Simple Backup Strategy
By JAdP on February 27th, 2007
In Computers and Internet, Business
One of our hosting customers emailed me with a question not related to their account with us, but I was happy to answer anyway.
My wife’s hard drive crashed and after diagnostics, we had our desktop support provider replace it with a new one. We lost all data on the old one. They tried to retrieve but there was nothing there. They sold us a back up drive: Maxtor OneTouch III 300 GB/ Firewire 400 to add to her computer for automatic backups. I thought it was a good idea to buy another one for my desktop. When I got on Amazon and read some of the product reviews I realized that people either said it was very bad or very good. I’m confused. What would you suggest? Any specific product? You know my skill level. I need something that I don’t have to do too much tinkering with or have to periodically remember to turn it on. Anything you could add would be of help.
We don't test hardware, so we can't comment with any authority. If memory serves however, I believe that the Maxtor One Touch did get a good rating from Consumers' Union [publishers of Consumers' Report]. That being said, any drive can fail at any time, but most consumer drives last at least a year.
A good backup strategy includes a weekly full backup, with daily incremental backups. The Windows Backup software's Wizard can help you to set this up, or you could use any backup software that came with the Maxtor. One failing of the Windows Backup software is that it doesn't "ghost" your drive, so you may still need to reinstall applications to get them working correctly with the Windows' Registry. I'm not familiar with how the Maxtor works, but perhaps you can learn more from its instruction manual, perhaps on a CD?
You should also keep a backup offsite, such as in a bank safety deposit box, or at a server elsewhere via the Internet [there are companies that provide this service]. I found an article about business class services. There are also some startups aimed at the home office/consumer market that are less expensive.
Remote backup services get affordable By Beth Pariseau, News Writer 27 Jun 2005 | SearchStorage.com
Robert Gerace has a series of blog posts about "survivable systems", the first part of which can be found at Help Your Users Build Survivable Systems — Part 1.
Here's a simple strategy that you might want to consider.
- Buy a second drive. If you like the Maxtor, and its' easy to use, buy another one of those. Each drive should have enough capacity to hold the backups for each machine you may want to restore: personal machine(s), business machine(s), older machines that may have stuff you'll "use one day", your children's machines, whatever. There are drives available that plug into your home office network, rather than plug into the computer. I don't know if the Maxtor does this. There are also WiFi routers that have USB or Firewire connections that can act as network file servers, into which you plug the drive. This allows all machines on your home network to access the drive. You can also plug the drive into one machine and "share" it to the network, and then "mount" that shared drive on any other machine from Windows Explorer. If none of these work for you, you'll need to plug and unplug and plug again, the drive into each machine every day. That last one is bound to work though.
- Manually do a full backup to each of the drives. Take one to your safety deposit box.
- Set up your software to do a full backup weekly, and incremental backups daily to one of the drives.
- Weekly or, at most, Monthly, take the drive from home, and exchange it with the drive in the safety deposit box, do a full backup, and continue with your weekly and daily backups on the second drive.
- Test the backups and the ability to actually recover the data. Even large companies have discovered that the backup was no good, or didn't actually bring them back to full operation.
You may even want to buy a third backup drive, six months to a year after you bought the first backup drive, just to have handy for when one of your backup drives fail. If you're really paranoid, you can also copy to a "thumb drive" or CD, anything that's immediately important, like a report for a customer, or a school paper [no more "the dog ate my hard drive" excuses].
It may seem a bit extreme, to have so much redundancy, but we did have a case where the hard drive on my laptop died, and when I plugged in the backup drive, it just went chitter, chitter, chunk, clunk. Sad, very, very sad.
With so many things, like pictures and videos and music, as well as business data, being in digital form only today, a good backup strategy makes a lot of sense, and isn't that expensive anymore.
