a ‘differential backup’, that includes everything that has changed since the last full backup. The difference is important; a differential backup takes longer, but you only need two files to restore your data - the full backup and the differential backup. Incremental backups are faster, but if you need to restore, you need a copy of the last full backup and every single incremental backup since that full backup. As you can imagine, many incremental backups can become problematic. Another sort of backup can be called a “mirror backup” or a “snapshot” backup. These types of backups copy your entire disk drive to another drive or a file. They take the longest, but are the fastest to restore.

Research indicates that the most common need for backups isn’t system failure, but user error recovery, such as unintentional file deletion. That’s why RAID strategies are fault tolerance strategies, not backup strategies. They increase your ability to sustain hardware failure, but not user failure. If you imagine a RAID1 scenario, where every change that happens is propagated to two or more disks, it becomes obvious why it cannot help you recover a deleted file. Backups are for recovery, RAID is for fault tolerance.  That said, it’s possible to install two disks in your system and have your primary disk copied, byte-for-byte, to your second disk, but not in realtime. This constitutes a real backup system, since you can recover data from yesterday that was lost today. This is fine for a short term ‘get it back’ system, but not suitable for a long term backup strategy.

When you decide on your backup strategy, the first thing you have to come to terms with is the value of your information. If you only play games on your computer, it might be sufficient to simply copy your saved games to a USB Flash drive and carry it with you. If you use your computer for taxes and storage of important family photographs, you might want to do something a little more resilient. Deciding what needs to be backed up can be problematic. Do you need to back up your Windows directory? This may not be a simple question, as programs often place their .dll files in various Windows directories; if you need to be able to restore that program, you’ll need those files. If you need to be able to restore a program (as opposed to re-installing it) you should find out from your vendor what files you need to back up. Almost everyone will want to back up their personal files, the ones in “My Documents” and the other folders like it. You might want to think about backup up your home directory, instead, to capture program preferences and data not stored in your Documents folder. When you restore your system, most backup programs require that you have Windows installed and configured, and the backup software installed and configured before you can restore your backups, so if you can re-install programs you probably shouldn’t bother with backing up Windows. You shouldn’t back up your swap file, or temporary files of most sorts. You probably won’t want to back up Program Files, either, unless you have one of those odd program that stores user data in the program directory. In fact, if you operate with care, you can probably just back up your home directory - the one with “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, etc. If your software has such a setting, make sure it’s backing up hidden files as well. This will help get those preferences you want to save.

If the information you’re backing up is something extremely important, like family pictures, or the accounts receivable database for your business, you should maintain an ‘off site backup’. This means that on some regular schedule you should take your backups somewhere else and leave them. You can arrange a backup swap with a friend, where you trade off site backups once a month - you might want to encrypt those backups - or you can put them in a safe deposit box. Some people take them to work and lock them in their desk drawer. The point of this exercise is to allow you to recover if your home were destroyed by fire, flood, or other natural disaster. An alternative to this technique is what’s referred to as an ‘on-line backup’ - or backup over the Internet. There are many providers, and the advisability of this strategy varies with provider. Before choosing such an option, make certain to look for and read reviews of the service. Guarantees alone shouldn’t be extremely compelling unless you would trade your data for the remedy offered. If your accounts receivable database is worth $280,000, don’t be impressed by a $50,000 guarantee!

When deciding how often you need to back up, you have to ask yourself how much data, in terms of time, you’re willing to lose. If you can live with the data you had yesterday, then you can back up every twenty-four hours. If you can’t afford to lose orders placed an hour ago, you will want to back up every hour. Think about the possibilities - in the event of a failure, you can’t change your mind!

So now you’ve worked out a backup strategy. You will run a full backup once a week, a differential backup every day at midnight, and incremental backups every eight hours. This way the most data you can lose will be eight hours’ worth. You will also take your full backup to work with you Monday morning for safekeeping. You only have two hard drives to back up to, so you’ll be using last week’s backup for the next week’s, alternating between the two drives. This means that you won’t be able to count on recovering deleted files more than a week old. But you can live with this situation, you’ve got the process automated. You’re done, right? Nope.

Before you can consider anything backed up, you must validate your backup procedure. Borrow a laptop from someone, rent a computer for a week, buy a second drive to put in your computer (setting your “live” drive aside!). Then restore your backup. You can consider your backup process functional only after you’ve successfully recovered. It’s completely possible to discover that some overlooked functional problem prohibits the restoration you planned, and you can’t smoke out these types of problems until you test.

Now you should be able to set out your backup strategy with some confidence that you’re protected against catastrophic loss. Backups can be tedious and frustrating, but they pay for themselves in confidence, peace of mind, and relief if you ever need them.

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