Lander Toyota
Backup and Restoration Guide
Roldan Alfonso P. Cuenca
Author
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Backing up data - why you need to do it 3
Why should you back up? 3
What data should you back up? 3
The First Steps 5
Take your time to get yourself and your computer prepared before you backup 5
How to back up 6
Be organized 7
Additional considerations 7
How much is your information worth? 9
What choices of hardware do I have for backing up my information? 10
External Hard Drive - Build Your Own External Hard Drive 10
Blank Writeable CD, DVD and Blu- Ray Disc solutions 10
What choices of software do I have for backing up my information? 11
Acronis True Image 11
Bacula 11
Syncsort Backup Express 11
Different Solutions - The Best Solution For Backing Up Your Information 13
External Hard Drive 13
Online Solutions 13
Automated Online Backup Solution for Your PC 14
USB Flash Drive Solutions 15
Flash Drive Pros & Cons 20
How Often To Do A Backup 22
Do You Do Regular Backups? 23
Protect your data from disaster 23
Why make backups? 23
Backup tips 23
THE Final Step - Restore Data From A Backup 24
External Hard Drive Solutions 25
External Hard Drive for 3.5" SATA hard drive 25
External Hard Drive for 3.5" IDE hard drive 27
Hardcore Restoration 29
Conclusion 30
Introduction
Backing up data - why you need to do it
This is one of the most important, yet also one of the most neglected areas of computing. Backing up your data should be at the top of your computer maintenance list, right next to Virus Protection. Without data backup or virus protection, you are running the risk of losing your data. And it will happen, don't think that you don't have to worry about it.
Why should you back up?
Data loss can happen in many ways. One of the most common causes is physical failure of the media the data is stored on. You probably have everything saved on your PCs hard drive. That hard drive will not live forever. To quote a friend of mine, "there are only two types of hard drives - the ones that have failed and the ones that will fail." Yes, normally hard drives will live for years without incident. But eventually they will die. It might happen gradually, by more and more bad clusters accumulating until most of the drive is unusable. Or it might happen suddenly, the hard drive just dies without warning.
Another bad storage media are floppy disks. They are good for temporary storage and maybe transporting information, but not for permanent data storage. I've lost count of how many floppies I've tossed because they were bad. And I have talked to countless people who saved valuable data to a floppy only to find out when they needed to access it that the floppy was bad and the data inaccessible.
Another possible cause for data loss is power failure or spikes. It can result in loss of the document you are currently working on because you did not save it before the power failed and your PC shut down, or in loss of your entire hard drive because a power surge fried your motherboard and destroyed the file allocation table of your hard drive.
Also worth mentioning is data loss through virus attacks. There are plenty of nasty computer viruses out there that will delete files on an infected machine. That's why Virus Protection is just as important.
What data should you back up?
You might think that you probably don't really have anything worth backing up, nothing important, no big deal. Let's go through just a few items to jog your memory.
Let's start with your favourite places on the Internet and that long list of bookmarks. Do you want to lose all those? How about the e-mail addresses from all your friends? That would take a long time to accumulate those again. What about that to-do list you wrote? Or about that nice picture somebody e-mailed you and that you saved? How about that family history you collected over the years and put into a database? Maybe you have a document for work, like a presentation or a spreadsheet that you created at home and don't have a copy on your work PC? Think about that saved game of your favourite game where it took you weeks or months to get to that level. These are just the most common examples, and I know that after thinking about it for a while you will realize that there is a lot of information you don't want to lose. That's why you should back up your data.
The First Steps
Take your time to get yourself and your computer prepared before you backup
Setting up, running and performing a backup can become very time consuming (especially if you are creating a FULL backup for the very first time and more on this later). You can take some steps to make the task of securing and storing your information, first, by getting rid of some rubbish. Rarely, have I noticed in other articles, blogs, posts, forums, any mention of getting rid of unwanted data on the computer FIRST. I may be wrong; I have not come across this information as yet.
The FIRST task is to get rid of any unwanted data, this will be important, especially if your want to do a COMPLETE backup of ALL your data, but, we don't want to save information in the trash, old emails, software you haven't used in a while.
So let's do the following:
Empty the garbage; get rid of unwanted files that are SITTING in your Recycle Bin.
Delete unnecessary emails, do we really want to keep those spam messages or the important ones?
Defrag your hard drive, you will save a lot of time when you run backup software.
Write a notepad file with all your online account Usernames and Passwords and PRINT it out. Why? Two reasons, first if your data is corrupted BEFORE you complete a backup, how will you access your accounts? Secondly, if your computer crashes and you perform a restoration of a backup and the backup didn't work....
Delete unwanted programs, for example, if you haven't played that game in while why keep it? Have you put trial or shareware programs on the computer? Get rid of them too.
Incomplete downloads, unfinished documents, new files with no information in them and orphaned shortcuts, these just take up space.
Run your Virus scanner, simple, you don't want to backup any potential viruses just to have them put BACK onto your computer if you restore a backup.
