Your backup strategy

Yes, there’s approximately 8,390,000 articles on this subject already, but it seems that people still don’t get it. In the vain hope of 8,390,001 articles doing the job instead, here goes:

BACK. UP. YOUR. FRICKIN’. DATA. If you don’t, you’ve got no-one to blame but yourself when it all goes Pete Tong and you lose it.

There are numerous strategies for this, but here’s mine:

First, buy two external hard drives. Yes, two. Keeping one backup next to your computer is a waste of time. When the nasty burglars sneak in, or fire monster comes calling, you’ll lose the backup with the computer, which kind of defeats the point. So, buy two external drives, and keep one outside the house – at the office, with a friend, wherever. But I precede myself.

When your backup drives arrive, take a moment to enjoy the shiny wrapping. It’s always worth treasuring new stuff, however mundane the item.

Plug in your first drive, and back up the data you need (a word on how to do this in a moment). I don’t back up my whole hard drive, as I’m happy enough to reinstall stuff from scratch if I need to. I just back up my documents, photos, movies and that kind of thing – the stuff I can’t get from anywhere else, or would take too much time to find again. If you want to protect your entire hard drive, and copy absolutely everything, that’s fine too. Once the backup is complete, repeat the backup for the second drive.

You now have two backups of your data. Good. Take one of the hard drives away from the house, and leave it somewhere safe. This is your off-site backup, and will be handy if the fire, burglars, or burglars on fire come and destroy your home. Keep the other drive at home, and every few days, update the backup. This is your short-term fallback in case your computer dies, or you accidentally delete an important file.

Over time, your off-site backup will obviously become out of date, and be less and less useful. So every few weeks, swap the two backup drives. This way, if the worst comes to the worst, you won’t lose too much stuff. There’s a trade-off here between convenience and the security of your data, so come to a compromise to suit your circumstances. Never, let your off-site backup languish in a drawer for 6 months though – an out of date backup is almost as useless as none at all.

When it comes to backup software, there’s plenty of options out there that will do the job. Some specialise in copying entire hard drives if that’s your bag, and others are better at dealing with selected sets of files. As a massive geek, I only ever use the Linux rsync tool, so I can’t comment on any specific software package. There’s more options, reviews and opinions in the world than you’ll ever need, so find something that works for you. The real key is to find something that will make your backing up as simple as possible – the harder it is, the less likely you are to bother doing it. And that way lies disaster.

That’s it. Simple. Now go and do it, unless your data is worthless to you, and I doubt that very much.

February 4, 2010   Tags: computing

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