This week, I’m going to talk about backups. I don’t think any one doubts the importance of regular backups of all your important data, but there is a lot to talk about. Even if you just use your computer in your spare time, there’s always stuff that you don’t want to loose. Those important romantic mails, that one picture of your kid, the drawing of your house-to-be you made, etc.
If you should doubt the importance of keeping a copy of all your data, let me tell you this one thing: accidents will happen, hard discs will crash, mp3 players will crash to the ground, cell phones will fall in the toilet. It’s not a matter of “if this happens”, it’s “when will it happen”.
However, making and keeping a good and reliable backup is not easy, and that’s why many people skip it. You need to do a bit of planning beforehand to make it manageable and you need to actually perform the backup. However, there are solutions for every ones level of laziness, but you might need to adjust your budget.
Lets get started with the six step plan to get your backup habit going.
Step 1. Make your Information List
Identify the information you have. There’s a lot more than you’d think, so take your time to write everything down. For now, don’t think about the importance, just jot down whatever you can think of.
Possibilities include:
- Every kind of personal file on your computer. This inlcudes all the stuff you create, write, listen to, watch, download, etc. If you’re a gamer, don’t forget those precious save games.
- Configurations of all the software you use. Things will be easier if those are stored in your documents folder, but older programs tend to place them in sometimes random locations on your PC. Think about game mods, FTP accounts, MS Word styles and templates, etc, etc
- Work related files. Write them down anyway, even if creating a backup is not your responsibility. It’s important to know you have those too and where they are.
- Often overlooked but oh so important these days: All kinds of online information. Mail accounts these days hold thousands of messages, online calendars have important dates, blog posts and Flickr albums are our life story and Twitter is a diary for many. Not all of them support easy backup, but usually there are ways.
Step 2. Identify What’s Important.
Go over your list and identify what you want to backup. Not everything is as important, but keep in mind that whatever is not backed up, could be gone any moment. Usually also size will matter. Larger files are more expensive to backup, especially if they change regularly.
Do you really need that 1 Terabyte of movies or could you do without it? It’s your choice. If yes, make sure you got the space for a copy, if no, don’t forget you might be without a movie to watch one day.
Step 3. The Backup Medium.
Where to backup do you put your backup. Personally, I try to put everything in two locations, an FTP server and an external hard drive.
It’s important to keep in mind the medium to which you make your backup. It should be reliable for at least a few years. Don’t you hate those IOMega ZIP drives that suddenly turned bad with their click-of-death? I know I do.
Make sure you at least have a general idea of how long your medium lasts and replace it in time. Good suggestions for most consumer are external harddrives (those are fairly speedy too) and high quality writable DVDs. And if you want to put an extra copy in the cloud, again, keep it simple and go for something like an FTP server (but make sure you know the backup policy of your host).
I wouldn’t bother with professional tape drives or other fancy and expensive equipment unless you really have the money and knowledge. I have a stack of QIC-80 cartridges and a useless drive collecting dust.
Step 4. The Backup Program.
Backup software comes in many shapes and forms. Yet to create a good backup, only a few things are important:
- You backup has to be able to stand the test of time. This means, you shouldn’t use fancy formats that go out of style. I have a bunch of backups that were made with Central Point Backup software, way back on the early 90s. I can assure you that those are difficult to restore (the software doesn’t run on any type of recent hardware, even in emulators like DosBox). So keep it simple, tar and zip are popular for a reason.
- Try to automate it as much as possible. The easier it is to make a backup, the more likely it is you’ll actually make those regular backups.
- Decide if you want to trust a third party with your data or not. There are many online backup options available. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to store your data with them. Me, I like to keep my own copy, but I do store a copy online too.
- An added benefit is the possibility to search your backup sets. This is more important if files move quickly through your system.
Hundreds of software packages are available so I won’t give you an overview, butI’ve gone over a few open source options, and have personally settled on Areca. It has nothing fancy, but it does have everything I want. Incremental backups, archive searching and a command line interface for automation. It’s a little rough around the edges with a bug here and there, but it’s still in active development (which cannot be said of many similar programs)
If your a real geek, you should already know Subversion. It’s also a pretty viable possibility, certainly for text documents and code. You do need to set up a server though. Something you also need to do if you want to run Bacula. It’s probably overkill, but if you want everything and the kitchen sink, it’s probably a good choice.
Also worth mentioning are cloud solutions like Dropbox. But beware of the consequences of trusting a third party. If they go out of business, you might be left without any chance to recover those precious files.
Step 5. Set Up.
Configuring your program of choice is your next step. Go over the list of things you want to back up and add them to the program. Don’t forget to backup that backup configuration too. And make sure it is accessible when the program goes bust. Areca creates simple ZIP files, so that’s easy enough.
Step 6. Run Your Back Up Regularly.
DO IT! 🙂