**Warning, Long Blog Ahead**
Photographs, accounting files, other documents, bookmarks, favorites, and saved game files. What would happen if you lost everything right this very moment? What would it do to you personally and financially if your computer was stolen, or if the hard drive failed?
These were the questions I was asking myself when I took my first wedding gig. What would happen if my computer would crash while I was editing the photos? Could I financially handle this type of a loss? What is the cost of getting a backup? Should I have multiple back-ups, onsite and offsite? How do I get started?
Well this blog is going to help you understand the importance of backing up your computer and/or your personal files.
Step 1:
Understanding what a backup is. Generally, backups have only two purposes. Recover data from accidental happenings (example: deleting the wrong file), or if your hard drive becomes corrupt, and the other is to recover data from a point earlier in time (example: if you made changes to a document and you clicked save, you could go back before the change). Another thing to understand, backups generally (some can) do not restore your complete computer (such as the Operating system and program files) functionality.
Be sure you understand the language of your backup software. Backups that can fully restore your computer tend to reference this backup as a "Drive Image Backup". If the software only states it does file backups, assume it will only save your files and not the Operating System or programs on the computer. This also affect how much storage is needed for backups; Drive Image backups will result in much larger storage needs.
Step Two:
Understand the storage needs. The most important thing about a backup, is making sure you have the room to store them. If you plan on just doing file backups, not a Drive Image Backup, you can simply right click on the folder where the files are located and add up all of the file sizes. You can also select multiple folders by using pressing ctrl prior to each click, then right click on any of the folders and go to properties. It will give you the total amount of memory it is using.
Step Three:
Decide on storage location(s). This is almost as important as step two, as you can have all the space in the world but if you can't access the backups what good are they? You also need to decide are you going to have multiple locations of your backups and if you are going to have them offsite (different location than your computer, such as not being at your home or office). Generally, I support having both onsite and offsite backups. Online backup solutions are so inexpensive and so are onsite. Also, for onsite storage do you want to use an external hard drive? **Please note, backing up to a different partition is not the same as backing up to a different drive. If you partition a drive into four partitions (think of cutting a pie into 4 pieces), and your hard drive fails (think of your pie being thrown against the wall) all of the partitions will most likely fail with it. So you will want to save your backups to a different hard drive. You can buy cheap internal hard drives that are easy to install in majority of your computers, use an external hard drive (though the writing speeds are normally slower) that connects directly to the computer, or use a Network Access Storage Device (NAS) that connects to your switch. Then there is also the cloud storage.
Internal Hard drive - You can normally take an old hard drive from one of your older computers and put it into your current computer. You can then use that specifically for backup purposes. Or you can purchase them new for around $65 for 1TB of storage.
External Hard Drives - For simplicity of this, you can purchase external drives for around $85 for 1TB of storage. If you have USB 3 ports on your computer, be sure to get a external drive that supports it. It will reduce your backup/restore time dramatically.
NAS- This is a bit more advanced than the other, and another huge area. For simplicity, they are generally the same as an External hard drive that connect to your switch via an ethernet cable. These generally cost $100 for 1TB of storage
Cloud (internet storage) - There are hundreds of companies that offer online storage, search around or read my blog about Carbonite (which is what I currently recommend for cloud storage).
Step Four:
Decide on your software(s). There are literally millions of titles out on the market to backup your files and computer as a whole. The price ranges can go from free-hundreds (some thousands) of dollars, depending on what you want to do.
In both operating systems, Mac and Windows, have built in back-up software. These are very basic, but very effective backup options. In Windows 7 it is called, "Back Up and Restore" and in Mac (Snow Leopard and up) it is called "Time Machine".
I personally use the Back Up and Restore along with Carbonite.
Step Five:
Put your backup plan into action.
Now that you have your files backed up, don't assume everything is good. Test your backups before trusting them. Understand how to use them before you actually need them. To do this, simply move one of your folders to another location and attempt to restore it. This way if the backups aren't working correctly, you didn't actually lose anything since you can just move the folder back.
My Current Backup set-up:
Currently, My computer is set to run backups every Tuesday and Friday with the windows backup utility. These backups are then saved on my second internal hard drive. Then on Saturday, windows backup utility backs up my second internal hard drive and saves that backup to a third internal hard drive. So, within my finger tips I have 3 locations of where the file can be found; My main hard drive, backups on the second hard drive, and a backup of the backup on my third drive.
I then use Carbonite as my off-site backups. Because the drives are all located in my apartment, you have to think of the worse. If my apartment would catch on fire, most likely all three drives are going to be worthless. To resolve that, I currently have Carbonite backing up all of my files, ALONG WITH doing a Drive Image Backup (or a mirror backup). Because of the way Carbonite works, with my Window Backups, I have 100% certainty that for over 1 month all of my files are safe and fully recoverable. I will be writing a review on Carbonite shortly.
The amount of data that I am backing up; 370 GB or .3TB of information. This does not include my operating system or program files.
Use this this link to Carbonite.
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