Backups are pretty important

Nowadays data backup seems to be of great importance. Isn’t the backup process alone, a proof of the lack of confidence concerning the reliability of computers ? As the need of backups grows because more and more companies, home users, etc. want to eliminate the risk of loosing their precious data, we can regard this growth as a lack of confidence or simply as a matter of awareness concerning loss of data.

My backup experience

As I have limited knowledge related to backups that involve more than 20 machines I will focus more on backups for home users. Related to home made backups I recall my first experience dated back in 2002. I remember I was then using Microsoft Window 2000 and Windows XP. Back then, Windows XP had a huge impact on my experience with PC’s so I started playing with it. At a point I was just feeling tired of installing Windows XP over and over, sometimes even 5 times a day.

My first contact with a backup application was with PowerQuest Drive Image. I was then using PQ Drive Image 2002 and I was pretty happy with it. It worked nicely at creating backups of my system partition and restoring them whenever my Windows XP crashed (pardon me, when I crashed it). PQ Drive Image was installed on my system just like an ordinary program. I used it for about 2 years. Before I decided to get rid of it I had some problems restoring some drive images because they were getting corrupted when they were created.

The next program I ran into was Acronis True Image. Since then i am using it (no the same version of course) and I really don’t have anything to complain about. I run it from my Hiren’s BootCD. That way I can manage backups and other useful apps (like Acronis Disk Director, Norton Ghost and many others) without needing to install them or even have an OS installed on my disks. The main reason because of which I create drive images is to gain some time when I want to do a clean install of my OS’s (currently XP, SuSe 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10). I basically restore the separate drive images and have all of my OS’s fresh and ready to use in about 10 minutes. At the moment that is my only reason for using drive images created with Acronis True Image. However I believe that in the near future I will more than surely use them for other purposes as well. As far as creating drive images for entire partitions, that is really not such a good idea because it can cost you lots of DVDs.

I manually create backups of my vital files such as web projects, different applications, scripts, websites and other important data, and store them on DVDs. Currently this is a highly trusted method for me and it works like a charm. For example I periodically create backups of my blogs, websites and a forum that I administer using CPanel. For MySQL databases I use phpMyAdmin (sometimes when remote access is permitted I use Navicat) and for the files… well, I sometimes manually download them and create archives corresponding to each site and name them in a relevant way so I in case something goes wrong I can easily restore everything back in no time.

Backup Platinum is another great software product that can help you easily create backups of different files and upload them to a web server (that is really useful if you are using an online storage service) or store them locally on your HDD, CD/DVDs, flash drive, etc. Feel free to check my other article if you want to read more about this neat program.

That’s an interesting approach, so where can i start ?

First of all, before rushing into using backups or choosing different backup solutions you might need to do a little of research. A great start would be reading some backup-related posts that describe different backup methods. Yuri wrote an article that goes far beyond that. This article starts with a very basic definition of what “backup” means. Furthermore it pretty much successfully covers elementary but important details regarding several backup solutions. The article is structured like a history lesson and it’s very easy to follow. Details are given about all backup solutions (from the earliest to the latest) in order to educate the reader and hopefully provide a clear overall view of this process called “backup”. It’s very likely that you’ll learn some new things related to backups (I know I did).

Also several links from the author’s knowledge base (and not only) are posted to offer you a quick reference in case you want to go deeper into a different subject. A decent amount of information related to network and on-line backup solutions is available. A graphic and a table, both stating that backup activity increased over the last years is also there to sustain the evolution of the process with real statistic data. Furthermore a timeline shows how the usage of storing devices and accessories developed.

Overall, after reading Yuri’s article I definitely regard the backup process with more seriousness than ever before. I even consider purchasing an USB hard disk and use it strictly as a backup device for my primary hard disk; all these just to help me sleep better.