Really? to me, booting up off a cloned backup is incredibly easy, just Option-Boot, select the cloned drive, and click the proceed arrow to boot off that drive, simplicity itself
The city I work for is in the process of digitalizing their archive files. The backup for digitized files will be contracted out to a company with storage sites in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Offsite storage is more important the more important your files are.
If you are talking about a Mac, I’ll take your word for it.
I know the Windows world, and it’s not that easy.
For example:
I’m using Outlook Express as my email client and it stores everything in ‘my documents’. So I make a copy of that folder on my backup device. Now I want to make sure that backup is usable. How do I that?
(Cloning the entire disk is not a good solution for most people because they might be restoring to a new PC and an exact copy of the old disk isn’t going to work because drivers, etc are different. )
I imagine that Outlook Express stores everything in a folder inside My Documents, for example
“My Documents/OutEx”
To test your “restore after disaster” plan:
- close Outlook Express
- rename “My Documents/OutEx” to “My Documents/OutEx Old”
- Restore from backup to “My Documents/OutEx”
- start Outlook Express
- do you still see all your saved e-mails? If so then the restore worked. You can keep on working with the restored “My Documents/OutEx” folder, or you can shutdown Outlook Express again, and reverse the steps to go back to the folder as it was before the restore.
I used to be smart but this all confuses me. I guess I’m the small business owner you are worried about. I paid my computer guy to set up my system. As far as I know, I have a mirrored hard drive and automatically save data to a CD disc daily which is supposed to be stored off-site. We’ve had one hard drive failure in 4 years, which we weren’t even aware of because the mirror half was working-or something like that, but my guy picked it up on one of his periodic routine checks. We’ve never had to restore anything from the discs. I do pay the computer guy a small fortune to prevent problems, though.
Yes, that would work.
That is the process to verify the backup of ONE of my applications. Now shall we do the rest which store their data in different places? The default path in My Documents for the Outlook Express files contains a GUID for God’s sake. Casual users should not even attempt mucking about like that. if you make a mistake you are liable to hose your existing data.
I stand by my original statement that people don’t do this because it is too damn hard. Not that it’s impossible, but the effort required to verify a backup in Windows is ridiculous.
What he said. I can’t imagine relying on a backup that I can’t even test by booting from it.
Well, couldn’t you still wipe the new HD, restore from backup, and then reinstall Windows on top of that? That would result in all the appropriate drivers while still preserving all your settings, files, paths, and so on, wouldn’t it?
Lots can go wrong. Enough that it’s usually better to re-install your applications and restore just the data, in my opinion. (Unless you are restoring to the same PC, not a new one.) For example, after you have restored from your cloned backup you now have a system where the drivers and registry setting don’t match the new hardware. You could have a lot of fun trying to get the correct drivers installed on top of that mess.
Another note to small business owners:
We just host your email and your Web site. We don’t fix your Outlook, set up your network, remove viruses or walk you through how to use programs we didn’t write. I’m sorry your computer crashed but honest to Og, everything on our server is fine. You will need to call your computer guy to help you out of this one.
Oh, you don’t have a computer guy? Lemme get you the number of my guy MacTech. He loves companies like yours 
I asked my friend, an IT guy of 20 years and a real sharp cookie, how exactly freezing the drive helps. He said “magic.”
Computer forensics expert here (well really I’m just their dummy manager, but here’s some stuff I picked up).
The only thing worse than small business owners not backing their shit up would be LARGE businesses that have a crappy or non-existant backup policy. I don’t know how many times we have gone to a client and been given a box of labelless tapes. We don’t know what brand they are, what type of tape, the date of the backup, what’s on the tapes, where they came from, the software used to make (and thus restore) the backup, the specifics of the environment that need to be created to restore the backup. So basically you are stuck with a room full of lawyers and consultants arguing about privilege and technical requirements at $400 an hour per person.
Not to mention it gives you a chance to start with a clean PC with just the applications you actually use. Not a PC full of shareware and old games and screensavers and god knows what else.
Actually, I usually run two drives. One drive with the operating system and applications and another with just the data files, music, videos, etc. If something goes wrong or I get a new PC, it’s simply a matter of plugging the old data drive in.
Man, that description describes our last big job to a “T”. Major heavy manufacturing company with about 10 sites, but no common backup platform, and no record keeping that would tell us when they switched from one software to another.
It was a total beat-down, to say the least.
I am so never going to get a PC then. ::shakes head::
Hmm. All my important files I can save on one CD, which I usually burn. But that takes more time and effort than a drive (meaning I don’t as often as I should), not to mention all the CDs I “waste” (I can reuse CD-RWs, but who knows how dependable that is, and in the case of CD-Rs, I have to somehow dispose of the old ones in a way that makes sure my data can’t be retrieved by someone else - I’m still not sure how to do that). Yet money is tight, and as I said, it all fits on one CD right now.
Is it worth it to investigate some kind of drive option? I have most (if not all) of my most up to date CD-ROMs for applications, so I’m not horribly worried about that.
You can get an external hard drive for a couple hundred bucks or less depending on the size. It’s certainly the easiest and most affordable way to back up large volumes of files (if, for example, you have a large collection of MP3s).
Actually this answer is over simplified. The correct technical answer is Pure Fucking Magic
You have all made me a believer about making regular backups. Could I ask for some recommendations for actual brands and sizes of external hard drives? There are so many to choose from and I don’t know who the reliable manufacturers are.
Small business owner here, and I just wanted to say that my bad blocks are all backed up.
Microwave. Six seconds on high. You also get a nifty-looking coaster.