PC Backup Strategies
Have you ever stopped for just a moment and considered how much of your life is stored digitally on your hard drive in that beige box of yours? Go on, take a moment now… Family photos? Holiday videos? Work reports? Personal diary? Digital media (iTunes and the like)?
These are just a few examples of “stuff” just dumped any old place on that magical box. Certainly on mine anyway. Have you given any thought to what would happen if yours broke? Right now. This instant. Do you have a backup strategy that would result in the restoration of all the data that just the thought of losing brings you out in a cold sweat? No. Me either up until yesterday.
Backups: The Avia Way.
My home setup is nothing out of the ordinary. 2 PC’s with shared file and print access via Windows XP. My “main” machine is the beefy one with the larger LCD in the middle, and the other provides continuous access to my mailbox via Firefox on the left screen, and IRC and general server administration tasks on the right-hand screen. The two PC’s and 3 screens are controlled as one using ‘Synergy‘ which is perhaps the only thing about my setup that differs from 99% of 2+ PC homes. There are 2 hard drives within the “other” PC, and “beefy” continuously synchronizes its “My Documents” folder to a network share of the second hard disk using Comodo Backup. “Other” also copies critical files to this second drive. The theory then is any one hard drive failing, will not cause immediate data loss. This network store is then further backed up on a weekly basis to a DVD-RW which is taken the next day to my place of work for safe off-site keeping. (You don’t need to be official about this – do you have a lockable drawer at work? A locker? A secret crack in a wall only you know about? Anywhere will do!).
My setup right now
As a final measure, certain folders within “My Documents” on “beefy” are synchronized with my Humyo Premium account, which provides 100GB of redundant storage based in an ex-Bank of England Bullion vault. These files are accessible online anywhere in the world with the correct credentials, and are also sync’d to each computer and the internet, so if one gets edited, every copy is updated on all machines.
So that is my strategy, for now, and I’m certain it’s more than 99% of PC users have. Do something about yours today if you haven’t given it much thought, or take the view “data loss only happens to other people”. My future strategy includes the purchase of a Drobo, but at £750 for a decently configured one, I’ll defer that for a few months…
April 26th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Having lost 3 days of intensive work in early 2002, I now have a strategy in place to deal with my data. It’s different than yours but the result is the same: if my hard drive(s) were to die, I might lose something from the past five minutes, but everything else – includng 10+ years of IRC logs, various versions of multiple websites and my CV and other work-related documents are all safe and sound in three copies – one stored away from my flat.’
I hope this post highlights to your readers the importance of backing up.
May 5th, 2009 at 5:16 am
I still need a strategy. Working on it.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:12 am
[...] mother just asked me what I wanted for my birthday and as you’ll know from an earlier post, I’m somewhat obsessed with backing up. The one thing missing from my backup strategy is an [...]