There is material both here on the SoftCity Café and on the Internet about personal computer backups, file management, and disaster recovery. 

This short article is not about how to do a backup or even what software to use to do your backups -- It's about the common sense that says YOU WILL LOSE FILES and YOU WILL HAVE A SYSTEM CRASH and you need to have a strategy in place that will protect both you and your computer system.

If you already have a disaster recovery image of your system disk (and recovery media so you can restore it) you probably already have an ongoing weekly archival system and daily file backup mechanism in place.  Good for you.  You will not find anything new here.

Protect Your Digital Assets!

You know you need disk and file backups -- most of us have either lost data or know someone who has. You may not know what your personal backup plan should include. The first step is to look at your system and decide:

1. Can you restore your entire system to a new disk when your current disk fails?
2. Can you get back the files and data you worked on last week after you accidently erase everything?
3. Do you care?

You probably want to ask the last question first.  I know a lot of folks that just don't care.  Perhaps they only work on IT-managed servers or just use their computer for playing games, surfing the web and email. If they lose data, it doesn't matter.

Personally, I do care about my files and systems, so I do:

• End-of-week disaster recovery image of each of my three main systems,
• End-of-day file-by-file copies and encrypted archives to external storage, and
• Weekly encrypted archives to web-based or server storage of all user files. 

I know -- you probably think this is overkill. 

The IMAGE Backup - Disaster Recovery and Bare Metal Restore

An image backup is just like it sounds.  It is an IMAGE of your system disk which will allow you to recreate the entire installation, including your programs, installation settings, and activations to a replacement hard disk (a 'bare metal' restore).

No matter what, you want at least one image for full system rebuild.  Also make sure you have made and tested the bootable recovery media (USB key or CD) that will allow you to use the image restoration software.

File-by-File Everyday Copies of Your Working Files

Next, keep file-by-file copies of your working files somewhere safe.  I try to keep daily copies of file areas.  There are many software utilities available for you to select from -- some allow you to manually select what to backup while others do it automatically. Most allow you to use either web-based or local storage or a combination of the two. Once you have put a file-by-file backup strategy in place, the key is to remember to refresh it frequently -- at least once a week.   There are automatic file sync applications or simply set a weekly calendar reminder.

Daily Archival/Encryption to Cell Phones, MP3 Players, and USB Keys

The easiest way to manage and safely store file-by-file information on portable devices like your mobile phone, mp3 player, or USB keys is to use standard compressed archive utility software (ZIP, RAR, gz/tar) but either encrypt the data as you compress it or use an encryption tool to protect the archive itself.

I use both my MP3 player and my Blackberry to keep periodic encrypted archives of my most important files as an automatic end-of-week work cycle.  We can go into the ways and means of portable file archival in a future article if there is any interest.

Tips to Maintaining Successful Disk and File Backups

Here are a couple of tips which have served me well over the years:

• Make sure your image backup will restore.  You can do this by either doing a full, bare-metal test restore (you need a secondary disk to test with) or doing an image-to-external disk restore, so you can validate the image restoration with a disk check.  DO NOT TRUST SOFTWARE YOU HAVE NOT TESTED.
• Do not let backup media accidently become primary storage.  This happens all of the time.  You get a new, big external disk for backup storage.  You use it for a while, then when you start to run low on space on your PC's hard drive, you find yourself moving files from your PC's primary disk to the backup disk.  IT IS NOW A PRIMARY STORAGE DEVICE, NOT A BACKUP DEVICE!   When the external disk fails, you will lose your data.
• Try to spread your backups across disk drive spindles and across machines.  For example, I keep two sets of main file-by-file backup copies on a weekly basis:  The first is an actual copy of my user directory (folder) areas. They look just like the file originals, but they are on a separate disk, volume, and machine.  I also maintain a Primary Archive volume that keeps files organized by file extension. 
• Always encrypt files you move to USB key devices.  Your devices will get lost.  Your data needs to remain private to you and your system.  Encryption works.

No matter what, make sure you have a disaster recovery image of your system (if you care).  Next, decide generally how much pain you will feel when you lose files and working data.  Write down and put in place a simple strategy to protect those files and folders. Let their importance determine how often your backups get refreshed.

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