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Backups! Backups! Backups!

Today boys and girls we're going to be talking about an ever-so-essential topic. Something anyone involved with computers (if you're reading this, then you're involved with computers!). Despite how vital this topic is, it seems be overlooked by the majority of users.

If the title of the article didn't make it obvious, we're going to be talking about backups today, this article is geared toward backing up a home computer. The same principles apply to backing up a website however.

Why are they important?

As I've pointed out in the lengthy article on site security (see: http://alltech-nologic.com/2011/02/hardening-site/) backups are really the primary fallback in the case of  disaster.

Digital media is wonderful in this regard, when a hard drive fails you don't have to think to yourself  "OH SH*T I've lost everything!." You just think to yourself "Meh, I'll go grab the backups and be back up and going in 10 minutes."

Basically if the worst happens backups allow you to be ready for when it does (talk to Murphy about how things go wrong at the worst possible time).

Establish priorities

The first step in setting up a backup plan is to establish what you need to worry about and what you don't. It doesn't make any sense to backup everything. Programs can be reinstalled, especially if you have install discs or can get the installations online.

The only thing you really need to be concerned with are things you can't replace. That's the data you've generated using your applications. Things like documents, spreadsheets, images (this is a big area all on it's own in today's world!), save game files, etc.

The biggest thing factor I suggest considering is "how much is this worth to me?"

If you've got all the digital photos of your child's first two years on your computer and no where else, obviously you can't replace those if something happens to them. So doing something like dumping them to a DVD or to an external hard drive is far better than leaving them in just one place.

Something you might start by doing is by taking an inventory of the programs you use and where the data files you create are stored. (This would also be a great time to audit what's installed on your computer and remove things you're not using)

Figure out a medium

Now that you've figured out what you want to save you'll want to figure out how you're going to save it. What you're saving will probably have a large impact on how you save it.

I personally have 900 Gigs worth of movies and music, obviously it wouldn't make much sense to try and store it all on DVDs. So it's all on an external 1TB drive. In this case though, the majority of the movies and music I have were all purchased legally and I have the physical media already (just ripped them to my hard drive for convenience and the ability to reduce clutter in my living area).

But important things such as family photos, I would use something physical such as a DVD and put it in a case. Then I could store it somewhere for easy access (or in a fireproof safe is I was particularly worried about the information).

If you've got the cash and the know-how you can setup a NAS (Network Attached Storage), these babies give you the ability to have large amounts of storage, and if you've got the right setup they have built in fault tolerance (such as a drive failure) through a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). That is of course if you're using striping with parity, meaning one disk fails and it's information can be recovered by the information on the other two.

Chose a backup method

The simplest method is probably just to copy and paste the files from where they're stored on your hard drive to where you want to store them as a backup. The problem with this is that its very manual and can be prone to mistakes. If you are going to pursue this route, then you should make sure you reference your list of things you need to save each time, that way nothing is forgotten.

There are other options available, Windows I know for sure and I think Macs both have backup utilities included in them (Linux also has the functionality to do backups, it's actually very easy to generate them through the command line). With these utilities you specify a location to place the backups, this is where the storage medium comes into play.

Set a schedule

Now that what you need to backup has been established and you've chosen a medium, now you need to figure out how often to update your backups. Many companies will perform a daily backup of data files, and then weekly backups of entire systems.

One limiting factor in doing backups is the time it takes to make the backups. If you're backing up your entire system every day, you'll be spending as much time doing backups as you do actually getting work done. That doesn't make much sense does it? A smarter way would be to backup the files you've changed that day.

All in all this is up to you to decide how often these get done.

Other tips

A good thing to do with some of your older backups, say if you took the approach of a daily, weekly, monthly backup would be to keep the monthly backups off site. That way if a natural disaster struck or the office burned down, you've still got a good amount of your files backed up.

Make sure you're using high quality media, it doesn't make much sense to store vital backups on crappy media!