Backing up your data - are you doing it correctly?
During the course of the last three months I have dealt with an upsurge in data recovery service enquiries, this article is intended to highlight some of the common considerations people should make when backing up their files.
The key thing to remember when planning your backup strategy is that you are aiming to create two copies of all your important data, a copy to work with and a redundant copy in case something goes wrong with the original!
Increasingly I have found that people are buying external hard drives (or in the case of some business clients of mine, network attached RAID arrays) and trusting that so long as the files are kept on the backup drive - everything will be fine. Sadly this isn't the case. An external drive has just as much chance of hardware failure as an internal drive and whilst a RAID array offers some protection against hardware failure, neither device can protect you from incidents such as; accidental deletion, virus infection, theft of your I.T. equipment or should you be very unlucky - fire.
No backup strategy is going to be foolproof but here are some things to think consider:
How regularly do you need to backup your important files? If disaster struck, would you be happy with files that are a week old, a fortnight? Or would you need them to be as up to the minute as possible?
How much data needs to be backed up? Backing up the whole system on a regular basis is likely overkill, eliminate files from your regular backup proceedure that you can live without (e.g. shopping lists) and files that you already have copies of elsewhere (on Compact Disc for example).
Where will you keep your backup? Consider how important your data is. Is it is subject to confidentiality laws such as the Data Protection Act 1998? Are you required to store copies for a set period of time (6 years in the case of taxation self assessment data)? Keep in mind that storing data using online backup providers, often makes it subject to US law as well as our own. Check the terms and conditions of your service provider and ask where their servers are physically located in the world (if you are particularly concerned about privacy - ask what other firms share server space with your back ups - a warrant issued against another company, but with whom you share server space, will allow the authorities access to your data as well as that being investigated because they are both on the same physical machine). If the backup data is to be stored on your premises, does it need to be connected to the network 24/7 or can it be kept in a safe or fireproof box until needed?
Once you have put some thought into the above questions, you should be ready to make a decision about which strategy to use. Looked at in simple terms, there are only two ways to backup your data; backing up to a local source, and backing up to an online (offsite) source.
Local sources include network attached storage devices in their various guises (external drives [USB/Firewire/eSATA/Ethernet/RAID Arrays]) as well as optical media (such as CD/DVD/Blu Ray), tape drives, flash memory devices and even floppy discs. The advantage of local storage is that you do not require an internet connection to perform and retrieve backups and that you can backup large quantities of data easily and quickly (when compared to an online source).
Online/Offsite sources are many and varied ranging from small amounts of space offered for free (such as the webspace that comes free with your email/webspace accounts) ranging to large (50 GB or more) amounts of space offered by backup companies who may offer guarantees on safeguarding your data. My personal favourite is 'Dropbox' which can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/ although other popular services include; http://www6.crashplan.com http://mozy.com/ http://www.jungledisk.com/ and http://www.carbonite.com/ each service has a slightly different take on online backup so it's worth looking at each of them and making up your own mind.
By now you should have a fair idea of what to backup as well as where you are going to backup to. If the amount of data involved is in excess of 5GB my personal suggestion would be to backup locally with provisions for fire/theft as dictated by your risk assessment.
Obviously neat and organised filing will help considerably from now on. Try to keep everything in the My Documents folder and off the desktop.
I realise that there are numerous software applications (even some that come free with windows) for doing this job on an automated schedule but my advice is to ignore all of them! If you manually copy and paste the files and folders you want to keep from your computer onto the backup drive - you control which files are copied, you control when they are copied and you have the peace of mind of knowing that the backup was successful! Using modern equipment such as a fast flash drive or eSATA device backups are very swift (dependant on the quantity of data being stored) and in my experience - automated scheduling software is unreliable.
My recommended solution would be to manually backup all of your data on weekly basis and to use an online service such as dropbox to backup/synchronize the few vital documents that have to be up to the minute.
Remember that however and whenever you decide to backup your data - you must produce two identical copies of the file and they must exist in two seperate physical locations, or it simply isn't a backup!