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Backup and Restore your Files, Music, Videos, Pictures and Documents, In fact- Back up your Entire Harddrive Automatically!

Backing up your computer is important however, you don’t necessarily need to backup every single file residing on your hard drive. Your backups are part of a larger recovery strategy. First, it’s simply impractical to back up the entire operating system, all program files, system settings, and data. Plus, you can always reinstall your operating system and programs from the original installation discs. In addition, your computer has systems in place for restoring or repairing system files such as System Restore or Microsoft Windows Resource Checker.

When deciding what to back up, focus on data. This includes documents, spreadsheets, financial data, photos, videos, and any other information that you value. For example, if you’re a poet who regularly composes poems on your computer, make sure to back up your poetry files! Likewise, if you’re business professional who has a huge database of customers on your computer, make sure to backup the database.

Simply choosing to back up your My Documents folder isn’t good enough. For example, if you use a tax preparation program such as TurboTax or TaxCut to file your taxes each year, your data may be stored in the application’s folder - not My Documents. Similarly, if you have an Act Database with all of your professional contacts’ information stored in it, the actual data will be in the Act folder. In addition, if you’ve created your own folder system or have partitioned your hard drive, you’ll need to make sure that you carefully go through each folder and subfolder in search of data.

Before setting up the backup, it’s smart to create a list of data that you know you need to backup and then go through and find the appropriate folder. For example, your list might look something like this:

• Family photos
• Manuscripts
• Microsoft Money files
• Tax returns
• Contact list
• Estate planning documents
• Travel videos
• Recipes
• All work-related files (D: drive)

The first backup will take a great deal of time because the data has not been backed up before. Once backed up, future backups will be much faster as only changed files are copied. For example, if you’ve only altered three files since the last backup, then only three files will be copied.

Make sure that when the backup is scheduled, all programs and documents are closed. Otherwise, if the backup utility sees that the data is in use, it might skip the file.

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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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Data Loss is a Frightening Reality for Computer Users

For anyone who has ever irrevocably lost an important file because of loss or destruction of their computer, or even user error, the importance of good backups cannot be stressed enough.

As technology improves, it becomes harder and harder to make successful backups of our valuable personal data. Most personal collections of documents and digital media are too large to fit on one CD, or even a handful of DVDs. Hard drives are relatively inexpensive and make great high-speed backup devices, but they don’t solve the problem of off-site backups.

Ideally, you want a copy of your data “off-site” so that you will still have it even if disaster strikes your home or office.

Mozy, owned by data storage giant EMC, offers their MozyHome product for just this purpose: to bring off-site backup to everyone who needs it. MozyHome is available for Windows and Mac, but this review will focus on MozyHome for Mac, which recently came out of beta with a 1.0 release.

MozyHome for Mac lists only one system requirement, Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, which translates to OS X Tiger or Leopard. In addition to this requirement, you also need a high-speed Internet connection.

MozyHome works on a simple principle: you install the application and tell it what you would like backed up. MozyHome then works in the background to upload your files to a safe off-site location at Mozy HQ. The Mozy client is small, does not use many system resources, and works silently in the background. After several weeks of constant use, the Mozy software did not cause any errors or system failures.

MozyHome maintains the security of your files: it uses standard 128-bit SSL encryption when uploading files to the Mozy servers, and it stores these files in strong 448-bit containers so that only the owner can decipher them. These are important considerations, especially since the alternative is to implicitly trust Mozy not to nose around in your data while they’ve got it stored for you.

Mozy offers an introductory program that grants 2 GB of off-site storage for your backups for free. This is a good way to check out the service, but if your backup requirements are that low you may be better off burning your data to DVD and taking it to the office or a safe deposit box. For $4.95 a month, MozyHome offers users unlimited storage, which could be ideal for people with a lot of data to store, particularly those ever-growing collections of digital family photos.

Therein lies the main problem with the Mozy concept: consumer broadband Internet connections are asynchronous, which means they are very fast on the download but can be slow on the upload. You might load a web page or download a file with lightning speed, but if you attach that same file to an email to send out and it takes forever to send. While Mozy offers unlimited storage, it is not as useful as it sounds, since with slow upload speeds it can take weeks or months to complete a single backup of a personal data collection large enough to make Mozy sound attractive in the first place. Mozy claims typical users manage 2-4 GB of data backed up per day. A user with as little as 120GB of personal data (not hard to imagine given enough music or photo files) would need a full month to perform a successful backup.

