Data Backup Software and Service

Everyone who uses a computer should backup data in some form or another, maybe you don’t believe it, but you must admit that our computers are a great part of life than ever before. We go shopping, work and play with computers. They've taken place of stereos, encyclopedias, even the postman. They've become TV, journals, albums and so many in our life. However, computers aren't perfect. Because of viruses, files get corrupted, system gets invalided, CPUs stop process, and then, what should we do?

The best defense is data backup. Backing up data is quite important for businesses; because lost information can cause a major crisis, and worse, lead to business failure. We people who don't backup computer data under the same risk. Maybe it won’t make any damage to your body, but it will annoy you, make you crazy, at last you’re in no mood to do anything. So why don’t you still use data backup to protect your files and yourself? There are some excuses:

I'm too busy to backup. ----I’m busy, and have no time to do computer maintenance, but today's backup software manufacturers make it easy. Through scheduled backups, your system can automatically perform a backup that fits your needs at you choose.
I don't know how to backup. ----Most of us understand how important data backup is, but don't know how to do it.

My computer won't crash. ----I have used my computer so long and never meet some big problem so far, why should I need backup? Think about it, you wear your safe belt even though you don't expect accident everyday. Data backup is about protecting your data's future, without it, someday your computer get corrupted, and the same to you.

Today is a world of high-tech, and also a world of sneaky spy ware and venomous viruses, every one of us run risk of losing data, the more developed this world, the more dangerous your computer is. Computer viruses are growing each year. When the threat really happens, you can either grieve about your loss or simply restore your data with data backup software.

While you start to backup for your computer, here are some backup strategies for you:
There are three basic types of data backups: normal, incremental, and differential. (See the Table.) This text will introduce three backup types to help you choose the right one for you or your equipment.

(Here is a brief explanation of how normal, incremental, and differential methods differ.)

Keywords: backup data, backup types

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.

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.

Backup is the process whereby a coherent copy of data is made. Backup has become more important as the amount of data has exploded, not just in importance, but in volume as well. One study estimates that more data will be created in the next few years than has been created since the dawn of history! It is interesting to compare the growth in data storage with the more widely known and appreciated growth in electronic chip density. Recall that Moore’s law implies that the amount of electronics on a given chip area doubles every 18 months. A lot of industry analysts believe that the growth in digital storage is actually handily beating Moore’s law in the sense that the amount of data doubles in much less than 18 months. Historically, tape has been used as a medium for backing up data. Initially tape was a much cheaper medium than disk. Subsequently it was argued that optical media would become the media of choice, but for various reasons this vision never came to fruition. Although the medium of choice (for backup) remains predominantly tape, regular disk drives are increasingly becoming the medium of choice for an initial backup and system mirror. This trend is due mainly to the falling prices of disk storage, which reduces the cost advantage of tape over disk storage.