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Backing Up Data for Non-Techies
9:34 AM PST, March 8, 2008, updated at 9:39 AM PST, March 8, 2008
If you spend much time on the web, you've probably heard more than once about the importance of backing up your data. Web wizards warn about losing your important files like street preachers, with wild eyes and waving arms and anecdotes about the inevitable certain doom of a hard drive crash. On the other hand, maybe you really have experienced the frustration of data loss--losing passwords, personal information and documents, full programs, and hours and hours worth of media can feel like a real disaster when it happens. If that's happened to you, you know that the arm-wavers are right--you need to back up your data.
But if, like me, you're not an IT professional, phrases like "disaster recovery", "data-loss event", and "fault-tolerant system" might make your head spin. Fortunately you don't need to get an $80/hr computer consultant to protect yourself against losses incurred through a hard drive crash; you just need a method you can stick to. "How can I prevent a hard drive crash?" The best way to protect your data from a crash is to make sure the crash doesn't happen in the first place, right? There's a few steps you can take to prevent the most common causes of hard drive crashes. 1) Buy a quality hard drive. When you buy a new PC or upgrade an existing one, use a drive from a brand with a history of reliability. Seagate and Western Digital are both good places to start. Understand, however, that all drives eventually fail--it's just a question of "when". But quality drives tend to last longer and built-in features such as S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring And Recovery Technology) can warn you about potential crash causes like high temperatures and faulty disk speeds.  2) "Defragment" your drive. Defragging is a simple maintenance task that everyone seems to know about, yet few actually do it regularly. Defragging doesn't just help prevent crashes; if your computer seems "sluggish", it can bring it back from Slowsville. If you have a Windows PC, simply go to your Start menu, select "Accessories", then "System Tools" and run "Disk Defragmenter" (see image at right). If you have a Mac, you'll actually need to acquire a third party application such as iDefrag. (Note that Macs auto-defrag smaller files so you shouldn't need to defrag a Mac often.)3) Check your system temperature. Does your whole computer tend to run hot? A high ambient temperature in your case can cause your system to overheat and your drive to fail. There are a number of ways to check your temp. Accessing the BIOS menu on your PC (usually by hitting "DEL" or one of the function keys during startup) will often give you a temperature readout. If you're not running a high-end system, this is usually enough information, but make sure the system's been running a while before restarting or it will give you a temp reading that's artificially low. You can also get temperature monitoring software (SpeedFan is effective and free) that will monitor your temp without needing to reboot. System frequently running too hot? Improve your cooling system: add fans and ventilation, or go whole-hog with a high-end liquid cooling system. "How can I back up my data?" Backing up data isn't difficult, but it takes discipline to do regularly. It's easy to put off as seemingly unimportant until the day a crash happens. How frequently you should back up your data depends on how important your files are to you, and how many of them there are. Anywhere from once a week to once a month is fine, according to your needs. But how should you do it? There are a number of ways, varying in price and complexity. Basically, the more automated you want your backup procedure to be, the more money you can expect to spend. Whichever way you decide to backup your data, make sure you do it on a regular basis to save yourself headaches down the line. The cheapest and easiest way is to buy a large flash drive or an external hard drive and remember to copy important files to it from your computer on a regular schedule. This is an inexpensive option, but very manual, as you'll need to pick and choose each file or folder and do the copying yourself. If you don't have much data that needs to be regularly backed up, however, this is a perfectly acceptable solution. If you have a lot of data (particularly movies and music) that you don't want to lose to a crash, an automated system with network-attached storage may be the safest way to go. The great thing about this method is that once you set it up, it will take care of itself from then on out. Here's how to do it: 1) Get auto-backup software. There are tons of software available for this, which vary wildly in price. It's up to you which one you want to use, but I like Acronis True Image. If you're pretty savvy there are a few freeware solutions that work well, such asGoodSync, but freeware solutions often lack flexibility and customer support, and pay versions aren't that expensive.  2) Add network-attached storage. Network-attached storage bays are like external hard drives, but with the added advantages of holding multiple hard drives at once and working through your home network, so it doesn't have to be physically attached to your computer. Pick one with the capacity you need for backing up your data, and you can put it in your closet, connected to your WiFi router. 3) Sync your backup software to your backup storage. Here, all you need to do is configure your auto-backup software to see your network-attached storage, which usually just means browsing for the right drive letter when the program asks where you want to archive your files. Schedule your backup sessions to run on a regular basis and to send its backup files across your home network to your attached storage, and you can "set it and forget it", only needing to lay hands on it again when you need to access your backup data or add more hard drives. --Aric A.
