Intelligent Solution to Backing up your PC

This is probably a topic that is not central to the purpose of this blog. However, I am really upset with the ways how PC's are being backed up these days. There are so many brain damaged ways to do it that provide you with the false sense of security. So, I would like to offer you completely free advice on how I solved that problem and the type of data protection you can get with it.

Problem Statement

I have computers I need to protect from disaster. What would be a possible disaster:

1. Disk crash
2. Accidental removal of important files
3. Bad software installation
4. Virus infection

You may probably come up with more examples where data would be lost or your computers would be rendered useless due to damage to essential data.

The solution(s) I will describe here are good for relatively small number of computers. If you need to do this on a large number of computers, the approach may be generalized, but with some modifications to particular type of external storage and software applications you may have to use for archiving important information. However, the principles I will describe remain all the same and you may just need to implement them differently.

Basic Principles of Backing up Data

When backing up your important data you need to come up with a way that can be automated easily so you do not have to think about it or do it manually, etc. The first step would be to find software applications that can do that for you easily. In my experience the following two are quite good and reasonably priced:

1. Windows System Backup Utility
2. Norton Ghost by Symantec

I have used them for years and they saved me time many, many times. Especially after installing some software applications that would damage my system stability. I was able to recover within minutes without much trouble.

In addition to a good software tool, you also need to have some strategy that you want to implement. My suggested strategy is as follows. It will work great for all files except the multi-media (e.g. pictures, movies). The multi-media data backup will be explained later.

1. Make sure that you create a separate disk partition for you operating system and software programs you would isntall on the system. Use that partition for only that purpose and nothing else. Do not put any other data on that disk partition.
2. Create at least one additional partition on your disk for your data that you will be creating and working with. Do not put on that partition and software applications or system files.
3. Obtain partition image of your system partition in the following situations:
• Each time before you install a new software application/update (optional, may be discarded later)
• Each time after you install a new software application/update (mandatory)
• Once per month (e.g. every 1st of the month, keep the images for at least two most recent months)
4. Backup all of your other data on daily basis (once a day). Here you may have two options:
• Use "file backup" of Norton Ghost to implement incremental backup for "even" and "odd" days. That would be two backup sets. You will automate "even" backups on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You will automate "odd" backups on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. You may not need it on Saturday. If you do, put it in any of these two groups. You will select the same files and folders to be backed up within these two groups. You will not need to include anything from your system partition since that is being taken care of in a way previously described. Keep this data for as long as you need and you will be able to go back in time for as long as you wish. At some point your external storage may get full. I will talk more about it later. You can configure Norton Ghost to automatically remove older data and folders according to your threshold. If you do not specify threshold it will keep data as long as you have enough space on your external storage.
• Use "windows backup utility" if you do not like Norton Ghost and implement the following approach. Automate once a month to perform file backup of all of your important data. On all other days, automate your daily differential backup (not incremental) that would replace previous day differential. You need to keep your full montly backup and the most recent daily differential for that month. You can keep those montly-daily pairs for as long as you need or depending on the amount of storage you have on your external drives.

What are the pros and cons of the two approaches for file backups. The Norton Ghost approach is easier to manage since you can set it up once and completely forget about it. The Windows backup utility may be possible to schedule in a similar way, but it may not be as straightforward as Norton Ghost. The advantage of Windows backup utility approach is that you can easily archive the monthly-daily pairs on DVD or Blue Ray discs so that you can keep that archive "forever" even after your external storage becomes full. You may archive those files and delete them from external storage to make more space. The Norton Ghost may not be as friendly in this respect since the file/folder backup is incremental and archiving old data (while it may be possible) may not be as easy and friendly as in case of Windows backup utility where you can do it yourself using your favorite DVD or BD burning software.

What Situations are Covered?

If you implement the approach that I described you will be covered from virtually any disaster. Here is how.

