5 Disastrous Ways to Back Up (And one Good One)

Everyone messes up their backups. If we even bother at all, we back up the wrong data or we put it in the wrong place or we do it at the wrong time. When people ask me to take a look at their broken PC, Ialways ask if everything is backed up, just in case something goes wrong. Without exception, the reply is “Um, pretty much. All the important stuff should be, anyway. I think.” Generally, what they mean is one of the following:

1. A USB stick
You can get 8GB for a tenner now, that’s plenty isn’t it? Who has more than 8GB of important stuff anyway? Answer: everyone. You might think that the only files you absolutely can’t replace are some emails and a couple of word documents but this completely misses the point. Yes, you could rescan all the photos you have printed off, you could re-rip all your CDs, reinstall your games and re-download all your utilities and patches. But it all takes time. A USB stick is a handy way to emergency backup for the Great American Novel you’re writing. But it will not save you from a whole wasted week when your hard disk fails.

2. Online storage
Most ISPs will give you some space on their server for you to upload your junk to. BT Broadband provides 5GB for free with ten times that available if you want to spend £4.88 a month, for example. This is just a USB stick with really slow data transfer rates. If your house burns completely to the ground while you are away with your laptop then you’ll be glad of that online storage, but in all other circumstances it is a waste of time and bandwidth.

3. RAID 1 mirroring
Two independent disk drives that are kept perfectly and invisibly synchronised for every file sounds like it ought to be the ideal backup, but unfortunately it isn’t. The only thing a RAID 1 set will protect you from is hardware disk failure. If you accidentally delete a file or an application corrupts it or you make changes that you later regret, it will all be faithfully mirrored across both drives instantly.

4. A drag-n-drop copy of all you r files to an external drive
If you have an external USB drive that is the same size or a little larger than your internal disk, an easy way to feel like you are backing up is to just drag everything from one disk to the other in Windows Explorer. This is certainly a lot more inclusive than options 1 or 2, and will let you recover from any accidental deletes. But it’s fiddly to do because the copy will abort when it hits files that are open or in use. And your external disk won’t be bootable, so it doesn’t help much with a total failure of drive C.

5. A bootable backup that you religiously perform on the first of every month
Acronis True Image (www.acronis.com) or Norton Ghost (www.symantec.com) will copy your whole disk to an external drive and make the copy bootable. This lets you treat the backup disk like a spare tyre. If your hard disk fails, you can just boot fromthe backup and carry on until you are able to replace the internal disk. But once a month? That’s a lot of data to throw away ifyour disk dies on the 31st…

The Answer
So if none of those are good enough, what should you do? It’s actually pretty simple: you can either do option 5 every night or combine option 5 with option 1 (or, at a pinch, 2). Which one works for you depends entirely on which one you find least onerous. A great backup strategy only works if you can actually be bothered to do it. If you have to spend more than 15 seconds thinking about your backup, you will eventually become lazy and start skipping it. And then you’ll lose data. So either leave your PC on all the time and set your backup to clone the disk at 3am every night, or clone once a month and get into the habit of saving every file twice: once to the disk and once to your memory stick.