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Maximizing Your Backup Strategy With a Disk Based Backup!

The need to protect your data is of such importance, there is no excuse not to...

So it finally happened…your hard drive bit the dust. It doesn't matter if you deleted it, formatted it, lightning struck your house, or you dropped it off the roof! The data is gone, so what do you do now?

The answer is easy, but I’ll bet you don’t have one. A backup of your data!

The need to protect your data is of such importance, there is no excuse not to. Why you ask? People these days keep data on there hard drives that is irreplaceable. Think about it, you might have business records, tax information, customer lists, email messages, personal information, the book you’re writing, all of your installed applications with there databases, and the list just keeps on going. Now just imagine one day, out of the blue that's all gone. You boot up to be greeted with the message “Insert boot disk” or “Drive failure”. This is a nightmare. Without a backup where would you start?

Again, the most important thing here is to make the backup!

There are three things you will need to make a backup. First you will need a backup media or target. This can be a hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD-R or other removable media. We suggest using a hard drive mounted in an external USB 2 drive kit, connected to a High Speed USB 2.0 port for convenience.  Next, you will need a backup program. A word about the paranoia that seems to exist about creating a backup to a larger media, and the creation of a slack drive. With the current cost of magnetic storage (Hard Drive) being less then $1 per Giga Byte of storage, it is not the end of the world to expect to lose or at least create a slack drive out of the excess space. For example; If you have a 80GB drive to backup and all you have is a 160GB drive, just except that you will lose the use (During the backup time) of the extra 80GB drive, ok so that 80GB cost you $50 bucks, so what! A Friday night of pizza for the family, just live with it. Modern computers usually have at least one controller with capability to connect 4 hard drives, if your main drive is 80GB and your backup drive is 160GB (Not usable for anything else), and you have another 160GB drive and a DVD-ROM or CD-R/RW. Scenario: You go out to buy a new drive say a new 160GB drive, you get to the store and find the 160GB drive you're looking for, but right next to it is a new 250GB drive for $200 bucks. Now you are tempted to buy the 250GB drive right? but don't, think back to that last big crash! The smart thing to do here is buy two 160GB drives one, the one you set out to buy and one to backup the data from this new drive. Ok so these two drive cost you about $20 more, small price to pay for peace of mind, and this is very important data right, why gamble with your data.

The Strategy, Media, and Software of making a backup.

The backup strategy is the most important aspect with new operating systems like Windows Vista or XP. These backup strategies vary from person to person and there in is the problem. In order to describe this new backup paradigm or the way we think about data backup, it is necessary to take a look at why we need to backup data and what about the data makes it require special backup considerations. A brief near term history: Most people know that Windows 98 is not very secure, and prone to crashing, but is also more fun, fun as in gaming. So why upgrade to Windows XP or Vista? Mainly for greater security, and a more stable system. These differences (Advantages) come at a cost, Loss of data though physical failure of a storage media i.e. hard drive. Win XP creates a more secure and stable environment through the use on a new kernel, it is the kernel that creates the VM "Virtual Machine" for each process, sufficed to say that the kernel also protects data on the hard drive even from the user (Administrator) in that the user is unable to backup some data, however if you have ever had a Windows XP hard drive failure you know it's a nightmare trying to recover the data off a NTFS drive with security settings, quotas and the like. Note; that Vista is much better at predicting a disk failure before it happens and we recommend Vista for just this reason.

Our recommended backup schedule and strategy for home use is to schedule DriveCopy backup daily to a removable hard drive (USB See above), and to do a complete DriveCopy backup whenever changes are made to the system (After you confirm that all is stable).

Our recommended backup schedule and strategy (For small Business) is to create a DriveCopy backup daily, and a separate DriveCopy backup weekly. The daily and weekly backup should be done to a removable hard drive (USB See above), the weekly backup should be stored off site and the daily backup can be kept on site. Sounds strict? see the statistics below.

We recommend removable hard drives as a backup media because they are relatively cheep, very reliable, and fast. At this time you should be able to find hard drives priced at about $0.50 to $0.60 per GB. Today’s hard drives can be stored almost indefinitely without having the worry about loss of data. In addition, using a DMA-5 (SATA150) drive you can expect to backup 160GB of real data in about 60 minutes or less and when using the DriveCopy method the backup can take as little as 10 or less minutes.

We of coarse recommend SyClone Builder!