It's backup time again!

[Keatah]

:tiphat:A friendly reminder to go through your system and ensure you have a backup of all the important stuff.. This can really be as simple as a 10-minute drag-n-drop operation for important files.

For near bulletproof backup (from a home user's perspective) you should image to an external drive, and use a rescue disc to create and restore that image. Optionally make 2 copies and store one of them off-site; perhaps at a relative's house, a bank vault, or stuff it in a baggie and bury it in the ground. This will protect against natural disasters, the worst kinds of mal-ware, theft, your own stupidity, hardware failures, and a host of other unforeseen circumstances.

But most important of all is to actually test your ability to image and restore. If you don't feel like practicing "live" on your operational system, get a second drive and restore to that and check it out. A backup is totally worthless if you can't access it.

Good practices suggest keeping your USER DATA separate from the OS and APPLICATIONS. This means your main system drive has all the applications and os. And the second drive has all your work output and pictures and music and projects and stuff like that. Both are to be backed up on a schedule you can live with. I tend to like this philosophy because I can recover from a crash or problem quickly without affecting years worth of work. Also you can move all your information to a new system quite quickly without the burden of having to search and separate it piecemeal.

As a side note, it's good practice to keep copies of applications, whether you downloaded them or purchased them or whatever. This will come in handy if and when you need to spot-reinstall or redo an app for any reason. Not to mention getting a new computer. Everything's all at hand and set to go. No fuss'n'fumbling.

For the past 30+ years I've kept at the ready in some form or other:
1- OS install disc
2- Boot disc
3- Rescue disc with disk imager and file sync program.
4- Applications, games, utilities, downloads, tools.. all original files.
5- User data, pictures, music, journal, projects, documents..etc.
6- Working HDD image, ready to restore at a moments notice.
7- Offsite(!) backup of special individual files done at a semi-regular interval.

Everyone will have their own style and requirements. This can be as simple as drag'n'drop op, or as complex as a megacorp operation spanning multiple datacenters. For me I just use an imager, windows explorer, and a file sync program. However you choose to do it is your choice. Go with what works best. The key take away point here is to have 2 copies of anything you don't want to lose!

 

[ky]

Great tips Keatah, will do this as soon as I can get an external hard disk.

 

[FADEC]

Well, my backup is quite simple. I have three hard drives in my PC. The main folder which contains all important files and folders is copied to the other two hard drives frequently. No tools required. Just deleting the two obsolete folders and copy the original one to the other two hard drives every few weeks. I also copy the main folder to my external hard drive and to my notebook. So it's actually 4 backups on 4 different hard drives. When I am on vacation I always take my notebook along anyway while all three PC hard drives are removed and treasured at a safe place (from burglar) along with the external hard drive.

There is also a DVD (RW) with all important files (login data, banking information, photos etc.) at a safe place (from burglar). But I consider to rent a small safe deposit box. Because currently all my hard drives are in one basked so to speak. If my house should burn down for example, all the data would be lost. But so far I would consider my data as safe as possible. I guess it's rather unlikely that 4 hard drives stop working at the same time while the DVD is not accessible anymore.

This may sound complicated for people who don't really care about backups. But it takes really no more than 15 minutes once a month to do the backups.

 

[Arrowstar]

I back up the entire contents of my HDD to a 2 TB external drive weekly. In addition, I use Dropbox as offsite storage for those files and folders which I consider critical to have up-to-date backups available on an as-needed basis with minimal concern for later access.

 

[Rtyh-12]

I use a 500 GB external hard drive for backups. I used it when I migrated to Linux a while ago. It wasn't anything too complicated -- just copy-pasting everything important. I also use our laptop, which holds a second copy of that stuff, and it's so slow that it's only usable as another, sluggish, non-pluggable hard drive anyway.

What's really important (i.e. family photos, basically) is also on a third computer.

 

[garyw]

Great thread Keatah.

My own backup regime is slightly complex because of the environment I run. I keep all my day to day stuff personal and some work stuff in dropbox including my encrypted password database.

At home I backup data ad-hoc to an external storage array into a folder called EOM-[MONTH]-[YEAR] so the current one is EOM-JUN-2012

On the last Sunday of the month that folder then gets copied up to Amazons S3 for offsite storage. I also do occasional dumps of other data to S3 when I need a special sort of backup.

 

[Keatah]

My own schedule

My backup procedure follows a loose semi-regular schedule.
It consists of 2 distinct parts.

#1 - When my system gets heavy I run a complete image backup of the o/s and installed applications. By "heavy" I mean when there's been a lot of changes to installed apps and settings and configurations. Updates and patches, things like that. Enough changes that it would take a long time to re-build. This typically means 2x or 3x year.

#2 - Generally monthly or whenever our personal user-generated stuff has changed a lot I'll back it up also. For this task a file sync program absolutely shines absolutely! ..with one big red flag..

It's so simple. I plop my ol'lappy in the center. Connect the master disk to the left USB port, and the backup to right port. Click on the sync program. It does a scan and tells me how much data it will transfer over, including a list of files which I can look through. This takes just a moment despite sifting through several TB of data. Once I approve the list - away it goes! It's nice because it only effects changes, and not the whole contents.

I always do a brief manual review. I've heard too many stories (and performed recovery ops for) of people connecting a drive and having the sync program blissfully copy a blank drive over their only working copy. It is important fully and completely understand the rules and regulations your sync program operates by. A tick of manual intervention here is a good thing.

You don't really want to image this portion of your backup. You're only changing a few percent and there's no need to redo everything every time.

Additionally, you can manually update something with drag'n'drop, access these files on another computer. If you damage a file, you can easily pick out the replacement from the backup heap.

This is what I use and it works for me.
http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/usage.php#features
http://softology.com.au/dirsync.htm

This has worked well for me for over 30 years. It all began with saving dupes of my huge planet-smashing-asteroid-sized Applesoft Basic files from the 8-bit era. I would make hours of changes and save the program twice, one to my working floppy I used at home and another to a disk I'd send to my aunt across town.

 

[streb2001]

I recommend the Clonezilla Live CD for drive imaging onto an external drive. Another good plan is to burn a new CD with install file, receipt and licence key for every shareware application you buy (you do pay for shareware don't you?) A bit tedious, but I also keep a simple list of all software installed/uninstalled including the date, adding to it as I install stuff. This has helped me resolve a serious clash in the past and also helps when rebuilding the system on a new PC.