Backing Up Is Hard To Do
In the corporate world, backing up data is the first step in an information systems environment. Corporations are about risk assessment, and in the information age the greatest risk is the loss of information. For some reason though, home computer users typically don’t have a backup solution. Power users usually do (it may take a couple hard drive failures first), but then I managed to go nearly 13 years without one (and luckily enough, only had one catastrophic data loss about 10 years ago).
Fortunately, technology has advanced to the point where affordable backup is an option for everyone. There are two technologies that make this possible – DVD recording and external hard drives. DVDs can hold 4.7GB of data, which isn’t much compared to some people’s music or movie collections, but they are cheap: a hundred of my preferred writable DVD of choice, Verbatim DVD-R, can be had for $30. 470GB for $30 is a pretty unbeatable space to cost ratio.
Of course, not all data is static – you don’t want to burn a new DVD every time you download a song from iTunes. The answer to this is the external hard drive. I have a Western Digital “My Book” Essential 250GB USB external drive that I use to store backups and media. Western Digital offers an array of drives from 80GB (currently $75) to 1TB (currently $355). The best value is their “Essential” 500GB drive for $140, which should be more than enough for most people and provides twice the space of the $95 250GB drive at only 1.5 times the cost.
Assess Your Backup Needs
Before investing in a backup solution, you should determine what your backup needs will be. At a basic level, you should answer the following questions:
- How much data do I have that can’t be replaced? If you have a massive CD collection, you could potentially re-rip all your CDs in the event of disaster. Maybe you store all your digital photos on a website like Flickr, so they’re always available to you. But your IRS E-File receipts, online passwords and Quicken database are irreplaceable.
- How much irreplaceable data do I have that never changes? Let’s say you don’t want to re-rip 400 CDs – you can back up all these MP3s once to DVDs. Your IRS E-File receipts can go on a DVD too, as well as movies, digital photos and any historical documents like college term papers, PDFs and so on.
- How much irreplaceable data do I have that changes a lot? You probably have less of this than you think. An easy way to tell is to do a search on your document directory (usually My Documents) – click “All files and folders”, then “When was it modified?” and finally on “Within the past year.” Click on search and see what’s changed, making sure to sort by type so you can easily see where movies or music might be taking up a lot of space. If you haven’t used it in a year, chances are good you can archive it.
Once you’ve answered these questions (you can either add up folder sizes or get a program that does this for you), you should have a size estimate of your static (non-changing) data and dynamic (changing data). Add to your dynamic data the size of these system folders:
- C:\DELL (only if you have a Dell of course)
- C:\I386
- C:\NVIDIA and C:\NVIDIA Display Driver (not system per se, but good to keep around)
- C:\Program Files
- C:\WINDOWS (might also be C:\WINNT)
Take the amount of dynamic data you have and multiply by 5. This is the approximate size of the external drive you should buy (but if you can afford a bigger one, get it). You should also make a note of the folders with dynamic data so you can properly set up your backup software.
Backup Strategy
There are a lot of options for backup software out there, and Windows XP Professional comes with built-in software that does this as well (although it is very difficult to use). Whichever backup software you decide on, there are a few options you have for backing up:
- Full backups – will back up everything
- Differential backups – will back up everything since the last full backup
- Incremental backups – will back up everything since the last full or incremental backup
For the home user, I recommend the following backup strategy: two full backups, one during the middle of the week and one on the weekend, in two separate files, and one differential backup which overwrites itself every day. The reason for this is that if one of the full backups gets corrupted (and it does happen), it won’t screw up the other one. Since differential backups have everything since the last full backup, you can save space by only having one differential backup at a time without losing the ability to restore all your data. Before you buy backup software, check to see if it will let you back up using this strategy. Most software should at least allow you to save your file choices so you can manually make 3 backup schedules as described above.
Backing up isn’t easy but it’s extremely important. Fortunately, it’s not nearly as hard as it used to be.