Got Backup?
(March, 2004)
What would your reaction be if you came home one day to find your computer gone? What loss would concern you more, the loss of the hardware, or the loss of the data on that machine? Hardware can be replaced, but the data stored on a PC is usually irreplaceable – unless you have planned ahead and have a recent back-up of your data tucked away.
Within the last two months, I’ve had a rash of calls from folks asking what they can do to salvage data lost due to a crashed or otherwise inoperative computer. It’s never the hardware that has them in a frenzy; it’s the loss of their saved email, their address book, their financial files, last year’s tax data, the pictures of the grandkids, or all that genealogy history it took so long to compile.
Everything that is saved on your computer is stored on an electro-mechanical device called a hard drive. This metal enclosure, about 4” by 6” by 1” high in a desktop PC, contains magnetic platters that spin around at extremely high speed while small heads are positioned incredibly close to these platters and read the ones and zeros that make up the language of computers. Capacities of drives have increased tremendously over the past few years while prices have plummeted. But one fact has not changed: all hard drives will eventually die. This may involve a head crashing into a platter, failure of the on-board electronics, infection by a malicious virus, or an electrical surge or lightning strike. It is not a matter of ‘if’ the drive will die, but ‘when’.
Whenever I get such calls, I always ask the same question: do you have a recent backup? I know before asking what the answer would be. “No. Was I supposed to do that? I don’t know how to do that.”
Most name brand computers sold today come with what is called a Restore Disk, a CD on which is burned an image of your hard drive on the day it was delivered to you. In the event of a failure of your hard drive, you can replace the drive and use this CD to get you back to Day One. But everything you loaded on the machine since the day you bought it will be gone, lost to the ages.
To keep yourself from ending up in such a predicament, you need to formulate a backup strategy that is right for your situation. There are several factors that need to be considered in determining the manner, media, and frequency. This will include the size of your hard drive, the amount of data you store, the way your drive is partitioned, and the frequency with which you store what you consider to be irreplaceable data. Space here does not permit me to list every possible scenario and suggest a solution. The main message today is: find a solution. Do it soon. And make a backup before it’s too late.
A few years ago, the only viable option for backing up your system was to use a tape backup device. The device itself was relatively expensive, the tape media was expensive, and the process took hours. But today, with the falling prices of hard drives and CD-RW (CD burner) devices, hardware constraints are no longer much of an issue. CD-RW is probably a suitable alternative for most home users. Decent burners can be found on the web for under $35, and DVD burners, which hold more than six times the data of a CD, are now well under $100. (May, 2005 update: External USB hard drives are now becoming the medium of choice for a system backup, as prices have become more affordable, and included software is designed to ease the process for the average user.)
The best place I can suggest for you to start researching what is right for you is the LangaList. Fred Langa, a former editor for Windows Magazine and current contributor to Information Week, publishes a twice-weekly e-letter on all things PC. He ran an extensive series of articles in mid-2003 on the subject of back-ups that I found to be quite helpful. You can find these on the web at http://www.langa.com. Look for the archives covering the second half of 2003. Pertinent articles can be found in the issues for 7/3, 7/10, 7/21, and 11/3.
My personal strategy is two-fold. I have an 80GB hard drive partitioned (divided) into five sections. About once a month, I insert a second 80GB hard drive, which is normally kept in a removable cartridge outside of the PC, and do a complete backup. Keeping the mirrored drive outside the PC insures that any virus or electrical surge will not impact the backup. I use an older version of PowerQuest’s Drive Image software to copy over an image of my main ‘C’ drive, and I use Windows Explorer to drag and drop the contents of the other partitions onto the second physical drive. (May, 2005 update - My hard drive has graduated to a 200GB unit, still divided into 5 partitions, all formatted as NTFS. The software I now use the most is Acronis True Image, version 8.)
Meanwhile, at least once a week, I use a program called Eazy Backup to back up my key data files. With one click of the mouse, Eazy Backup copies the entire contents of ‘My Documents’, all my Outlook email folders, address book, internet Favorites, and Quicken files into a compressed file on my hard drive. I then burn that file to a rewriteable DVD disk so I’ve always got a recent backup of the important stuff.
Backup software I can recommend includes Drive Image, Image for Windows/DOS, and Eazy Backup. Drive Image’s parent company, PowerQuest, was recently purchased by Symantec, the same folks who market Norton Ghost. Both products have a list price of $70 and are designed for full backups. You can find Ghost bundled in some versions of Norton System Works, which can be found for far less than list price on EBay. Drive Image is currently sold as version 7, but you can find Drive Image 2002 and version 5 on EBay for under $30, and I’ve used both successfully with Windows XP. In fact, Fred Langa lists several reasons in his 7/3/03 article to avoid the current version 7. As for Ghost, I tried an earlier version and did not care for its ease of use in relation to Drive Image.
Eazy Backup can be found on-line at http://www.ajsystems.com. It sells for $50. I highly recommend this program, as it is extremely easy to use, even for beginners. It comes with Quick Backup, which is the one-click front end to the program. But bear in mind that it writes the backup file to the hard drive, so while it may protect you from corrupted files, it will not save you from a hard drive crash. For that, you need to take the extra step of burning the backup file to a CD or DVD, or copy it off to an external hard drive. I use an erasable DVD disk so I can re-use the disk over and over. Many home users with a Recovery Disk who do not install a lot of new programs may find Eazy Backup all they really need to protect themselves from data loss.
A low-cost alternative to Drive Image is a program called Image for Windows. It sells for $27 and includes Image for DOS, which can also be purchased independently for $19. You can find these on-line at http://www.terabyteunlimited.com. I actually prefer Image for DOS. You make a boot-disk and copy a very small file called Image.exe onto it. You start your computer with the boot disk and run Image.exe, and just follow the prompts on-screen. The program burns and verifies the backup onto CDs. It is very easy to run, and a good solution if you don’t have tens of gigabytes to back up. The downside to the program is that the on-line instructions are somewhat cryptic if you’re not computer-savvy. But the program works far more easily than the on-line documentation would make it sound. Plus you can download a fully-functional copy of the program and use it for 30 days to see if it suits your needs before plunking down your $19.
A free alternative that is similar to Image for DOS is called Partition Saving and is downloadable from http://www.partition-saving.com. But if you find the documentation for Image for DOS confusing, be advised that Partition Saving originates in France, and its conversion to English leaves something to be desired.
(May, 2005 update:) The latest addition to my backup arsenal is a program called Acronis True Image. You can find it at http://www.acronis.com The program is also available for download at significant savings from http://www.newegg.com. The main advantage of True Image is that is can be run from right within Windows. In addition to creating partition or drive images, it can also be used to clone a hard drive, as for instance if you replace an 80GB HD with a 200GB HD and want to move the contents from the old drive to the new drive, allocating the added space proportionally. I've done it, and it works as advertised. Make sure you take the step to create the recovery boot disk CD, so you can restore an image if your drive crashes, without first having to reinstall Windows. True Image also has the advantage of being able to recognize an external USB hard drive from its DOS-based boot disk, for that all-important system restore.
Do you already have backup software and hardware? If so, when was the last time you used it? For those who don’t have the means to do a backup today, are you comfortable with losing everything on your computer? If not, the time to explore a backup solution is now.
Want to talk about it? You can email me at wamaruna@cox.net.