I am in charge of backing up the computers in my small office. There is my PC, and two laptops belonging to my bosses. We have elected to backup data onto CD versus buying a server. How often do I need to do a backup? I’ve read the information on the MS site about backing up and assume I’ll need to make copies of all our docs, but also our system data? Does backing up the system data also make copies of all the information in Outlook?
I’m new to this and want to make sure that in the event of a catastrophic failure I can get my guys and myself up and working as quickly as possible. We are not networked.
I’d forget about backing up to CD. Get a portable hard disk. They are cheap these days.
How often? If your hard disk died, how much would you be willing to lose? You can only restore up to your current backup so if it’s a week old you lose a week’s worth of data. Most people wouldn’t like that, so a daily backup is probably your best bet.
Backing up Outlook can be a pain in the ass. There a programs specially written to do it. (I use this one: OE Backup )
For backups, more often is better. If you back up once a day, then you stand to lose only one day’s work if you need to use the backup. If you back up once per week, you could lose an entire weeks worth.
If you just want to back up your documents and e-mails, a CD should work fine. You can back up Microsoft Outlook by backing up the contents of the folder
c:\Documents and Settings\<your username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
However, if you want to back up your entire system, a CD will be way too small - so will a DVD. Your best bet in this case would be to buy three external hard drives, one for each system, and just back up to those. They’re fairly cheap, especially if you get small ones - and it doesn’t sound you like you have a lot to back up.
The advantage of backing up your entire system is that, should you have a problem with one of your computer’s (primary) hard drives, you can simply buy a new one and restore the entire contents from your backup. If you back up only your documents, you will still have to reinstall Windows and all your software, and only then restore your documents. It saves a lot of time.
I use external hard drives for backup. I back up both my laptops every night before I go to bed. It’s saved me twice - in both cases, once the hardware problem with the computer was repaired, I was back up and running within an hour.
You need a consenses at work on how much can you afford to have to redo if the files are lost. Is it a day, week, or month? You might try full backups monthly, and changed files daily. Always run the check for error option, so the files backuped are known to be readable. The external HD is better than a cd. Buy two and keep one at a different location. Make a current back up and then switch the drives so the latest is not on site. This is a fire or desaster precaution. Save a copy of the daily back up on the administrator’s computer. In this case your’s.
As for backing up, I’d recommend Norton Ghost. It images your hard drive, and should you need to restore, it’ll be IDENTICAL to the last time you restored. A few years ago (Christmas eve eve) we had a computer start rebooting so often you couldn’t do anything on it, the the hard drive started clicking…loud. I dropped the drive into another computer as a slave, purchased an external drive, a new internal drive and a copy of ghost. Luckily, I was able to image the drive (it took quite a few tries though) and then I restored the image into the new drive. Once the new drive was in the computer, you’d never know anything happened. So know we use Ghost (on the main computer) to image the drive everynight, plus we use (something, don’t remember off hand) to copy all of the My Documents folder and few other select folders up to the external drive as well. This way we still have a full image of the drive, plus the ability to pluck out certain files if we just need one. (ie if our quickbook data get’s corrupted, we don’t want to have to restore the entire drive, just the one file.)
CDs just aren’t durable enough for my liking; I use them to take static snapshots of source code at landmarks during development and these go straight onto a spindle in my fireproof safe, but for backups I’m taking off-site, I have two USB portable bus-powered hard drives; the machine into which they are plugged shares them on the network; each drive contains folders named ‘Monday’, ‘Tuesday’, ‘Wednesday’, etc, plus ‘month end’ and ‘year end’ - each of these folders contains subfolders named to match each of the machines I want to back up, so today’s backup of my folders/files would be found in \Monday\Mangetout. A set of batch files - one for each day - on each machine copies the files with a click. the two drives are used on alternate weeks, with the other left offsite in a secure location.
It isn’t the best possible solution, because several consecutive days’ worth of backups are going onto the same media, but it’s better than the system it replaced (one backup set which was overwritten every night).
A good backup strategy should give you a tolerably recent recovery position, and at least one fallback position before that in case that one fails. It should also ensure that any major disaster (sudden fire at the office while today’s backup is being written) cannot destroy all possible recovery positions. you shouldn’t ever be overwriting your most recent backup.
The basic rule of backing up: Only Backup What You Don’t Want to Lose!
I second the suggestion to use an external (or even an extra internal) HDD. I use a Maxtor One-Touch that comes with the excellent Retrospect backup software. Once you do a full backup, then each day just do incremental ones. You can schedule it to be done automatically during lunch, at night, or any time you choose. Or, just mash the One-Touch button and it will begin.
The software lets you create a Disaster Recovery bootable CD. If everything crashes, you pop in the CD and restore the last backup and everything is back exactly as it was before. Worth its weight in gold. Saved my butt a couple of times.
Whoops. Stupid Question the Third: I found an external hard drive with about 18GB of storage. Could I buy one and move it from machine to machine and backup everything, say, once every two weeks? I’m assuming that the backups for the three machines would be stored seperately and that each would be overwritten with the next backup?
Thanks for answering my stupid questions. I’m not dumb, just green.
