Averting Disaster - A Guide To Computer Backups (2014)
by Brett Howse on May 21, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Mac
- Apple
- Windows
- Cloud Computing
- macOS
Final Words
Backups are important. If you were ever to have a catastrophic system failure, or your laptop bag was stolen from your car, any amount of time and money you spend setting up some form of backup will pay for itself hundreds of times over. We all store an amazing amount of our lives in digital form now, and you don’t want to be “that person” who loses everything they have saved over the years.
Take the time now to set up a backup. Here is a summary of the recommended backups for different scenarios:
Single PC or Mac:
Good: Backup to USB hard drive using built-in utilities.
Better: Backup to cloud.
Best: Backup to USB hard drive and cloud for Hybrid Backup.
Multiple PCs or Macs:
Good: Backup to NAS using built-in utilities.
Better: Backup to NAS, then use NAS utilities to backup NAS to cloud.
Best: Centralized backup tool such as Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
NAS Storage:
Good: Backup NAS to internal or external drive.
Better: Backup NAS to cloud storage.
Best: Backup NAS to internal or external drive, and cloud storage.
Consumer Cloud:
Good: Use cloud storage as the default save location for all important files.
Best: Ensure entire cloud drive is synced with PC, then perform PC backups on the cloud data.
Hopefully you are already backing up your data, but if not, then the next best thing would be to have this discussion urge you towards adding a backup system to protect your files.
If you have a backup system that works great for you, sound off in the comments to let others know!
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SirMaster - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
There is no way around it.If you are keeping data, you need to budget for 2x that space at a minimum, otherwise you cannot truly afford to keep that much data.
Mark_gb - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
I just built my first systen in nearly 20 years. I need a backup system. And so far, despite the fact that I have both a Blu-ray and DVD burners in this box, Windows 8.1 does not appear to be willing to let me just burn a (series of) full system backup disk(s) once a week that I can take anywhere I want.Isnt this 2014 or is Microsoft still stuck in 1988?
theduckofdeath - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
It's not a big consumer demand, that's why they are cutting back on backup. There are literally 100's of 3rd party alternatives from $0 up to any price you feel like paying for extra features and performance.Duckeenie - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
You almost answer your own question here. Discs in 2014?zero2dash - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
Crashplan can back up to/from a NAS and/or network drives; it's not baked in to the client out of the box, but there are workarounds to do so. I pull files off a network drive at home, and we back up to our Synology NAS at work on servers ranging from 2003 R2 to 2012. Pre-2008 is more of a PITA (because you have to create a scheduled task), but it's still fairly easy to do.Brett Howse - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
You can understand me not writing about workarounds. Also this is 100% on Crashplan not sure why they don't add the support it's not very difficult.NCM - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
The trouble with CrashPlan, or any of the other remote storage solutions, is that for larger backups you're severely limited by the physics of data transfer. For instance at any given moment we have 1.5-2TB of active business files on our main volume, and depending on the day, at least 15GB to be backed up nightly. However sometimes we have 100-200GB in the nightly backup.It would take an eternity to upload our initial backup and an only slightly lesser eternity to download it again in case of total loss. When there's one of the big backups to be made it probably could not be completed in one night, even though we have a reasonably fast 50/10 Gbs (nominal) connection. Instead we have multiple redundant backups, and regularly rotate them through off-site storage.
One of the things I've found from painful experience (mostly with Retrospect) is not to use backup software that stores in a proprietary format. There's simply too much risk of the software's recovery process not working as expected, at which point you're stuck.
DanNeely - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
Generally agreed. AWS has an option to do initial data import by shipping a box of hard drives. Any full system image or enterprise level cloud backup system needs to offer physical media import/export options.If your business's daily new data volume is high enough you can still swamp nightly updates; but disk based options would really extend the level of users who could effectively make use of such services.
Currently for personal data I've got full local backups, periodically rotated offsite USB drives, and document/media files backed up in Amazon's cloud. A full drive image in the cloud would be nice; but the recovery time is just too long. If my parents were running something faster than cheapskate DSL, I'd probably setup a nas box at their house and sync to it; but currently I couldn't do that without crushing their connection.
Kevin G - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
Deduplication and compression here would help out but how much is entirely dependent on your data.Though with such large data sets in a business environment, it sounds like a solution like Commvault, CDP or Avamar would be better suited. They still use proprietary formats but at this level it is hard to avoid to get features like deduplication.
Brett Howse - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
As Kevin G said, deduplication would make that fairly easy.There's nothing wrong with backups to tape for your situation, but tapes are a pain. Avamar or other backup systems would be able to handle that with ease though.