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Help! Something happened, and I just lost all my irreplaceable digital pictures of our newborn son. My wife is going to kill me. How can I get them back?
Sound familiar? I've seen and heard cries for help similar to that one dozens of times. For some reason, many people assume that computers and the components which constitute them are infallible. If they save a file to their hard drive, they think it will be there forever, unless they themselves delete it on purpose.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Computers are collections of electro-mechanical devices, and like other electro-mechanical devices, they fail sooner or later. Sometimes they fail because they wear out. Sometimes they fail for external reasons. Sometimes we make errors that cause the loss of the hard drive or some portion of what's on it. It is always possible that a hard drive crash, user error, nearby lightning strike, virus attack, even theft of the computer, can cause the loss of everything on your drive. As has often been said, it's not a matter of whether you will have such a problem, but when. Just as with your car, sooner or later, something fails and has to be repaired or replaced.
The difference between a computer and a car, though, is that repairing or replacing the car may cost some money, but otherwise doesn't result in the loss of anything irreplaceable. If you lose the contents of your hard drive, it can be a very different story.
So the solution to this problem is to protect yourself by backing up any data that you can't afford to lose. A backup protects you by providing one or more extra copies of the information.
What to Back Up
Think about what you can't afford to lose. This information might include any data you can't readily recreate. What that data is depends on how you use your computer and what you use it for. As an example, could you replace a photo you took on your whirlwind honeymoon trip to the Hawaii Islands? Not really.
Clearly you should back up your data files. Important data may include e-mail, your address book, browser "favorites," pictures, music, word processing files, and spreadsheets
But what about your software applications? Should you back up Windows? What about Microsoft Office or Photoshop? Most people will tell you no, since you can always reinstall these easily from the original media. But I don't think the answer is so clear-cut. If you have invested substantial time and effort customizing Windows and configuring your applications to work the way you want, putting it all back together can be a difficult, time-consuming effort.
If you create a full backup image of your entire hard disk, you can quickly and easily put everything back the way it was before in the event of a drive crash. That complete disk image can be a very good choice for many people.
However, some people don't customize anything; they use everything pretty much just as it came out of the box. In that case, you could quickly recreate your software environment. Whether you should backup up Windows and your software applications depends, once again, on you. What's right for one person isn't necessarily right for everyone.
How Often to Back Up?
Although it takes time and effort to back up, it also takes time and effort to recreate lost data. If you back up daily, you should never have to recreate more than one day's worth of data. If you back up weekly, you potentially would have a lot more data to recreate. Assess how much time, pain, and trouble you would have if you lost x days worth of data. Then choose a backup frequency accordingly.
As noted, some things like photographs can never be recreated, so you may want to do more frequent backup of them. At one extreme is a professional or business person who would likely go out of business if he loses his data. He probably needs to back up at least daily. At the other extreme is the kid who doesn't use his computer except to play games. He probably needs no backup at all, since even in the worst case, he could just reinstall his games.
Most of us fall somewhere between those extremes, but nobody can tell you where you fall; you need to determine that for yourself. Another option is to consider backing up more important files more frequently than other less important files. (I discuss this option at the end of the article.)
How to Backup and What Software to Use?
When it comes to backup software, you have a lot of choices, including the backup program the comes as part of Windows. A number of excellent third-party programs also are available, and most of them are considerably more capable than the software that comes with Windows. You can even do some backups simply by using a standard Windows copy and paste. The choice that is best for you depends at least in part on the answers to some of the questions above.
For example, someone who backs up only the data he has created himself may be able to use simple software. If all you need to do is burn the contents of your \My Documents folder to a CD, you really don't need any special backup software at all. You can just use whatever software you normally use to burn CDs.
