Computer Back Up

[Danny]

Following on from another thread... All contributions welcome - especially from ErnieY and Albert the info gypsy and all others who spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of a little monitor for a living.

Backing up computer data.

If one has important data on computer, it is equally important to back it up in case of loss i.e. make a copy elsewhere which is usable

Bearing in mind that every Hard Drive will fail at some point, it is advisable to make a copy of data that can't be recreated easily. When it goes, all your documents like letters, reports, all your photos etc, in fact anything you have created and you want to keep will be lost unless you keep copies.

What will you do if your computer is stolen or lost? If you do not have a regular backup routine, all your personal stuff will be gone for good.

You have to decide

1 what is important

2 how to back it up

Number one depends on what you consider important

There are lots of ways to back up. The important thing is, in the event of  your computer failing or loss or theft or damage, you have a copy of the important data, whatever you decide it is. You can choose to copy the data to another hard drive, a pen drive, cd or dvd disks, whatever is the best method for your needs.For example, if you have important emails, you can save the files to another hard drive. If one fails, you still have a copy. If you have a house fire!! you will have decided to use an on line back up so the data is still available to you later. Or you can save the info to another computer in another location...

I have a very small business and use the computer for that and also for home stuff - family photos etc. Computer here is Windows XP, sp3

Just to start the ball rolling, here is my routine:

What do I need to back up?

Two things:

First thing, photos and documents that don't change and I want to keep. These, I normally save to a disk - CD or DVD depending on the size of file.

Because they don't change, they don't need regular back up. Once you have copies (plural intentional) you can transfer them whenever you need to. If the format becomes extinct you must keep up with the times and copy to a new format. Be aware that CDs and DVDs don't last forever...

Second thing to back up - any data which  is changing regularly. In my case, I back up my email files, my address book, my business documents - estimates, invoices, letters etc and my website files. These are all changing frequently and I copy them all to a USB pen drive and an online service automatically twice a day and manually after I create a new document or write/receive an important email. This might sound A N A L but I learnt from experience when our computer crashed irretrievably...

this is a good time to organise your computer files if they are all over the place...

I copy the relevant data email files, address book, business files and website files with a simple copy method (XCOPY in a dos window) No need (for me anyway) to buy expensive back up software.

For the online back up I use Mozyhome which gives free automated back up for small amounts of data. Perfect for me.  I have also used another ,similar free back up service called idrive but I find it a bit more difficult to use.

These are free for a certain amount of data and if you want to back up more data, you can pay for it.

OK that's enough for now - all posts welcome

Danny

[Bugsy]

Good post Danny and always a useful reminder.

Most people usually suffer a failure before they invest in a reliable back up system. I certainly did and its not a nice experience.

Hard disks are pretty cheap these days and setting them up is easy.

I have a Western Digital 320gb on our Windows XP PC running Acronis True Image software.

I have just purchased an Iomega 500gb for my new iMac and that runs with an absolutely brilliant background program called Time Machine. This backs up all data at a specified period (as often as every hour) so your risk of losing anything is greatly reduced.

I even have a small 75gb Toshiba drive that I use to backup website files on my laptop.

All photos I have (a lot) are further backed up on re-writable DVDs.

Sold on backups, you bet.

Gary.

[Nick Trollope]

Likewise.

I use a WD 640Gb external HDD (cost about 99€) connected to our "main" machine and software called Comodo (free) running on the others (4), which backs up over the network (part wireless, part wired) - easy!

 

[Albert the InfoGipsy]

I'm looking for a decent package for doing a full disk image backup to local media, probably an external HDD. Ideally it will have some compression and also handle incremental backups, although I'm prepared to get a separate program for that.

I'm going to be doing some serious fiddling with the C drive so I need something that is quick & easy both for backups and restoresSo far it looks like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. Any other suggestions?

 

[Ian]

Albert, I use disk-imaging software from Paragon (Paragon Drive Backup 9.0 Express). Apart from being free (the Express version is), what I like about it is, you can make a bootable CD and run the back-up and restore from that. So if your C Drive is totally trashed, for whatever reason, who cares?

Now, I've not used it to restore yet, so it may not work..... In that case, I have another image (on the same external HDD) made using DriveImage XML. Again, available on a bootable CD (this time, it's UBCD4WIN).

If the worst happens, I'm hoping one of them will work, so I'll not have to spend another day rebuilding Windows.

It doesn't handle incremental (tactical) backups, though.

