When you hear the word backup, you know you need to do it but you never really get to it until it is way too late. Backups is one of those techie things that nobody wants to do or take the time to even learn about. If you have read this far, you are one of the few who are willing to take some time to protect your data. Good for you!
What would you consider is the most important data on your computer that you can't live without, or most importantly, that you can't recreate or rebuild? It is not your business data, your homework or your documents... it is your family pictures. Your kids, parents and loved ones will never look the same. Most pictures are irreplaceable. That is the one thing that anyone who has lost a house to a fire misses the most. Some people kept pictures in a shoebox hidden inside the master bedroom closet, some might keep the wedding pictures at the family room, but our new generation of happy photo taking friends keeps every picture on various computer systems, or in the cloud (internet based servers spread around different locations). Some even just send it straight to services like Facebook or Instagram and forget about them. But, cloud space gets expensive when you want to save a collection of 100,000 pictures, and with today's upload speeds, it could take months or years to finish the FIRST backup. So the other option is having a local backup. Most people even depend on a basic USB flash drive thinking that it will never fail. Well, all is great until it fails. And it will eventually, we just never know when. So, let’s start by thinking of a variety of "What if". 1- What if the office has a fire? 2- What if we have a pipes disaster and my computer ends in water? 3- What if my laptop ends in a pool?
4- What if I left the laptop on the roof of the car, it sled off and the next car drove over it? 5- What if I left the laptop inside the car while I had lunch, but a thief decides to take it?
6- What if a thief decides to break into the office/house and steal most tech, including the backup drives? 7- What if the battery or power supply bursts into flames for no apparent reason? 8- What if constant power outages bring down my drives? 9- What if a lighting hits my house and destroys most tech? We can have hundreds of "What if" moments, but we have to be ready either way. What can we do about it? It is all very possible after all and I have seen it a bunch of times, theft being the most common on our island. First lets consider the basic three backup solutions. Option 1- Mirrored option. With this type of data redundancy we make sure that the data is duplicated live so that if your hard drive stops working for any reason, a secondary drive keeps on working and you did not lose productivity time. This might be more important on servers at a corporate level. You would want RAID technology on that server to protect your company from data loss and employee productivity. If the employees can’t access that data for any amount of time, it is company time that is being lost… productivity was then lost. Option 2- Archival backup - If an employee deletes a client folder by mistake from the server. If you delete a whole year of your picture library by mistake. Any of those mistakes will NOT be recovered by just having "Option 1" in place. Redundancy drives WILL delete those files from the other drives as commanded by the operating system. This is why you ALSO need an archive type of backup that lets you restore data from a past backup, or from another point in time since the backup system was configured. An archival backup is usually installed at the local location so that transfer times for backups and restores are fast and reliable. But what if that local backup is also stolen or burnt? For that reason we ALSO need Option 3. Option 3 - OFFSITE backup - like I mentioned before, this is the same as a local Archive, but it has to be saved at an offsite location. The cloud is what usually comes to mind for people, but what is the cloud? Well, that would be for another blog entry. ;) Since cloud backup systems are not yours, you might not feel safe leaving YOUR data on those servers. This is why you look for backups systems that will include encryption BEFORE it leaves your computers to the cloud, With encrypted backup, not even the backup company can view your files. But offsite backups do not have to be at a cloud service, they can be anywhere outside the current location for that data. So yes, even moving your data on an external drive to your home from the office "every night" counts as an offsite backup. Remember, even if I called them "options" they should ALL be in place at the same time. For the home user, Option 2 and 3 should be part of your plan. And if you are a laptop user, option 3 with the automatic offsite option should be seriously considered. So, I do have many clients who at first swear that they have a backup solution, they move the documents folder to an external drive, or flash drive. But most of them later realize that they only remembered to take action during the first few weeks, then they forgot and dragged their feet for a few months. This is why an automated system NEEDS to be in place. Not just automated, but scheduled, pointing to different locations, and it should also alert in case of problems. Another system should also be in place to monitor and alert when those backups are behind and when a backup location is not accessible because of drive failure, etc. So yes, a backup system can get complicated, but it has to be monitored. Sometimes it looks like all backups are fine until you try to restore data, if the data can’t be restored it was never a great backup strategy, was it? So yes, even when all looks great, try to force yourself to try a restore once in a while just to make sure everything is REALLY OK. If you are a corporate customer that needs assistance with your backup strategy, give us a call to set an appointment and we will make our best efforts to secure your data. If you are a home user, here are some useful options. Some might need a very high speed internet connection, but we are talking about the second number… the UPLOAD speed. 1- Apple’s Time Machine is included with your Mac. Take advantage of it as a primary option, but not as the only option. Time Machine is great because the user interface is really simple. Backing up to an external drive is super simple. It will automatically keep an archive of EVERYTHING you allow, up to the hour. Time Machine backups will restore a full bootable Mac when other systems might not. 2- Crashplan (www.crashplan.com) is a free application if you plan to use for local backups or limited offsite. You can do offsite backups to a friends or family computer anywhere in the world. Not a popular option if you consider the other person needs to have the space available, are willing to do it, and are also willing to have that computer turned on 24/7. Maybe think of having another of your computers installed at your parents/son house with plenty of available space. Setup can be done easily, but it will take a bit of research from your part.
Then, they also offer a service from the application that will backup your data to the Crashplan servers. That is the only part that is not free, but is pretty darn cheap considering the space. It is unlimited space, from internal or external drives. This I definitely recommend for all laptop users. It will take care of your backups each time your laptop is connected to the internet from ANY location. UPDATE (8/2017) : Crashplan for Home subscription is not being offered any longer. Backblaze would be my recommended offsite solution for the time being.
3- Carbon Copy Cloner and similar applications (SuperDuper, etc) are amazing at creating an exact duplicate of your data to another drive. I usually set them up on systems for a nightly backup, if a system then fails or something changed during the day that makes the system unresponsive, I can go back and restore the full bootable drive from last nights copy. Time Machine can also do this, but these options do it with the old school tried and true method that makes me happy. You see, my bootable drive is huge and Time Machine will need a whole lot of backup space to keep up with it, so I implemented CCC to the external drive which happens to be the same exact size as my main drive. This way I have a mirror copy, nothing more, noting less, without and expensive RAID. This works for this scenario because I NEED all the data (mostly browsing data) from the past few hours. Email is on an outside server anyway, so CC will do in this case. Google Drive and similar services are NOT actual backup systems and should not be used as the main strategy being that the cloud archive is ONLY the third point of backup. Speed will still be an issue until all services have at least a gigabit connection from and to those servers. Your data security is usually another concern when using Google Drive and similar services. So yes, strategies will change throughout the years, never stop researching and learning about new faster and safer options.
Similar recommended backup services to crashplan.com are: (not in any particular order) 1- iDrive.com 2- backblaze.com 3- www.dollydrive.com
Hope this information has helped you better understand the importance of backups. Even if it is your grandma’s computer... PLEASE BACKUP!
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