Backup Best Practices: Read This First!

[Ablang]

Backup Best Practices: Read This First!
08.17.05


By Robert P. Lipschutz



The terms we throw around in this story—incremental backup, system
versus data protection, single-file restore, and disaster recovery—may
make the whole idea seem daunting. But backing up your data
(documents, photos, Quicken files, and such) is not an option; it's a
necessity. And we recommend you back up your OS and applications, too,
so you can recover from a disaster that wipes out or corrupts your
hard drive.

In truth, both the Home and the Professional editions of Windows XP
come with simple backup functionality. The problems are: No one knows
where to find it; it doesn't do single-file recovery; and the
Automatic System Recovery (ASR) available in Windows XP Pro requires a
floppy disk to use (many systems don't have floppy disk drives
anymore).

Here, we present our tips and recommendations to guide you in setting
up a backup plan that makes sense for your needs.

Separate your data from your operating systems and applications. Ideally, you should save data files on a separate drive or partition. This will make protection easier in many ways, and it could save your bacon. For example, you can restore your system to a previous state without reversing your data to that point in time. Our favorite partitioning tools are Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 and Norton PartitionMagic 8.0.

Purchase an external USB 2.0 hard drive for your backups. It's a worthwhile investment that pays for itself with one system recovery. Dedicate the drive to backup; don't use it for anything else.

Distinguish between protecting your system (operating system, settings, applications), so you can recover from a crash, and protecting your data (documents, digital pictures, music, settings). Some backup tools work better for system files; some work better for data.

Identify what you absolutely can't afford to lose—pictures of your kids, financial information, and so on.

Do you have the installation CDs for all your software? If not, you need an image of your system and its dozens of applications.

Store a duplicate of your most crucial data off-site, using DVDs, an online service, or a second external drive.

Schedule a full-system backup once a week and smaller, incremental backups (that store only changes to files) daily or nightly.

If you encounter file problems, the most recent backup of that file may have the same problems. So don't be too quick to overwrite older backups.

As you learn the ropes, don't be afraid of mixing and matching for better protection. Multiple solutions, such as continuous backup and traditional backup, give you both quick recovery and long-term protection.

Storing backups on a separate partition of your hard drive (as Norton GoBack does) makes them easily accessible but won't protect you from a physical disaster. If you need this kind of protection, keep a system backup off-site, either online, on an external drive, or on optical media. We fit our Windows XP OS and a hoard of applications (about 9GB total) on two DVDs.

Note that most solutions can't restore individual e-mail messages, because they see your whole mailbox as a single file. (As a safeguard, make sure your e-mail accounts keep a copy of every message on the server.)

Typical consumer backup products don't save open files. So if you never close your mail file, or you keep a status-report spreadsheet open all the time, it may never get properly backed up.

Test restores often. We've heard too many horror stories of readers convinced that they were backing up properly only to find that nothing was actually written to the disk.

The specific method you choose will depend on your appetite for risk,
your budget, and the value of your data based on time, real dollars,
and sentiment. Only you can choose the right solution. Here are some
combinations that we like:

EMC's Retrospect with an external USB 2.0 hard drive and secondary, off-site DVD storage gives you the best of most worlds—data protection and system rollback.

Norton Ghost for weekly or monthly system images—consider its new incremental features for interim image creation, but make sure you have a full image, not a baseline with incrementals, for a reliable full-system recovery. If you want easy single-file access and version storage, combine Ghost with a simple backup product like Argentum.

Online services are a good choice if you don't have a huge amount of data to back up, as they can be incredibly slow.

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===
"The pressure is outrageous. Everyone is picked apart and it's so superficial and not real. I'm not superskinny and not overweight. I'm just normal."
-- Hilary Duff

 

[Jan Alter]

The message is absolutely right but as usual it takes a good spill to get it
across for the majority of computer users. If one doesn't back up it's like
driving one's car across the country back and forth with no spare tire.
Sooner or later a tire will go flat and the driver will be stuck.

 

[Bob]

The message is absolutely right but as usual it takes a good spill to get it
across for the majority of computer users.

There is only one good solution to backup, namely removeable drive
bays. Put two Kingwin KF-23 3-fan units (or equivalent) on the primary
IDE channel and use 3 disks of the same size. When you plan to do
something that could corrupt your boot disk, such as
installing/removing an application, cleaning the Registry, defragging,
etc, then make a clone with your Acronis TrueImage CD. Eventually you
will have two kinds of clones - one recent and one less recent. That
should cover your needs for disaster recovery.

You can put a disk in the lower bay when you are not using it to clone
a boot disk where you can keep old stuff like MP3s, pix, etc. You can
even make a backup of that if you want.

This method has the advantage that you can recover from any kind of
disaster, either disk failure or corruption. The removeable bays cost
about $25 and come with one tray. Extra trays cost about $15. Of
course you have to buy 3 disks, so this is not the cheapest solution
possible, but it is the most practical because it covers all possible
problems.

You could get by with only 2 disks, but I do not advise it. I have
cloned a boot disk only to find that it would not reboot, which means
the clone is no good. So I had to reach back for the 3rd disk.

 

[Joe Rom King]

Good point Bob,

But remember that if you need to back up you data frequently, the two
backup disks will most probably bear the same corrupted file, or any
other problem.

On the other hand, Relative Rev Backup by DataMills
http://www.datamills.com, can backup to any disk, creating archives
that go back months, enabling swift recovery of file/folder to a
selected time point that can be many months old, and it does so without
multiplying the backup space.

That way each of your backup disk contains many versions of you data,
and you would not need to keep adding backup disks just to increase the
backup history.

 

[Bob]

But remember that if you need to back up you data frequently, the two
backup disks will most probably bear the same corrupted file, or any
other problem.

That's why I have 3 disks. One is from a period long enough ago not to
be corrupted.

On the other hand, Relative Rev Backup by DataMills
http://www.datamills.com, can backup to any disk, creating archives
that go back months, enabling swift recovery of file/folder to a
selected time point that can be many months old, and it does so without
multiplying the backup space.

That way each of your backup disk contains many versions of you data,
and you would not need to keep adding backup disks just to increase the
backup history.

I have never liked software backups because they either don't backup
everything or they screw up enough to make them worthless.

I will stick with hardware only - that way I know what I have.