Data Backup Software and Service

In terms of information technology, backup means to make copies of data. These additional copies may be used to restore the original if the data loss. We usually called these copies are "backups." Backups are useful primarily for two purposes. One is disaster recovery (restore a state following the disaster). Another is to restore files after they have been deleted or corrupted.

The data storage requirements are considerable, because a backup system contains at least one copy of all data worth saving. It is a complicated task to organize the storage space and manage the procedure of backup. As the development of technology, there are kinds of data storage mediums can help us to make backups and they can be arranged to provide geographic redundancy, data security and portability.

If you want to restore these data, you should select, extract, and manipulate these backups. We can also use many different techniques to optimize the backup procedure. These include optimizations for dealing with open files and live data sources as well as compression, encryption, and de-duplication, among others. It is also important to recognize the limitations and human factors involved in any backup scheme.

When was the last time you backed up the important files on your computer? Last year when your best friend called in tears after the Blue Screen of Death ate her thesis?

Yeah, I thought so.

Hard drives fail. It's a fact of computing life. It's not a matter of whether or not your computer's disk will fry, it's a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life.

Don't expect yourself to remember to back up your data, or stack your closet full of burned CD's or DVD's. Today we're going to set up automated nightly, weekly, monthly local and off-site backups for your PC using free software. Once you get this up and running, you'll never have to worry about losing data again.

What you'll need:

1. A Windows PC. (Sorry Mac folks, you're another article.)

2. An external hard drive.

I've had great luck with a LaCie FireWire drive, which of course, requires your computer has a FireWire port. When choosing size, go for 4-5 times the amount of data you want to back up (i.e., 4 times the size of your My Documents folder.)

3. An FTP server.

This is optional, but if you want off-site backup, it's a must. See previous post, Ask Lifehacker Readers: Web hosting provider?, for recommendations on companies that provide not only web hosting, but FTP-able disk space.

Here's how to get your backups up and running.

1. Set up your hardware and software. Download and install the most excellent free software, SyncBack Freeware v3.2.9. SyncBackSE version 4.0 is also available to buy at $25. This tutorial will use v.3 for the cheapies and those of you giving SyncBack a try for the first time. Once your external drive is connected to your computer and turned on, name it "Backup" and browse to it in Explorer. (On my computer, it's the F:/ drive.) Create 3 folders named "Nightly," "Weekly" and "Monthly" We're going to store our backups into these folders.

2. Create the backup profile. Fire up SyncBack. Create a new profile called "Nightly Local Backup." Set the source folder to your documents folder, and the destination to your backup drive's "Nightly" folder.

3. Select the directories to backup. You can backup the entire "My Documents" folder, but I didn't want to do that, because I've got about 75 gigabytes of music, photos and video that don't change too much and aren't world-ending in subdirectories of "My Documents." I don't have the space on my drive to keep copies of multi-gigabyte media in triplicate. So I chose the backup "selected subdirectories" option, which lets me tell SyncBack to ignore "My Music," "My Pictures," and "My Video" each night when it runs. To do so, click on the "Subdirectories" tab. If you've got tons of subdirectories, it'll take SyncBack sometime to traverse the tree and show 'em to you. Go grab a drink of water and come back to check off the directories you want backed up each night.

4. Set up e-mail notification of backup failure. Since we're a bunch of smart cookies, enable the advanced options in SyncBack by hitting the "Expert" button at the bottom. To keep tabs on whether or not your nightly backup is completing successfully, in the E-mail tab, check off "E-mail the log file when the profile is done." I don't want an e-mail every day; I just want one if things go awry. So also check off "Only e-mail the log if an error occurs." Set your SMTP server options as well and hit the "Test E-mail Settings" button to make sure you can receive messages. Click to enlarge image.

5. Schedule the job. Now hit up the "Misc" tab, and hit the Schedule button. Here you'll tell Windows to run this Nightly backup profile, well, nightly. I set mine to run at 2:00AM every night. Be sure to set your Windows password for this scheduled task by hitting the "Set Password" button.

Wash, rinse and repeat twice for Weekly Local Backup and Monthly Local Backup profiles, but point them at the appropriate directories and also set the schedule to, um, weekly and monthly, respectively. Once you're all set up, you can run each job as a test (it'll take a long time, depending on how much data you've got), or just leave things to run on their own. Once all 3 profiles have run, you'll have 3 copies of your most important data on your external drive getting updated every night, week and month. If something goes wrong and the backups fail, you get an email notification letting you know.

This means if your hard drive fries? The most data you'll lose is a day's worth. If you overwrote an important file? Recover last week's or last month's copy.

Now, our backup plan doesn't stop there. If your computer's hard drive buys the farm, you're covered, but what if your house burns down or gets burglarized? You want your most important data somewhere OFF site as well. This is where your FTP server comes in. Create a last SyncBack profile called "Nightly Remote Backup" that sends all your important data over the wire from, say, your hard drive in New York to your FTP server in Atlanta. If you don't like the idea of your data on someone else's server, check out the compression tab: you can have your files zipped up and passworded before they get FTP'ed for a little extra security.

Update: An astute reader points out that compression is not enabled for FTP backup. So, create a profile that compresses and passwords your files and set it to run BEFORE your FTP profile which transfers the zips. Thanks, Ralph!
backup02.jpg

That's it! Once your automated backup system is up and running you can rest easy knowing that if Something Bad happens, chances are your data will be safe.

