Disaster Data Recovery and Your System - Personal

There are many methods and philosophies on backing up your data. These may differ between home and work but the quest is the same...protect yourself against a disaster, and, if a disaster happens, to be able to recover your files.

My philosophy is simple. Backup your data in more than one place and keep those backups in different locations. Backing up to a computer or drive in your home or place of work will not help you if a fire swept through the building. Keep at least one backup set off site, either on CD, DVD, or online.

At home things are much simpler than a work environment. Depending on the platform you use for computing (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) the method and utilities available for backup and protection are different. Most backup software will require an external drive connected by firewire or USB, as well as a computer with a recent operating system, probably Windows XP and up and Mac OS X 10.4 and up. First, come up with a plan for the backup. Ask yourself, what do you need to backup and what tools do you have or can you afford so you can backup adequately?

At home, I use a Mac. Within the Mac OS there is a backup feature called Time Machine. This backup software will backup to an external drive or over a wireless connection to a Time Capsule, an Apple product that is a wireless transmitter with a hard drive built-in. For me, this software is adequate for backing up locally. It is fast and keeps many copies of documents so if I need to go back to a previous version, it is easy to do so.

For a Mac user, there are not many backup utilities available. Aside from time machine there are various disk cloners out there that will copy your hard drive contents to an external drive. Many of these are free, including Carbon Copy Cloner.

Windows also has a built-in backup program. You can use this program to backup to a floppy (probably not a good solution), a flash drive, a CD, or an external drive connected to your computer.

For Windows users, there are some free and low-cost solutions available. Cobian Backup is a free solution that supports both local and remote backups. Cucku Backup is a "Social Backup." It will backup your local drive to a "friend's" computer. If you are both people running the software you can backup to their computer. The files are encryped and the other person cannot see your files.

To backup to a remote location, both Mac and Windows users can use a program like Mozy. This will backup your files to the Mozy servers in different parts of the country. It is easy to use and you get unlimited backup space for only $4.95/month. This is the second part of my backup method at home. Another home online backup company is Carbonite.

In both the local and online backup methods, the user can schedule regular backups. After the initial setup, which only takes a few minutes, the user just needs to check that backups have been completed. It is pretty much a hands off method.