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How to Back up all my Junk??
by The F@t Guy
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Backing up -On Replication |
| Data replication (a fancy way of saying "copying files") is an important thing to talk about for a minute. As I mentioned briefly in the intro, many back up solutions will compress your backup into a single file. This method is not recommended in my opinion, and I consider it a hold-over from the ancient past when storage space was a premium. Nowadays, hard drives are huge and space means little or nothing. Storage space aside, there are two reasons not to compress your files: First and foremost, any file of any size can be easily corrupted. While there are some methods of repair, it can be generally assumed that once a file is corrupted, it is shot -Never to be opened again. If there is some sort of corruption on your storage media and your files remain uncompressed (just copied), you may still lose some data, but at least you won't be as likely to lose it all. Secondly, compressed backups often use their own proprietary compression method. This means you cannot open or restore the backup without the program that made it, and you may need the exact version of the program as well. This is not a good idea for backups that may span decades. Folks that backed-up using Microsoft Backup from Dos 6.22 and Win3.1 cannot open the backups on the current Windows system, and there are many backup solutions that went out of business in years past and can no longer be used. If you must use a compressed fileset, use one that is common, like ZIP, ARJ, or 7Z; That way, even if the original program is gone, you can still acess the files. Another point, it is not likely that you will need to restore an entire backup set... probably just a file or two... so it is much easier to do so from the raw files rather than restoring an entire set just to get at those files. The whole idea is data replication- having more than one copy of any file you might need. How you get that replication will be discussed further on. Managing Filesets: A "fileset" is...err... a "set" of "files" :P produced by the actions of a user or a program. A backup fileset would be the set of files produced by your backup activity. OK, Now you have a fileset... What now? There are many ways to handle these filesets- You will have to find out what works best for you, but by way of example, I will show you what I do. My system consists of 2 testbench computers, my office box, my laptop and my server. In addition, there are currently 2 computers that the family uses, so I have 7 boxes to take care of. Each of these boxes has a back drive or partition that is reserved for backups (read-only to the user), and each user has a folder in the backup set. Every night my automated backup routine kicks in, copying the "my Documents" folder structure from each user into the fileset on the back partition. After that work is done, each backup partition fileset is copied to the server backup fileset. That means that I have three separate copies of each "My Documents"... the live one, the backup on that particular machine, and the backup on the server. Each business quarter I access the backup partition on each machine and rename it's backup folder to "YR-MO Backup", make a new "Backup" folder, and then do the same on the server. I then burn a cdset of the fileset from the server, making two copies- one for local storage and one to drop in the safe deposit box. The dated backups (the ones I renamed) remain on each box and on the server as long as I still have room for them or until there are four dated backups and the current backup on each machine. That means I may have up to four more dated copies of any file on each box, and four more dated copies on the server... It isn't that I am paranoid, more that I am lazy... and my systems can afford the space I need to do this. It is more for convenience than anything else- Once I have it burned to cd and sitting in the safe-deposit, it really isn't needed on the machines anymore. In addition, I maintain my own critical data separately- I don't rely on the automation... Barring my house burning down, it is really unlikely that the server and any individual box would die at the same time, so my data is safe enough for me.    |
