Backing up Data

I reformatted my computer last night and started thinking about the setup I have for backing up my data. It’s not a new phrase by any means, but I’ll still say it: backing up your data is the most important thing in computing. Before I get into it, I should mention that this post is going to be geared onto a personal level. I don’t expect to provide a backup solution on any professional scale.

First, I want to list the reasons that I back up my data:

• Obviously, as a fail-safe. If your computer crashes, your data should be separated from the system so that it is recoverable.
• Organization. At this point, I have a lot of stuff. By having a plan to back up my data, all my data is easy-to-access when I am just using my computer.

On my main system I’ve got two external hard drives. I use a program called SyncBack to sync the data from one to the other. This provides a solution to the problem of if my main external drive ever fails. So now my system can fail and I’ll be okay, and one of my external hard drives can fail and I’ll be okay.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be external drives. There are a number of reasons why you’d want internal drives instead of external. They are faster. They don’t require additional power. I believe I originally got the externals so that I could move the drives between different computers. Now I just use network sharing.

The next level is my backup server that has an extra internal drive. For this, I mirror everything from the main external hard drive on my main system to this drive. In addition, I set up SSH on this machine so I can access this data from anywhere. I use SyncBack to mirror the data from my main external drive to this internal drive through the network. Now I have my data in two places, which is definitely important when it comes to backing up your data. There are other ways to ensure your data is in multiple places that doesn’t involve buying a server. There are online solutions such as Mozy that will back up your data to their servers for you for a pretty decent price.

On a side note it is ideal to try to get syncing to occur automatically. SyncBack has this feature. I set my backups to occur once a day and occasionally check to make sure everything is still running according to the rules I’ve set up.

Also, Microsoft has a backup/syncing utility as well that is free. It is called SyncToy.