Data Loss Could Strike At Any Time

We live in an age of amazing machines. Thirty years ago, machines the size of the room you're in couldn't do what a graphing calculator does in seconds. Now, we can search the global internet for information, music, pictures, and people, and store all of that on our personal computers. We can record movies with digital cameras, take hundreds of pictures of our trip to Paris, listen to hundreds of hours of music, and write resumes, letters, spreadsheets, and documents. We can store more data on our personal machines now than we ever could before, and for very affordable prices.

Anyone who has ever used a machine knows that it's possible for it to break. Clocks stop ticking, cars stop running, and computers crash. Computers are very complex machines with lots of different parts, but there's only one of them that really matters when it comes to your personal data - the hard drive. Nearly every computer has a mechanical hard drive inside, and that's where all of your pictures, music, and programs are stored. If something happens to that hard drive, some or all of your data could suddenly go poof.

Most hard drives are made of little round platters that spin around at extremely high speed (most desktop computers have hard drives that spin at 7200 rotations per minute), with a thin needle-like reader picking up data. Like any mechanical construction, there's a lot of things that could go wrong. Ask any computer technician or IT professional what the most vulnerable and likely-to-fail part of the computer is, and they'll all agree that the hard drive is the weak link. Hard drives will die - it's guaranteed. Some may last 5 years, some may last 10 years, but sooner or later every hard drive will stop working. While there are things you can do to mitigate this failure, the best plan is to have a backup in place so that when your drive does die, you won't have to lose any sleep.

How Can I Backup My Data?

The good news is that there are tons of solutions to this. Data backup has been a very important part of the foundation of network safety and standard operating procedures for Information Technology Departments everywhere, and there are lots of different ways to protect your stuff. I'm going to take us through several different approaches to backup, and talk about the pros and cons of each idea.

Generally speaking, there are three kinds of backups - local backups to another drive, online backups to a distant remote location, or network backups to a private storage network. From my personal experience, most users I've worked with feel that the local backup is generally the most straightforward and approachable (and affordable) solution for backup.

How Often Should I Backup My Data?

The better question you should be asking is, "How much data can I afford to lose?"

How many changes to your data do you make in a given day? A week? A month? If you're a college student or a journalist, you're probably writing new articles or papers every day. How much of that can you afford to lose, should your computer randomly explode one day? If you're up against deadlines or you make lots of new additions to your stuff constantly, maybe a daily backup is the best way to be safe. If you're a professional photographer and you upload tons of pictures every day, or a musician who records lots of music, or a video editor who works with lots of movies - the question pretty much answers itself.

If you're the sort of person who doesn't really do a whole lot aside from web browsing, email, some limited word processing (in my experience, most users fall into this category) and maybe some other light gaming or content creation, you could be happy with a weekly backup. If you're a really light user, you could even do a monthly backup. I wouldn't go too far beyond that, though - you'd be surprised how much changes every month on your system.

Local Backups

A local backup is when you hook up a secondary hard drive (either internally or as an external drive), and copy data from one drive to another. This is generally the easiest approach, because the requirements for it are extremely low, and it's very cost-effective. Nearly every office supply store that sells any kind of computer equipment (such as OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, Staples, or other computer stores) will sell external hard drives.

To give you an idea of the price, Office Depot is currently selling a 1 GB Seagate FreeAgent external drive for $99.99. A comparable drive by Iomega from Newegg.com, a popular site among computer assembly enthusiasts, is the same price.

Most external hard drives will connect to your computer through a USB 2.0 port. Any computer manufactured in the past few years or so will definitely have USB 2.0 (which is different from older USB ports, which operate at a much slower speed and are unsuitable for backup). Those of you with Apple Macs are also likely to have FireWire ports (recent Macs will have a faster FireWire 800 port which offers almost double the speed of a USB 2.0 port), so you have a few more options for purchasing. Manufacturers have learned to make the process of connecting a new drive very easy - you plug in the drive, it'll show up on your computer automatically, and you can simply run whatever software the manual suggests to properly configure the drive. It doesn't require any particular technical expertise - just the ability to follow instructions.

