Keeping your data safe

When I purchased my first digital camera, a Kodak DC280 I took photos of my friends and other events enjoying the new to me technology. But of those photos, very little I have now due to a accidental formatting I did on my main computer. Back then, I would reformat my computer, reinstall Windows, and every time I think I lost some data here or there, either photos, or school work, or game saves, it was always something I would remember when the computer was finishing up the Windows install. Of course, at this point, it was too late to recover and the data was basically gone. I had some backups but nothing that covered all of the data I lost.

After years of working with data on a personal level and also working with data on a business enterprise level I have some tips and tricks for the average end user. Here's my recommendations, and they are all low cost, where possible, no subscription needed.

A safe backup

A common mistake is backing up your data on the same computer. Recently while rebuilding my laptop, I installed a second hard drive, the same size and manufacture as the first drive. When I reinstalled Windows, the installer asked which drive I wanted to install to, so I figured it was drive 0, not the second drive I installed which was drive 1. When the install was done, I checked my second drive to retrieve the data I stored on drive 1, but it was all gone. I checked again and found that when I reinstalled Windows, I installed Windows on the data backup drive, not the Windows system drive.

I couldn't figure out how this mistake took place until I realized that the manufacture installed the Windows OS on the wrong drive, drive 1, then the new drive I installed was drive 0. Lucky for me, I only lost a bunch of ISO images I downloaded but it could have been worst. This example is why backing up on the same computer is not really a solid "backup".

For a better backup solution you should think about the following. Is my data safe if my computer's hard disk crashes? What if my computer's second hard disk crashes? What is my backup drive is stolen? Below I wrote a listing from least safe to most safe for backups which I personally recommend for home users.

1) Backing up on the same drive - This is great for working on a document where you are making edits and is a work in progress, but you should save your work end of day to another drive or location like a USB stick.

2) Backing up on another drive, same computer - This is a good solution for storing items that need quick access like photos or music. In most cases the second hard drive has much less use than the main drive and would equal less chance of failure but it would not protect against theft of the computer nor a virus.

3) Backing up on an external drive - Now we are starting to get into a much safer solution. Now you're data is easily accessible by USB, but it's also not too hard to access, a great combination. The only issue is theft or fire in the home but this is covered if you storage the drive in a safe location, or if you keep another backup in a different physical location.

4) Backing up on an external drive, also using on-line backup - This is the method I use and it's been pretty handy. While it's not free, typically costing about $100 per year, my data is backed up once by myself and then automatically by the backup provider. Since I backup not daily but every time I take a large amount of images from my camera, I wanted to have something to backup the small files I was working on and this works perfectly.

Know where your data is located



What is the best method to backup your data? I would first recommend to know where you data is located, then what is the most important data to backup. One of my biggest mistakes when I first started to use the computer was I stored data all over the place on my computer. From different drives, keeping data on my personal home folder, or keeping it under another folder, it was a large mess. Now, I use a different method for keeping the data in one location.

For a Windows system, I store all of my data under the account's document folder, this way if I backup the "My Documents" folder, then I can save all of my web page links, settings, Outlook PST files, photos, data, etc. On a Linux system, I follow the same method, I just make sure to save all of my work under /home/robert and this makes things much easier to manage.

How to backup your data

Backing up data is done in many methods but I really prefer simple over complex. There's plenty of free software, paid software and great built in software available for the home computer. I recommend that you use either the built in software for backing up or a simple file copy to backup your data. Here's my personal reason why.

When you use a special software to backup your data, you're usually compressing the files for the backup into a new format for backup. In most cases, the new format is not cross compatible, for example if I'm using brand X for my backup and it uses a formatting called "mybackup.mmg" then it's typically only going to work with software that knows about mmg files, in this case, the brand X application.

The big issue about this is that your data is only safe as long as the brand X software is available, which given the rate of software changes, could be months to years. For this reason I really only use two methods to backup my data on a Windows system. Either Windows Backup, which is built into most Windows systems that are higher than "home editions", or a simple file copy. In the years of using Windows Backup, I never had a issue where one version of Windows could not read another version's backup files, and thanks to the automated process with a simple wizard it's very easy to use.

Recently I'm now using a simple script to run a copy job from my desktop to a USB drive, not using any special backup software. For me this runs very easy, I can have access to the backed up files at time and as long as the drive is still working, my data is accessible.