However, with dedicated backup software, you can do what is called "incremental" backups. An incremental backup saves time because it only backs up the data that has changed since the last backup. The way it does that is by setting the archive attribute bit to "off" on every file it backs up. When a file is created or modified, Windows sets that bit to "on." That means that you (or your backup software) can tell which files have not yet been backed up; it's only those with the archive bit on. So backup software can perform an incremental backup, backing up only those files that haven't been backed up (i.e., those with the archive bit on).
If you have a lot of data to back up, doing occasional full backups of all your data and less-frequent incremental backups can save a significant amount of time. However, note that this technique requires more time and trouble if you have to restore, because you first have to restore from the last full backup, then from each incremental backup created since then, in turn.
Should you use the incremental backup technique? Again, it is your choice. I would do it only if you have a lot to back up, but I wouldn't want to run that a of incremental backups for a long time because of the complexity of restoring if you need to. Every so often (perhaps once a week if you back up daily, or once every month or two if you back up weekly.) you should start the string again with a new full backup.
Which Backup Media?
Finally what backup media should you choose, and how should it be stored? Again, you have many choices, including CDRs, CDRWs, DVDs, tape, diskettes, zip drives, thumb drives, and second hard drives.
You can cross diskettes and tape of this list right off the bat. Diskettes are way too small to be effective these days, and most new computers no longer even come with disk drives. Tape is also yesterday's technology. Plus it's clumsy and not cost effective. Even zip drives are not very common these days.
Some people back up to a second non-removable hard drive. I don't recommend this approach because it leaves you susceptible to simultaneous loss of the original and backup drive to many of the most common dangers, which include severe power glitches, nearby lightning strikes, virus attacks, and even theft of the computer.
Even worse than using a second non-removable drive is using a second partition on your only drive for your backup storage location. This approach is really only barely better than no backup at all. The risk of losing everything, the original and the backup, at once is unacceptably high because all the data is located on only one physical disk.
In my view, secure backup needs to be on removable media; not stored on the computer itself. For really secure backup, you should have multiple generations of backup. At least one of those generations should be stored off-site. This type of secure backup would be important, for example, if the life of your business depends on your data.
When it comes to backup media, apart from thumb drives (which are useful for partial backups, but are generally too small for backing up everything most people want to back up), your other primary options are members of the CD family (CDRs, CDRWs, and DVDs) and removable hard drives. My experience with CDRWs is that they are considerably less reliable than CDs, and I wouldn't recommend relying on them for backup. I'd rather use CDRs or writeable DVDs, and throw away old ones when they are no longer needed. Fortunately, they are inexpensive.
If you have a lot of information to back up, particularly if you want to back up an entire drive with Windows, your data, and all your applications, your best option is almost certainly an external hard drive. External hard drives come in two varieties: one type is a sleeve that you insert into a drive bay in your computer case, and connect as if it were another drive. The drive itself then goes into a matching cassette which slides in and out of that sleeve. You insert the cassette to perform a backup, then remove it when you're done. The disadvantage of these devices is the potential of damaging the drive if the cassette is inserted or removed with the power on.
The second type of removable drive, and the one I prefer, is a USB hard drive. You can buy these already assembled, or you can buy an ordinary drive and a USB enclosure for it, and assemble it yourself. Assembly is easy, requires no special skills, and takes under five minutes.
Even better than a single external drive is having two or more such drives, and using them alternately. With a single drive, every time you do a full backup, you also destroy your only backup by overwriting it. That leaves you vulnerable to a problem occurring while the backup is in progress. Alternating between two backup drives overcomes that problem. And you can go back one or more generations of data if you need to restore. Not every home user needs that extra layer of protection (and extra cost), but almost every business does.
My Backup Plan
My computer isn't used for business, but my personal backup scheme uses two identical removable hard drives, I alternate between the two, and use a third-party backup program, Acronis True Image, to make a complete copy of the primary drive.
I also use a pair of 1GB thumb drives (also alternating between them) for making more frequent backups of my most critical data (like financial information). For that I just copy and paste using ordinary Windows techniques.
In the end, no matter how you decide to back up your information, the most important thing is that you actually DO it.
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