When it comes to picking out the external drive to use, the most important decision you have to make is how big of a drive you'll want. The rule of thumb is that you'll always want at least the same size as your computer's current hard drive. If the size of the drive isn't written on the outside of the computer (as is typical with many prebuilt computers you can purchase from stores), you can determine how big it is by following these steps for Windows (this works for Windows XP, Vista, or 7):

Open My Computer (either in the Start menu, or on your Desktop)
Right click on the C: Drive (this is typically your primary hard drive)
Select "Properties" in the menu
The dialog box will feature a pie chart of your used vs. free space, and above that will list "CAPACITY", typically in gigabytes
Round the Capacity up to the next 10, and that's generally how big your hard drive is
So if your capacity is listed as 78.89 GB, then you can round up to 80 GB. Rounding up even further to the nearest 100 is not a bad idea, as more is better when it comes to space on your backup drive.

Typically, as of writing time, you'll find drives in sizes like 300 GB, 500 GB (the most common), 750 GB, 1 TB (a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes), 1.5 TB, or 2 TB. Round yourself up (not down!) to the nearest of those sizes, and you'll have a good idea of the drive you want to aim for.

Local backup has its limitations, though - any hard drive is susceptible to failure, so your backup can also be potentially vulnerable. In addition, if your house suffers a major disaster (such as a house fire, or electrical short), your local backup may suffer just as badly as your primary computer. If it's a laptop, and you keep your backup drive with your laptop in a single bag, you can lose both your computer and your backup should your laptop bag be stolen.

But for the price, the amount of storage you can get and the speed at which you can copy data onto it can't be beaten by any online plan.

This section is about setting up a backup using the built-in operating system tools for Windows XP, Vista/7, and Mac OS X 10.5 & above.

Backing up on Windows XP

Windows XP is an older system, and unfortunately is missing out on some great features introduced in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Specifically, the Windows XP Backup program is a bit weak compared to its newer versions, so you'll have to do a bit more manual configuration. Windows XP Home does not install the Windows Backup program by default, so you'll have to follow the instructions on Microsoft's knowledge base to install it. Windows XP Pro users will find it by going to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup.

If you're looking for Microsoft's step-by-step backup instructions, you can find them on its knowledge base. Since Windows XP is an older system, I won't reprint them here. The gist of the idea is that you can use the Backup Wizard to select what you are backing up (mainly, your C: drive, or perhaps just your user's folder - C:\Documents and Settings\), what kind of backup ("normal" is a simple choice here), and how often you backup, which we discussed previously.

Backup on Windows Vista/7

Windows Vista introduced a much better backup system that runs automatically and makes intelligent decisions about space management, and Windows 7 refined it.

There's an excellent step-by-step guide with a tutorial video on Microsoft's website for how to set up Windows Backup and what the options will mean for you: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Back-up-your-files.

Backup on Mac OS X

If you're using Mac OS X version 10.5 or above, you have access to a wonderful backup program called Time Machine. Time Machine's setup is very simple, as you simply need to insert a drive, and typically Time Machine will ask you if you want to use it for backup purposes. Apple has a very good setup tutorial on their knowledge base: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427.

If you aren't sure which version of Mac OS X you are running, you can simply go to the Apple Menu -> About this Mac, and right underneath the Apple logo, it will indicate "Version 10.x.x". As long as you are using 10.5.x or above, Time Machine will be available.

If you have an older Mac running 10.4 or below, you'll need to find an alternate solution such as the free SuperDuper and CarbonCopyCloner, or one of the many available commercial backup programs. They'll have their own instructions.

Local Pros:

Easily purchased, configured, and installed with little experience or knowledge needed
Best value of price for storage space
Full control of your data
Local Cons:

A single backup drive is just as vulnerable to failure or disaster as your personal computer
Can be easily stolen, damaged, or corrupted
Online Backups

There's an obvious problem with local backups. If your primary hard drive has the capacity to suddenly explode and die one day with no warning, what's to stop a second hard drive from doing the same thing? At least with multiple hard drives you'll increase your chances of data preservation should one of them bite the dust - but the chances of failure for a given drive don't decrease just because you have a lot of them.

So if local backups are also potentially unreliable, what else do we do? We back up our data to the "cloud" (a fancy word for a special space on the internet reserved for this sort of thing), to a remote location or set of servers where the data can be maintained or preserved by a professional company devoted to data storage networks.

There are many such companies that will do this for home and businesses. The two most popular I've encountered are CrashPlan and Mozy, though there are plenty more for all platforms.

CrashPlan offers multiple backup plans at varying prices - you can get 10 GB of online storage starting at $25/year, or unlimited online storage for $50/year per computer. There are also family plans for getting an entire household of computers backed up online. The free CrashPlan product does not offer any online storage - you'll have to provide your own.