1. System drive crash: you would need to purchase the same type of disk drive, create same partitions as you had before. You will recover the system partition from your most recent image and you will recover all of your data from your file/folder backup. If you cannot find that type of drive, you may not be able to recover your system partiion, and you may have to resintall all applications on the system partition (although in some cases with some effort you may be able to get around this limitation). Your files and folders will always be possible to recover since they do not require special handling as for the system applications and programs.
2. Data drive crash: if you had a seprate physical drive for your data, you will just install new drive that is same or different and just recover your files and folders.
3. Accidental file delete: you will go back in time and recover your lost files from the previous backups that you saved on your external storage or on your DVD/BD disks. You may be able to go back 2-3 years without much effort.
4. Virus infection: problem here is to know with some certaintly, when did you aquire the virus. It is often more efficient to have some type of virus protection software, but if you do not want to run such software on your system, you would need to put back the system image before the time you aquired the virus. If you can determine when it happened, and you saved your old system images, you will get rid of the virus by putting back your image. If your data contains files that may be infected by viruses you may also need to put back older version of such files. Once again, this is not the preferred way of protecting from viruses, but it may help you if you absolutely refuse to run anti-virus software on your system. Since you are implementing the backup strategy on your system anyways, this comes for free and no additional effort is needed to attempt the recovery.
5. Crash during the backup: This is not likely to happen, but it could. Imagine you have a disk crash, while actually doing the backup. In this case you would not have access to your data on disk and the backup file may be corrupted and incomplete. The approches I described here will help you to get back to your previous backup copy. That is not going to be too old copy if you followed the guidelines I described. In case of files, it will be the previous day or the first of the month based on which approach you used. If it is the system drive image backup, you should be completely OK since you would have the previous image that may either be the same or prior to you installing the new application (in which case you could simply reinstall the application again and be good to go). This situation can also give you idea on additional pros and cons of the methods and strategies I described.

External Storage

What type of external storage to use? I use USB/FW external drives. You can obtain 500GB or 1TB sizes at very reasonable prices these days. If you take 500GB drive, you may be able to backup one desktop and one laptop as described above and keep data going back 1 year. This is all under assumption that you do not have huge multi-media files on your drives. I will describe how to deal with multi-media files later. You may also use network storage. Advantage may be that you could back up multiple systems on the same external storage. Disadvantage may be that in case of external storage crash, you may require longer time to reinstate your backup procedure on all of the systems that were affected. Another limitation may be the price of implementing this approach. If you have larger number of systems, you may need to optimize your approach based on your particular needs and the way how these systems are used.

Multimedia Data Backup

The multimedia files like pictures and movies can take a lot of space. My suggestion is as follows:

• Place your multi-media files on network storage (or USB/FW local external storage)
• Try to organize this storage in folders that could fit on DVD or BD disks
• Backup the external storage on DVD's or BD's.

In this case, you are keeping your files on external storage and you are backing it up directly on DVD's and BD's. There is no point in backing up these files on additional external storage drives unless you have budget for it and you do not mind spending more money. The reason is that these files do not really change. You do not keep changing those pictures or movies (unless you run business that does that). Very old pictures and movies you may remove from the external storage and keep your DVD or BD copies.

Importance of Redundancy

It is important to keep multiple copies of your data. Why? If you lose or damage one copy or it is destroyed in fire or similar disaster, you would have another copy to get back to. The above procedures already implement some level or redundancy since you would be keeping older backup images or files. However, if you archive any backup images or data on DVD's or BD's, please always create two copies of it. Put one copy somewhere close so you can get to it fast and put another copy somewhere else, preferrably at a different location (at work vs. home, or in a safe deposit box at your bank). If one copy is destroyed or simply damaged or your drive refuses to read it for any reason, you would always be able to try the other copy.

In short, you would improve your chances to recover the lost data even in cases when the archived copy may not be readable or might be lost and destroyed or damaged.

The procedures described here may look complicated and hard, but if you master them, you would have to work very hard to successfully lose your important data. When a disaster happens, you may have some inconvenience for certain period of time, but shortly after all of your data will be back and ready to use like nothing happened.