Get rid of temporary files, every time you use a web browser and surf the web, an Office program, files are created and stored as temporary files. These files are accessed the second and future times you open that specific file, by Windows and it seems those files open just a little bit faster. If we back them up, we are really backing up certain frequently used files twice.
So, what I am suggesting here is, when we backup and store the data we want to keep, we don't want the guff kept as well. This is not so much an issue for the home user if we are specific in the information we choose to store, like music, programs, video and photos, but is critical if you are doing COMPLETE backup for your business computers.
A note for the business users and network administrators, you have an opportunity to plough through that data, incomplete files, software and hardware updates, service and system updates, incomplete or broken user files, and the like. Are you still keeping hold of data and updates that are more than 6 months old? I know this is not so much an issue if your data centre/server is mirrored or you have NAS services. But what if your business doesn't have these facilities and your IT structure is run in house (such as a Super-User is your IT go-to person)? You cannot leave your critical business information to chance, the cost of data loss is too prohibitive.
How to back up
Backing up means to keep a copy of your important files in a separate location for retrieval in case of an emergency. Keeping a copy of it in another folder on the same hard drive though is not a good idea. It means to put it on a separate media. Preferably, you have two backups on two separate types of media in two places.
The oldest and worst way to back up is to save your data to floppy. As I said before, floppies fail rather quickly and are not a reliable storage media. Bad idea. use them only for temporary storage or data transportation if there is no other way.
Another older and very popular way was to use a tape drive. They could store several Gigabytes of data. The disadvantage of tape drives are that they are slow and that the tapes are somewhat sensitive to heat, magnetism etc. which does not make them the most reliable media either.
Then a few years ago, the Zip drive from Iomega came out. It became very popular overnight for several reasons. It is easy to use, just like a floppy drive. Insert a disk, copy the data, eject the disk, done. It is also very mobile if you have an external Zip drive. Just take it with you, plug it in, install the software if needed and you're set. The Zip disks are relatively reliable (yes, there was the click of death but it supposedly affected less than 1% of all Zip drives according to Iomega) and can store 100 Megabytes, that's about 70 floppies worth. Recently Iomega released a new version that can store 250 MB. However, the disks are still somewhat pricey, and a lot of times several disks are required for a complete backup.
Recently, recordable and re-writable CD burners have flooded the consumer market and offered another way of data storage. A good burner can be had for $200 - $300, the disks cost $1 for recordable and $2 - $3 for re-writable ones. The disks hold approximately 650MB of data. The advantage is that the media is pretty cheap and very reliable, but the burners cost more than a tape or Zip drive. I've been using a CD burner for a while now for backups and found it to be very reliable and convenient.
Another way of backing up data is to another hard drive. If you have multiple PCs at home and they are networked, you can copy data files to the hard drive of another PC on the network for backup. That way, if one PC goes down, you still have the data on the other PC. The advantage is that it is pretty quick and easy to do, but it takes away some hard drive space and it does not allow off-site storage of the backups which is a problem if your house burns down and all PCs on your home network go up in flames. I always back up my data to my laptop as well by connecting my laptop to my home network or by using Direct Cable Connection.
Recently I have seen some ads for online backup storage, where you can rent disk space online and upload your data for backup. I am still a little sceptical about this concept, because you depend on your ISP and the disk space provider to be up and running for data retrieval, if you have lots of data and only a 56k modem, upload will take quite some time, and lastly, you put all your info on a strangers machine.
Be organized
To make backing up your data easier, it helps if your data is organized. If you save all your data in the program folder of the program the data is used in, e.g. Word documents in C:\Office\Word, Excel documents in C:\Office\Excel, you will have a lot of fun hunting down all your files and making sure you didn't forget anything when backing up. Believe me, it gets old real fast. Instead, you should make a point of saving all your documents, no matter what it is, in one central location. That's what the My Documents folder is for. You can make subfolders called Private and Business, and subcategorize those more. This way 95% of your backup will be done by simply copying the My Documents folder. Very easy and convenient. But don't forget, as I mentioned earlier, to also back up your bookmarks and e-mail data. If you use MS Internet Explorer, you need to back up the folder C:\Windows\Favorites which contains the bookmarks and the folder C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book for your e-mail addresses and the folder C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook Express for your e-mail if you use Outlook Express. If you use Netscape, you need to back up the folder C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\(your user name here), it contains all your Netscape related data.
Additional considerations
The backups described above will of course only back up the data files or documents. This means if you lose a hard drive, you need to reinstall the operating system and the programs first, then retrieve the data. If you want to save yourself the hassle of reinstalling everything, you could get a program like Ghost from Symantec or Drive Image from Powerquest or one of many others. These programs will take a snapshot of your drive and save an image of the drive as is. When you have to start over with a blank hard drive, you just restore the disk image and you're back in business, no reinstalling of any programs necessary.
If you want the backup process to happen automatically, you can get a backup program that does the backup on a regular basis and lets you schedule full anincremental backups. This type of backup is recommended for businesses that have multiple machines.