My personal favorite backup scheme for the entire system is to get two identical standard hard drives and mount each in a mobile rack. Make an image backup of the active one to the secondary one, then switch the two and store the (now) secondary copy somewhere safe. Periodically, repeat the process so you are rotating and using each drive equally. If anything goes wrong with the active disk, you are just a plugin away from getting back in business.
The really paranoid (like me) will have threeidentical disks and rotate them.
This works extremely well if you try to store your opsys/applications on one partition and your data on another. Typically, I can backup my data-only partition to a CD or DVD and I do daily for the most active stuff, but the system partition doesn’t change much over time. Plugging in last month’s system doesn’t lose anything, and I can restore the data from CDs or DVDs.
This plan works even better if you store your data on a network drive where you can back it up from another station.
As long as there’s sufficient space on the drive, and as long as you create separate folders on it, one for each machine, then yes, this would work, but do conside that a simple copy-overwrite backup like that can have pitfalls - namely, the copying process will fall over one day and tell you “Can’t copy file xyz.doc, source file is unreadable”. trouble is that it might have started copying it and failed halfway through, so now, not only are you suddenly aware that important document xyz is corrupted, but you also just destroyed your backup copy of it.
Which is exactly why I suggested using a rotation of THREE drives instead of two. That way there is always one drive that is not in the system when a backup is being performed, and can’t be corrupted as easily. Sure, it might be an older backup copy, but that could be better than none.
Backups are nice, (OK, OK, crucial, essential, critical, etc.), but if you are going to use any third party software to perform the backups, you really want to test your recovery process a few times a year. You especially want to be sure that you can get back your year-end data (that you will want to back up if you are tracking any financials*) and you may want to consider a few other benchmark breakpoints. I worked for an outfit who had purchased a recovery system for all sorts of drawings and related stuff. I kept asking how often they had tested the recovery. The vendor’s tech was a bit miffed that I was “butting in,” but I was not casting aspersions on his product, just asking that the recovery portion be demonstrated. Sure enough, one of the older machines crapped out, finally, and although they got most of the data back–eventually–after a LOT of effort, (far more effort than the “push a button” claim of the vendor), there were some files that simply disappeared into the æther.
You may also want to back the year-end stuff up on separate media and store it in a different building.
I do not have any business or critical information to save so i use the mobile trays and two hard drives. I switch hard drives once in a while for a day or tow just as proof that is is good.
I dump all temp, internet files, clear my cache’s and scan and defrag, then copy ( mirror ) the drive. Then disconnect or swap, what ever I feel is needed that week. Since I have only 14 gigs of stuff, I also have an older 20 GIG hard drive that I copy to once in a while that is only a few months old. and another that hasd back up of all my pictures.
Hard drives of 10 - 40 gig are really cheap.
If your company thinks that $300 is to much to protect their computer information, they are penny wise and pound foolish.
Keep at least one copy of your backup off-site. You are not just protecting against a blown hard drive. You are also protecting against fire and other calamities.
The night the tornado took the roof off the blind factory and broke the sprinkler pipes, flooding my brother’s office, he was glad he took his backups home. (By the way, it’s a window blinds factory, not a factory where sightless people work.)
How valuable is your data? How much would it cost to recreate it? How much time can you afford to spend recreating it? How much can you afford to lose? How often do you need to recover lost data, and how quickly does it need doing? What security considerations are there? What legal requirements are there?
Answers to the above questions will give you the parameters you need.
Taking image backups of a system is really only of use if you expect to replace failed systems with identical units. Backing up only the data directories can fail when applications store special data like license keys in their own directories or the registry.
Here’s a sample strategy for you:
You have a little LAN, right? If only to access the internet? Get a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box and put it on your LAN. You have four areas: one for each of you, and each of you backup your machines to your area on a regular basis. In the fourth area, you have install sets for all your applications - Windows, Office, etc - from which you can rebuild a system if need arise. Perhaps a fifth, shared, area too. Less frequently, you back up the NAS to one of several removeable HDDs which you take offsite. Thus you have an immediate, onsite, backup, and a less immediate offsite one too. Indeed, each of you could have one and take turns backing up, so you’d be covered against disaster hitting both you and the site.
I’ll let this slide since we are assuming the OP is backing up Windows machines
Seconded. There are lots of easy ways to do this, from using an old computer to an external HDD enclosure with its own ethernet port, or router with USB port and external HDD. I also agree with the earlier comment that if a $300 server, as suggested by the IT staff, is considered too much to spend for backups, management is pretty foolish.
A $300 server is not a server by any present day standards…
An external drive unit can also be mapped to all of the machines via whatever machine they are connected to if you have a network. This way it does not have to be carted around.
If you could give us a better idea of the size and type of machines you are talking about we could probably point you at some excellent software and hardware possibilities. Many vendors are starting to sell “business class” machines with mirrored raids already in place to provide data redundancy and avoid data loss from hard drive failures. Another option along the same line is called network attached storage, more expensive than a simple external but often have built in raid capabilities and can be loaded with drives to suit any budget or scale of storage needs.