Initial post:
Mar 8, 2008 10:41 AM PST
Douglas J. Fort says:
I use SpiderOak http://spideroak.com
Disclosure: I'm a programmer at SpiderOak
Posted on
Mar 9, 2008 12:30 PM PDT
Michael J. Kemp says:
If you're a home user who pretty much keeps everything in your My Documents folder and you're looking for a dirt-simple method, buy an external HD, then once a week just copy your entire folder over to the HD.
Mike
Posted on
Mar 9, 2008 12:48 PM PDT
B. Hamilton says:
Boy, you make it sound really easy. The problems I've had in the past with backup programs are that you have to know where they put the drive "snapshot" that is used to recreate the data. One program, Retrospect, was actually keeping the snapshot on the drive I was backing up even though the actual data was going to my external drive! I don't think I told it to do that, but it is possible I made a mistake. Another "sort of" problem that I had was when I backed up the entire drive and then needed to recreate the "entire volume" onto a new hard drive after a crash. The new drive wasn't exactly the same type or size and this bothered the program. Also, Windows doesn't seem to like being thrown onto a new drive and I was getting errors in the registry and corrupted messages for the recycle bin...
So, I think choosing the right things to back up is as important as the decision to back up. For me, I decided to go with the manual option and copy all the stuff that means anything to me to the external drive. For me, that's My Documents, My Pictures, Videos, Saved Games, and email, plus attachments. I don't have to worry about Snapshots and corrupted files after a Restore. There's also a thing called Sync-Toy that allows you to easily make sure that two directories are identical, I use that to make sure my laptop has the same pictures on it that my desktop does over my home network. I suppose I could start using that to help me with my manual restore to my external drive... For those who want to go the automatic route, my advice would be to start small with a test directory of random files. Back it up, then see if you can restore it. And pay attention to where the data files used for Restore are kept! Like I said, you make it sound very easy. I've been working with computers since the days of DOS 6.0, Procomm Plus and 1200 baud modems, and I find it somewhat a challenge to make sure the automatic backups are working correctly. Maybe I should try another program?
Posted on
Mar 9, 2008 12:57 PM PDT
Michael Gebert says:
One of the lessons of film history is that keeping more copies in more places, even poorly cared for, is better than trying to protect one copy perfectly. For instance, I burn CDs with my digital photos and send them to my mom out of state. Ultimately I plan to print out copies of the best ones on an archival quality printer and paper so they'll survive even the greatest danger of all-- technological change making it impossible to read them. In 100 years, historians will rely on my photos as a major visual record of a time period otherwise lost in the great jpeg disaster of 2037.
Posted on
Mar 9, 2008 12:58 PM PDT
John Rylander says:
If one uses a laptop, it's also important not to drop, bump, or bounce (which can happen while dragging) the system while it's on. This can easily cause damage to portions of the disk media surface, usually automatically corrected by the drive electronics; but if severe, a drop or bump can lead to total failure immediately or soon after. (In my case, after having my laptop inadvertently slide off my lap onto a carpeted floor, the disk failure happened suddenly about one week later.)
These cautions are especially important on higher capacity or speed drives.
Posted on
Mar 9, 2008 6:59 PM PDT
Charlie Green says:
Connect a second computer to your network and copy your data (not registered program) files to its hard drive. It can be a slow piece of **** since all it has to do is "remember" stuff on the hard drive. When not needed, it can hide in the closet.
Posted on
Mar 10, 2008 8:15 AM PDT
Jamie Lawrence says:
I'm surprised you managed to point out the semi-obscure point that OSX defragments smallish files on the fly, and completely failed to mention Time Machine. Transparent, on the fly backup. With the new wireless NAS devices, completely untethered, too, all for $500.
Posted on
Mar 10, 2008 8:47 AM PDT
M. Dembski says:
http://carbonite.com/ is a good option also.
Don't forget that not only are you backing up against a hard drive failure, but also against fire, flood and theft. Backing up to another hard drive you keep next to the computer is not going to help much for anything except a hard drive failure. I keep two hard drive backups which I rotate and also use carbonite. I keep one hard drive is a safe.
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