Mozy offers home and business plans. The home plans allow for 50 GB for $6/mo (for one computer), or 125 GB for $10/mo (for 3 computers), with additional storage space and computers offered for extra payment.

Both services offer secure, reliable, automatic and safe online backup to a remote location, so if you have extremely important data that you must preserve (the previous examples of university researchers comes to mind here), cloud backup is a compelling concept - if you're willing to pay the monthly fee.

Online storage has its weaknesses. You are willingly placing your data into the hands of a third party, and though they all guarantee the safety of your data, nobody is hack proof nor disaster proof (as the recent events with Sony and the PlayStation Network demonstrate!). Furthermore, if the company goes out of business, what happens to your backup? What happens to your data? What happens if your online backup company suffers a major earthquake, flood, or storm? While most company representatives will have answers to these questions, it's worth doing some investigation and research before signing over your stuff.

Online storage also depends very highly on your internet connection. Since you're backing up your data online, you're limited to the speed of your upload stream - which is often very reduced compared to your download speed. Many countries and cities also have caps on how much data you can upload or download, so an online backup could eat into this very quickly. Furthermore, online storage can be expensive, and uploading 1 Terabyte of data can cost you a larger monthly sum than you expect. If you have thousands and thousands of photos, or hours of movie footage or video, or a music collection to make the rockstars jealous, online storage will be an extremely expensive way to accommodate your backup needs.

Online Pros:

Your data is kept offsite, so even a disaster at home means your data will be intact
Companies depend on the well-being and security of your data, so they will go great lengths to protect and preserve it
You don't need to add additional hardware to your house
Online Cons:

Monthly or yearly fees for your storage
A third party company is in charge of your data, and any technical support or problems will need to be resolved through them and them alone
Limited to the speed of your internet connection
Storage Networks and Network Backup

The last option is for those of you with large budgets, or great technical experience. Most businesses (small, medium, or large!) simply have too much data to fit into a home backup system, and may have needs far beyond the allowances of a home system.

IT professionals will often utilize storage area networks (SANs), or network accessible storage (NAS). These are intended for more enterprise-level solutions for large amounts of data preservation, and are priced accordingly. The good news is that once you've purchased the hardware, you generally don't have to pay a monthly fee. Running a backup server in your house will increase noise and energy usage, though, so there are hidden costs to be aware of.

There are some "home-compatible versions" of NAS machines, such as the popular Drobo (starting at $400), the NetGear ReadyNAS (starting at $300), or D-Link DNS (starting at $200). These are individual machines that allow you to plug in hard drives (which you'll have to purchase separately) that keep live networked storage spread across multiple drives, so that if one fails you won't lose any data.

A home NAS or SAN is a high-caliber option though; it's intended for serious users with a large amount of data that needs to be preserved and kept alive (the key phrase is "high availability" at all times and at high cost. It's more reliable than a single local backup drive, as the data is spread amongst multiple drives, and you won't have to pay an additional monthly storage cost to a third party company like an online backup, but the entry cost is staggeringly high, especially as you add more drives.

Network Pros:

High capacity, high speed
Scalable depending on what kind of device you purchase
Full control of your data
Network Cons:

High level of technical experience is usually necessary to configure, setup, and maintain
The starting price is going to be very high - the cheapest option starts at $200 and does not include the cost of the hard drives, and you'll generally need to use higher-quality (more expensive) hard drives
An always-on-24/7 network device in your home can add additional noise, heat, and energy usage, which can lead to increased utility costs
Pros/Cons and Summary

No denying that backing up your data is absolutely critical, no matter what kind of user you are. But how much data, and what kind of data you have - that will determine the backup needs you can reasonably expect.

Now that you have all the facts, you can make a very informed decision about how best to back up your data. While this may seem a little overwhelming to you, once you establish a backup and get it going, it'll become an automatic habit, and you'll be able to rest easy at night knowing that all of your personal stuff won't go away should your computer have a bad day.


source http://www.furiousforum.com/general-discussion/how-and-why-you-should-back-up-your-personal-computer/msg5/#msg5

Thanks for sharing the nice post and you can give a try with some third-party backup software. Here I recommend AOMEI Backupper for Windows users. It's much easier to get all the data in your PC backed up. It includes several backup methods as well as incremental & differential backup, real-time sync, make a scheduled plan based on weekly, daily, monthly and so on.