Luckily, once an initial backup is made, Mozy only needs to upload files that change, which will be a smoother and less bandwidth-intensive operations, with occasional spikes, e.g., importing the photos from the latest birthday party.

MozyHome is for personal use only, and neither the free 2GB account nor the $4.95/month unlimited account is allowed by Mozy’s terms of service to be used for business data (not even small home-based business). For businesses, Mozy offers MozyPro, a more expensive product with features geared toward business users.

Recovering your data from Mozy is a fairly straightforward affair. Using either the Mozy software or the Mozy website, a user can pick the files or folders they wish to restore can can either download them or ask for DVDs to be sent (for a fee). Preparing a download-based data restore can take a while, and downloading it can take even longer, though not as long as the upload took. A backup that took a month to upload could take a few days to download, depending on the speed of the Internet, but if you must turn to Mozy to restore your data, chances are something horrible has happened, and waiting a few days to get your files back is a better option than never seeing them again.

MozyHome can provide some peace of mind in the knowledge that your data is locked away somewhere safe, out of reach of local disasters. It can be time-consuming and frustrating to achieve an initial backup of a large chunk of data. At $60/year, MozyHome is an affordable service for as long as you trust EMC to continue operating the service. A potential Mozy user should start first with a free 2GB account and get a feel for backing up and restoring small amounts of data before committing to an unlimited plan.

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Backing Up Your Data

Data Backups Are Essential

Backing up data is a best practice routine that all companies and individuals should undertake. While it doesn’t literally prevent data loss it can vastly minimize or even eradicate the negative effects of a data loss incident. Data loss can occur for many different reasons and can range from a mild loss of a single file to complete hard drive failure. If you have recently backed up important data and files then you can be certain that in the event of any potential data loss, no matter how potentially catastrophic, you will always have a recent file and data list to fall back on.

Increased Computer Use Means Increased Data

The use of computers has become much more widespread. Rather than being a work based phenomenon the majority of households have at least one computer and at least one regular computer user. As well as surfing the Internet the computer can be used to work from home, store personal information, transfer files from devices to a permanent storage device, and more. Digital photography and MP3 players, for instance, regularly require the use of a computer to store the relevant files. This means that even personal computer users stand to lose money and/or personal files and memories if anything untoward does occur.

Minimizing The Negative Impacts Of Data Loss

Preventing hard drive failure and other types of data loss is not entirely possible. An aging hard drive, or one that has become full of files and programs will inevitably suffer from a greater number of corrupt files, accidental deletion of essential software components, and conflicts between different files and different applications. All of these carry the potential to cause data loss. Another area, and one that regular Internet surfers should be more than aware of, is the infection of your system with spyware or other types of malicious software.

Recovering After Parasite Infection

Spyware and virus infections have also become increasingly common. This is purely because hackers and parasite authors have recognized that more people use their computer to store personal information and surf the Internet. By creating software that can be covertly transmitted via the Internet and can transmit data from one computer to another in the same way, hackers can gain access to an entire system or have certain files and cookies of information forwarded back to them. Digital theft is also a major cause of system errors and, subsequently, the loss of data.

Regular Backups For Regular Computer Users

How often you should back up your data depends, in part, on how often you use your computer and what exactly you store on there. It is highly unlikely that any regular user does not store some vital information that needs to be secured rather than lost. Very regular users should certainly consider a partial backup to CD or DVD on a daily basis. Version archiving means that once a disk reaches a certain age it can be written over again because there is no need to keep the older version of that disk.

Remote And Local Backups

As well as daily local backups it is strongly recommended that your perform some sort of remote backup. For individual users this might be the saving to disk and storage within another premise. For business users and for individual users, though, a weekly online backup is certainly a beneficial move. There are free services and paid services available offering many different features including full automation, unlimited storage space, and more.

Data Backup Conclusion

Backing up data is often critical to the survival of businesses. If something were to happen to a central server or to a computer that included vital customer account information or employee information then it can be incredibly difficult to recover from these types of incident if you do not have some form of backup available. Regular users should consider daily backups to a local source and at least weekly backups to a remote source of storage. This should prevent any major loss of mission critical data.

