If you're on a large business network, or have a single laptop, backing up your data is critical...and my recent near-miss. A tiny backup guide.
If you're on a large business network, or have a single laptop, backing up your data is critical. You work hard creating your data, right? The safety of that data is contingent on a number of factors. Why chance it?
I'm a laptop user. Have been since about 1992. Laptop users are the worst when it comes to backup, both on their own, and from a Network Administrator's perspective. On their own, they typically don't take the time to make good backups. As a network administrator, you have the challenge of backing up laptop machines when they are on the network.
However, we all work hard for our data: creating it, acquiring it and fretting over it. Despite that, I heard three data-disaster stories yesterday, my own included, that just begs the question: why not backup?
First, I had a friend e-mail me that his hard-drive crashed and really didn't have a recent backup. It "took important data with it." Data consisted mostly of Microsoft Word files.
Soon following, I got a call from a friend of a client. iSync went bananas on his Mac during a sync, and took his address book data down with it. "But I have a backup!" Great, let's bring it back then. Oops! He had been backing up the wrong file...
Then, disaster struck. I keep all of my client data on an encrypted disk image. If my laptop ever gets lost or stolen, the thief won't be able to get at that sensitive data. However, the disk image format is somewhat delicate, and any small inconsistency makes you lose the lot - so backups are a must.
The question, then, is, how can we prevent this from happening?
- First, no matter the computer or operating system, you have to know what you want to backup! Sounds simple, but most people forget one or two small things, and then are really, really sad when there's a problem and these one or two things can't be brought back.
- Second, you have to know how to back up.
What
The easiest way to keep track of what needs to be backed up is to centralize it. OS X and other Unix platforms try to have (or in some cases force) you store certain data in your home directory. OS X is particularly good about this.
Windows creates a folder for each user under [bootdrive:]/Documents and Settings, however, most people that I know simply don't gravitate toward using that. It's too easy to spatter stuff around C:\ (or whatever your boot drive/internal is). Resist the urge to do this! Use "Documents and Settings". Or create a folder for yourself called "c:\Documents" if you're the only user of your machine.
In either case, centralize your data. Your OS (unless, of course, it is heavily customized) and your applications can always be reinstalled (you have the install disks for your apps, right?).
Linux: You need to get user's home directories at minimum. Possibly /opt or /usr/local.
Windows: You need [boot:]/"Documents and Settings" and/or whatever you've designated your documents directory.
OS X: You need to backup /Users at bare minimum. This alone will get the user's personal files, desktop files, mail (Mail.app, Entourage, Eudora and others), preferences, and application files (such as address book).
Do not mix data with applications!
How
You need to get a copy of this data off of your machine - completely separate. So, how much data is there? 1MB? 200MB? 5GB? This will determine where you can backup to. Since this is a guide for getting data off single machines, I'm not focusing on high-end tape libraries. Think CD, DVD or another machine.
Linux: you really have a wealth of options available to you. You can burn this data to CD or DVD using cdrecord, or you can get it to another machine any number of ways, my favorite being rsync.
Windows: You can also burn your data to a CD or DVD if your machine is equipped with a burner of the appropriate kind. Nero will do this for you, as well as some of the Roxio products. You can also use Microsoft Backup over a network to copy data to a network volume.
OS X: Many good options here. Ideally, you just clone your entire drive to an external. This protects everything. Products like SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner (10.3 only), will create bootable copies of your disk. Your entire internal hard drive can crash, and you'll have no worries, because you can take the previous night's backup off the shelf and boot from it. Like Linux and Windows, you can also be more select about backing up. You too can burn select files to CD or DVD, or, get them off your machine via rsync (Tiger is OK here 'out of the box'. Panther users need a third party rsync - free - to be sure to capture attributes).
Why Not?
Hard drives fail - that's a fact. People accidentally erase data, machines crash and sometimes, laptops go missing. As always, if you need an expert to help with planning, hire one! With everything that's at stake, why not backup?
