Backup of data on personal computers

DRAFT

Making backups of data held on enterprise servers to record transactions of the business is very different from backups for personal computers. What follows may sound doom laden and pessimistic, but remember that disks do crash and eventually such an event will affect you.

We often hear recommendations to backup only the files that have changed since the last full backup, and to do a full backup once a week / month – tastes vary – maybe copying the files to a memory stick or portable hard disk.

If you have been preparing a long and important document, especially with a deadline date on it, this kind of backup is very useful. But there is much more to recovering from a disk crash or other serious file system problem than that.

Here are some things to consider:

1. If you computer will not start, you may need to rebuild the operating system or even install it from scratch. Whether that takes a long while will depend on your experience or access to support people.

2. It gets worse. If you cannot do a “repair install”, recovery may well involve re-installing all your software afterwards…

3. …and then re-doing all the fine tuning of the operating system and software that you did to suit your own needs and taste.

4. We have more and more information coming at us every day. After sorting out what is relevant, we have to have a system for organizing our files. If we have a disk failure, restoring our work by simply copying in backups of important files saved on that basis of the date when a file changed, may mean that all the effort spent in organizing information are lost. Repeating the organization of files can be much harder the second time – the material is no longer new, and motivation is poorer in our experience.

5. If we have received documents from others, or from our laptop computer, they may have a date earler than the cut-off for the regular backup, so may not be added to the backup disk or other medium.

For PCs Ghost or Acronis

For Macs, Carbon Copy Cloner, Bombich Software

Online backups

Websites / Cloud services that support various forms of backup – PC, Enterprise and mobile devices.

• Backblaze
• Carbonite
• CrashPlan
• Dropbox
• Egnyte
• iDrive
• Mozy
• Remote Data Backups
• SOS Online Backup
• SugarSync