Bon chance

[babcock]

I have Acronis True Image. It runs as a scheduled task and after the first full backup it runs in incremental mode. It also has a "try and decide" feature that allows you to try out new software without tangling up your PC. I also have norton 360 which backs up selected files to online storage while your PC is idle. I hope I have it covered after losing a lot of stuff to a corrupt disc.

[Albert the InfoGipsy]

Thanks, People.

Ian,

I'll look at the Paragon package. One thing I know from (fortunately a client's) experience is that you have to make sure a backup can be restored successfully. I'm not sure how you can test yours without risking damage to your live system, but it's worth doing as much as you can to verify it.

[Clair]

Some suggestions here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologyfaqs/3358741/Back-up-choices.html

[AnOther]

I've been a devotee of Acronis True Image since about version 7 or 8 and heartily recommend it.

I backup stuff like photos, music and and documents by copying to 2 external HD's - double protection - but for my system's C:\ drive I make regular images and keep the latest on a partition on the machine but also copy them to the external HD's.

Regarding having a machine stolen well unfortunately no imaging programme is going to help you here because you cannot restore an image to different hardware but with True Image, and probably other imaging programmes, you can at least 'explore' an image and drag files out of it.

Personally I'm not a fan of incremental backups as if one part becomes corrupted it's possible the whole archive series could become useless.

Albert's point is very important too, always verify a backup image. There is no worse time to find out it doesn't work than the day you need it.

Backing up is not sexy but essential. The majority of sales of burglar alarms for houses and cars are probably the result of a robbery, horses and stable doors !

[Cacknanty]

and don't keep your backup in the same property as your computer. A fire or Billy the Burglar don't care that it is your only copy of your essential docs.

[Pierre ZFP]

My son built me a brilliant little fileserver, well I say little but it has 4 x 250Gb drives. It's that size because that's 'what he had laying around' !!! Kids today don't know they're born sometimes [Www] . So in theory this is a Terrabyte of storage but, and this is the clever bit, it is mirrored so really it's 500Mb but as safe as houses, even hot-swappable drives!!  But even this does not cope with Cacknanty's very valid comment so really irriplaceable stuff is stored in an online digital vault (I just hope BT doesn't lose it!!)

[Ian]

Yes, I'd like to test my recovery procedure, but I can't think how. I could try and recover the image onto another partition, (D, for example) and see if it worked, but it's set up to boot from "C", and I'm not confident enough to meddle with the registry. Which is why I back-up two images by two different programs - I'm counting on one of them working.

(Regarding recovery, I used to work for a large american computer

company, as a salesman. Back in the days when computers were less

forgiving than they are these days (tells you how bad they must have

been...), our party trick during a demo was to pull the power cord out,

mid-transaction, and then recover cleanly. Very impressive. I'm not sure my PC could do that....)

Cheers

[Payrac-man]

Hi

 

I use Ghost, it fits on a floppy disk and makes an image of your Hdd on another Hdd or a dvd.

I can E-mail you a copy if you want one

                 

[AnOther]

Ian, I'm an Acronis man myself and have not used Paragon but I'm sure it will have an option to verify images and if you do that and also make regular backups, monthly at least, and also double copy them to external media then it's very unlikely that you will find yourself unable to restore in case of disaster.

I would be wary of incremental backups as corruption in one part can render the whole set useless.

[Ian]

[quote user="ErnieY"]Ian, I'm an Acronis man myself and have not used Paragon but I'm sure it will have an option to verify images and if you do that and also make regular backups, monthly at least, and also double copy them to external media then it's very unlikely that you will find yourself unable to restore in case of disaster.

I would be wary of incremental backups as corruption in one part can render the whole set useless.

[/quote]

Ernie, yes, it does have an option to verify the image, which I do of course.

The reason I do double imaging, using different programs, is that I bought and until recently used a back-up (not imaging) program. Everything seemed tickety-boo till I actually tried to restore the data for real. It failed - kept falling over with a terminal error. Fortunately,there was enough of the back-up available for me to recover manually. So, now I have (I hope) two strings to my bow. One of these days, I may find out......

Cheers

[Nearly Retired (I am now)]

Here's what I do, which might be more in line with may users knowledge, abilities and ease of use (or lack of ) with technology.

Everything on the computer gets copied to a CD with the date written on it. That CD is stored in the shed. Every couple of weeks I back up every file with a newer date.

Not high tech, but with relatively few files it works fine. It's clearly of no use to big users.

The amazing thing is that my (so far only one) hard drive failure occured the morning after my CD saving session.