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Data Loss, Backup, Security, And Recovery

What Is Data Loss?

Data loss is a big issue to businesses and individuals alike, especially those that have suffered data loss incidents. It costs American businesses alone billions of dollars every single year and is one of the biggest causes of a business going bankrupt. To an individual it can mean the loss of personal information and memories including financial information, personal letters, and family photographs. To businesses it can mean the loss of vital financial information, contact details, and ongoing work. Regardless of whether data loss happens to an individual or to a group it can be truly devastating and difficult to recover from.

Causes Of Data Loss

Data loss is typically caused by damage or erosion of physical hardware, software, or files. Hard drives may be more robust than ever before but they still contain fragile components that are potentially very easily damaged. Similarly, software and personal files can be accidentally deleted or they can become damaged or corrupt over time or through the introduction of spyware or viruses to a vulnerable system.

Prevention Or Cure?

However data loss occurs the end result is usually very damaging. Data loss can, to a large extent, be prevented through the regular creation of backups. While backing up data is not without its flaws and its possible problems it is preferable to the complete loss of information. In those cases where data loss occurs after the most recent backup it is also possible to perform data recovery in order to recover the majority or even the whole of your lost data.

Backing Up Data

Backing up data is a practice that we should become accustomed to because it can help to minimize the impact of data loss. By regularly saving work and files to a source other than your main hard drive it is possible to prepare for almost any instance of data loss. Regularly saving important files to a CD, DVD, or flash drive is both inexpensive and very simple. It’s certainly a practice that can be undertaken by any computer user with any level of expertise.

Remote Backup Facilities

However, backing up data to a local source such as a CD that is kept on site is not an ideal long term solution. Another major cause of data loss is fire or natural disaster. If your computer is subject to fire, for example, and you keep your DVD backup on the same desk or even in the same building as your computer then you are likely to lose your backup as well. For this reason it is advised that users routinely make a backup that is kept off site or at a remote location. Online services exist in order to facilitate the simple and quick creation of a remote backup. Alternatively, data storage companies will store tape or other media backups at their own secure location.

Ensuring That Stored Data Is Secure

Whenever we create a backup of data for remote storage one of the most important factors is how secure that data is. Insecure data can be lost or stolen and fall into the wrong hands. It can be used, for example, to gain credit cards or bank accounts in your name or it can even be used for the purpose of identity theft. When using a remote backup it is vital that this service or location be secure.

Ensuring The Security Of Your Data

Most online backup services offer a secure server as the location for your data. Do as much research as possible into the server itself and where the server is located. No matter how secure the server is, in terms of remote access, if it is stored in an insecure environment it will be easy for unauthorized parties to gain access to the information it holds. When using a remote storage facility to store backup data it is also important to ensure that the location is as secure as possible to prevent the loss or theft of data.

Data Recovery Introduction

If the worst does happen and you lose some or all of your data then you will undoubtedly want to recover this data as quickly and painlessly as possible. Many people are surprised to learn that most instances of data loss can be reversed. Physically damaged hard drives can usually be retrieved and the necessary files removed from the source. Similarly, when files are completely deleted (even from the recycle bin on your computer) they can ordinarily be recovered and retrieved back to your computer for further use.

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More Affordable And Accessible Than Ever Before

Data recovery has long been a practice reserved for highly experienced and specialist data recovery experts using expensive software that is difficult to obtain. Fortunately, that is not necessarily the case any longer. Software exists that is not only affordable but incredibly simple to use with many applications using a wizard type interface that Microsoft users will be more than accustomed to. These applications are available online for considerably less than you would pay a data recovery expert and they can be used over and over again.

Data Loss, Backup, And Recovery Summary

Data loss can be a real problem for individuals and for businesses alike. While backing up data is an essential practice it is often overlooked. All users are recommended to perform a CD or DVD backup of important data on a regular basis and users that keep important data on their machine are also recommended to perform a regular remote backup of data in case of fire or other disasters that would make the local storage of a disc backup impotent.

Data recovery is the final tool in the fight against data loss. Affordable and intuitive applications can be downloaded over the Internet and used to restore the vast majority of data that has been lost through whatever cause. It is unusual for data loss to be completely irreversible unless files were securely deleted using software that performs a number of overwrite passes.

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