Size limits of backup

In most cases unless you have a large amount of backup storage, you will not want to backup the entire profile on your computer. You might want to have the data easily accessible from a USB drive as D:\photos instead of D:\backup\robert\photos. Here's comes a common issue, how can I backup everything that is important without the extras that are not important? Let's say, I want to only backup my documents and Outlook PST data from my workstation?

If someone was to ask me this I would to the following steps on a Windows system.

1) Where are you saving your data? It's easy to assume "My Documents" but I have seen users save data to either the root of the main system drive, in most cases C:\ in a folder like "my data" and even saved under a strange folder like "09". It's my recommendation that you search the drives for Microsoft Office documents, images, music, Microsoft PST files at the very least. I usually use a search string as "*.xls; *.xlsx; *.doc; *.docx; *.pst; *.jpg; *.jpeg; *.mp3; *.wma; *.wmv; *.mov; *.m4a; *.mpg; *.mpeg".

This covers most of the common file formats including Apple iTunes formats but check twice and make sure you record all of the possible paths the user might have used.

2) Once you know the data locations you can either run the system's backup software or a simple file copy to backup your data to another location.

Test your backup solution

Before thinking everything is ok, test your backup solution once in a while before committing this process for months or years. It's easy to restore a few files and this small test will save you hours later from recreating work, if it's even possible to recreate. :)

Hope this has been helpful and here's some links for reference.

Windows XP Backup Made Easy

Mozy Backup Service

Crashplan Backup Service

A simple Linux backup plan

Rob

Backups

Recently a friend mentioned to me a UNIX workstation at his work could not start the GUI or xwindows. The OS could start but since the desktop was limited to a command line, there was a bit of problem getting back to the applications on the desktop since the windows could not be started. Unfortuntaley my friend did not have any backup of the systems and the application looks like it was having problems so it could be more than a simple copy of a few files.

Thinking about backups, they are usually considered something nice but not always kept at a high priority. Often when a new system is purchased, the last item, if even remembered is the backup license or software. Not to mentioned how many stand alone systems are purchased with out a valid backup solution, or how many are in production with out testing the restore procedures.

From my experience at home and in the enterprise data center, a backup is a make or break point for the system. If you have a backup, even a old backup from a few months ago, it's far better than starting over from a base OS. In once case at my previous job, a key system in a multi-tier application crashed from a hardware issue. Basically the system ran a SQL server that was a key component for updating workers in the distribution centers. With this one server down, the entire work force of workers would have to be let go and this would impact the company with a lost of several thousand dollars of work and merchandise not shipped to the stores.

After I found the server lost a drive and was not mirrored (old HP ProLiant DL310) I installed a new drive and OS, but the problem was installing the applications and data. We had a process for emergency bare metal restores but it was never 100% successful, often requiring some fine tuning and slight fixes. We were lucky and the server came up with some tweaking from our SQL DBA but it was down to the wire. To say we were on edge is to say the least, I was there till 4AM on Sunday waiting for the ok from the application team.

Thinking back to how important backups are, I have been not taking regular backups of my personal computers. Mostly I think my reason why I skip out is I usually keep my files across multiple computers and take a backup about twice a year. It's lazy and after thinking if I lost everything, how much would I really loose?

I actually almost found this recently.

On my main workstation, I usually run Vista Ultimate on the workstation but it's been running slower and slower over the years. Thinking I'm going to upgrade when I have time, I backed up my files over the past few months. The past month I wanted to install a Linux workstation instead of working from a virtual desktop. Installing on a physical box involves some extra challenges such as locating the correct drivers.

After installing the Linux on my workstation, by changing the boot drive from C:\ to my D:\ drive, I found that some how my master boot record was changed. Tried some recommended steps, the reinstalled Vista, thinking I could reinstall to a junk directory but still copy off my data. To my surprise, I checked and all of my data was gone!

Actually, the Vista installer copied all of my data to a new folder Windows.old, I used a USB to SATA device and I was able to copy my data. I was extremely lucky, I had my resumes and other data that I could have lost and did not have a recent backup.

Like the issue at the old job, the lost of data or non tested restores can be the success or failure of any data restore. If I lost my resumes, that would be about a few days of work, not to mention that I would be behind on my job search.