Back It Up!

Insurance. Many people find it a necessary evil. But once you need it, you'll thank your lucky stars that you have it. Insurance can protect you from a catastrophe. Computer backup software is similar. First you have to find a good program. Then you have to install it, and then configure it, schedule backups, and lastly verify that the data is saving correctly. Yes, it's a bother, but if your computer crashes or you accidental delete a critical file, you'll breath a sigh of relief that you have a good, current backup. In this article, we will review some quality free programs and then discuss a good backup methodology.

Recommended Backup Method

A good archival system will not only let you restore recent files, but will also allow you to roll back to previous versions of files. This is achieved by saving the archived files for a period of time. How long you want to to save them is up to you, but this method describes a two week cycle, in which you can restore files or roll back to a prior version for up to two weeks.

The first step is to determine a destination location. Most backup software will allow you to specify the location of the resulting files. The most convenient location - your computer's local drive - is also the least secure. Yes, you will have a copy of your data, but if your hard drive crashes you will lose your backup data along with your computer's files. You can, however, save the archive file to your computer's hard drive and then burn it to a CD or DVD. Another option is to save your backup to a removable drive. USB flash drives are becoming quite inexpensive and work as a great repository for these files. Still another method is to back up to a network drive or an on-line file server. Of all of these destinations, I prefer the removable flash drive. It's inexpensive and easy to store off-site in the event of a fire. This tutorial will proceed assuming you're using a USB drive. For this two week cycle you will need two flash drives.

Schedule a full backup to be performed weekly on the day of your choice. Further specify that this backup will replace the existing full backup. Don't backup the entire hard drive - instead just back up your data files. In the event of a crash, you can reinstall your software from disks, and then restore your data.

Next, schedule a daily incremental backup. An incremental backup will backup just those files that have changed since the last backup. If the file changes daily, then each day's backup will contain a copy of it. If the file hasn't changed, then it will only reside in the weekly backup. Set each day's incremental backup as a separate backup job and tell it to replace the existing backup. So for example, you would create a daily incremental called Monday, and have it replace any existing Monday backups. You don't need to set an incremental backup for the day your full backup runs.

At the end of the week, your backup USB drive will contain one full backup and six incremental backups. Now here's where the second drive comes in. At the end of the week, after the sixth incremental backup, remove the USB drive and replace it with the other one. Your scheduled backups will continue to write to this new drive, first the full backup and then the daily incrementals. At the end of the week, swap drives again, replacing this one with the first one. Your first drive will have the old backup data on it, but since you told your backups to overwrite the existing backup files, they will automatically be replaced with the new backups.

Using this method you will have a full backup sets - this weeks backups and last weeks backups. If you wish to keep backups for longer than two weeks, you can, before removing one weeks USB drive, simply burn all of the files on it to a CD or DVD.

This is just one backup methodology. There are many others, along with any number of good freeware backup programs. Speaking of which...

Free Backup Software

There are lots of free backup software applications. For a list of suggested programs, read this article on The Computer Psychic's website.

As you can see, there are a lot of methods and software to perform your backup. It's not important which one you use, it's just important that you use one. A good habit to get into is to occasionally test your backups by restore one or more files from a backup set. This way you will be assured that your backups are in good condition and you are protected from catastrophe.