Backup geeks and the curious should be sure to paw through all of SyncBack's tabs and options, there's tons of them. For example, in the "Autoclose" tab, set SyncBack to shut down any programs with a word you specify in the title bar before it runs a backup job. The "Programs" tab lets you set commands to run before and after backup happens - handy for database or source repository dumps, exporting your Instiki wiki to HTML and anything else you want to move or mash before you back up.

As computers play a bigger role in our lives, the information we store on them becomes increasingly important. For small businesses, data loss can be disastrous; for home computers, it can be heart-breaking.

Most of us know how important it is to backup files, but don't know how to begin. Today's backup software makes protecting your data easier and more convenient than ever before—giving you the tools to perform backups how, where and when your needs require.

But, as with all software, the data backup choices are as diverse as the people who use them. Choosing the right backup program can be complex and confusing-that's where we can help.
What to Look for in Data Backup Software

You need backup software that is reliable and simple to use or you won't use it. Below are the criteria reviews used to evaluate data backup software:

• Feature Set – Backup software features should go beyond standard copying of data files; backup software should be flexible enough to meet your needs. First-rate data backup software allows you to schedule both full and custom backups; backup only what you want and when you want.

• Ease of Use – A computer novice should be able to install and use the backup software without help. The control panel should be intuitive, convenient and should offer easy backup scheduling for automated backups.

Some backup programs are designed for advanced computer users, not novices; we comment on this in the backup software reviews.

• Backup and Restore – Your backup should be simple to set up and easy to restore. Accessing restored data should be automatic, and the backup should preserve original data files and paths. Restored backup files that don't preserve original file organization are nearly worthless; you'll have to reorganize all your restored data to access it conveniently.

Consider self-checking backup software that compares the backup to the original to verify accuracy (backup verification). Look for backup software with a range of backup choices: full, incremental, differential and individual file backups. A complete system backup (Image Backup) is also a valuable asset, as is the ability to create a boot disk.

Also, consider backup software that can compress data for compact storage. If security is an issue, choose backup software that protects with passwords and encryption.

• Help Documentation – Backing up and restoring your data can be complex. Help files should offer clear, step-by-step instructions and troubleshooting tips. The language should be simple to understand and the help information should be well organized so you can find answers fast.

Whether its corrupted data, viruses, or your computer just calls it quits, with the right data backup software, you've got it covered.

Backup is the process of preserving copies of your files on a different drive, folder, or a medium to protect it against the destruction or loss of the original files in case of a system failure. Data can be unintentionally lost due to many reasons such as careless deletion, formatted, lost partition, virus infection, unexpected shutdown, etc. So backup is essential to computer users.

Here are some statistics of data loss from website: 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year. Given the number of PCs used in US businesses in 1998, which translates to approximately 4.6 million data loss episodes; 31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control; 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing Magazine); 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster; 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington).

We should be alarmed by these awful statistics of the importance of backup. Just back up your data by creating an image and then restore it. If you regularly make backup image of your files and keep them in a separate place, you can still get your data back form where you back up in the event something happens to the originals on your computer. Or you can just copy your data to other safe place. Today, users have many ways to backup, such as on-line backup, backup software, using the backup utility built in Windows Operating System.

Tips:
Don't try to copy programs like Microsoft Word, which can be reinstalled from the original CDs you purchased. Likewise, the operating system software - Windows itself and any software provided by your computer maker - can usually be recovered from the installation or System Restore CDs that came with the computer. And you also need not to copy some other programs like EASEUS Partition Manager. You can require re-downloading it by providing your order information to its vendors.

People maybe use data backup function built-in Windows, such as create a duplicate copy of the data on your hard disk and then archive the data on another storage device, sometime restore the archived files to your hard disk, you can also make a copy of your computer's system partition, boot partition and the files needed to start up your system in case of computer crashed. According the effect, Windows Backup utility’s features and functions are not comparable with the third party software, EASEUS Disk Copy. You may get more about from here. Recently, EASEUS Partition Manager [shorten as EMP below] has been enhanced its function after inheriting from EASEUS Disk Copy. That means the EPM, as a successful partition tool, will perform better than before.

EPM has its respectively features compared with EASEUS Disk Copy:
Run normally independent from the Operation Systems
Nonsupport for hard RAID
Under Partition Copy, the destination partition must be unallocated
Under Disk Copy, the existing partition must be deleted
The destination partition can be resized and moved
If the destination partition/disk is less than the source partition/disk, the copy action can be taken only if the unused destination space partition is greater than the size of the use of source space
The target sector can not adjust the size if they have equal size between source and destination partition

Further instruction about EMP copy
The destination unallocated partition is greater than the source partition
Partition Copy: support a single copy by NTFS file system less than or equal to the NTFS partition 1TB; also support a single copy by FAT32 file system. The rest is treated as sector copy the partition of FAT32 is more 500 GB or the partition of NTFS above 1 TB.
It will terminate the copy procedure if any partition copy is failed in disk copy. And it will keep the success part and update the partition table before the failure.
The destination disk can't be source disk
The disk copy needs the operation systems run normally, instead partition copy does not.

From above, some advantages in EPM is rather than EASEUS Disk Copy
Support hard RAID
Be achieved if the destination partition/disk is less than the source partition/disk.
Resize and move in the process of copying
Faster than the Disk Copy.