6 Top Tips for Home Backup
Top backup tips for the home
Top backup tips for the business
Your home data will probably contain pictures, music, and your CV. By far the most important to you will be your photos otherwise how will you embarrass your child at their 18th birthday?
Here we’ll look at 6 tips to ensure that your data is safe even if a fire destroyed all your possessions you could remember what they looked like by thumbing through your recovered photos.
Tip 1 – Get online backup
By far the easiest way to backup your data is to do it through someone like www.livedrive.co.uk or www.carbonite.com; it’ll cost you a paltry £50 a year to ensure that your data is safe and sound. It works continuously in the background, when you copy your latest holiday snaps from your computer a few hours later they are backed up online. You only need to remember your logon details.
Tip 2 – Get a second backup
Every backup will fail at some point, the internet connection may not work, the file is just corrupt, or it just didn’t work. If the backup fails at the same time as your computer fails you’ll lose your data. Even if you’re the most methodical person and you check the backup reports and address anything going wrong you still can’t be sure; nearly every backup program can give a false success report i.e. it will report that the backup was successful when in fact it was not.
The easiest way to get around this is to get a secondary form of backup; this is very cheap these days. A decent desktop external drive will set you back about £60, and both Windows 7 and Mac OS have great backup programs that’ll sit there effortlessly backing up however often you ask it to. They are also quicker than online backup programs as well, both at backing up and restoring.
Tip 3 – Do a test restore
Even with 2 forms of backup, you still need to check it every now and again. There is nothing better than the feeling of relief when you realise that you have a backup of the data that was lost; it’s quickly ruined by a ‘restore unsuccessful’ message. You should check your data restore at least yearly (a lot more often if you’re relying on one backup). The online backup programs offer a great reminder for this when they bill you the £50. Logon to your portal and try to restore a couple of files.
Tip 4 – Get the latest version of Windows
Quite possibly the best feature of Windows 7 (and Vista) over Windows XP or MacOS is a service called ‘Volume Shadow Copy Service’. This service looks for changes in files (usually twice a day) and makes a copy of them each time they are modified (or deleted). It’s been around on Windows Server for a while but has been dribbled down into even the Home Editions of Windows 7. It means should you delete a file by mistake, or overwrite it, even if you discover it 3 weeks later there is a chance you can recover it. To access it simply right click on the folder where the data was, select ‘Properties’, then click on the tab at the top that says ‘Previous Versions’
You can now even browse through the folder as it appeared at the chosen date and drag and drop your data out. No backup drive, no config, nothing. If you have Windows 7 (or Vista Business) then the feature is already there.
Tip 5 – Use ‘The Cloud’
The cloud is basically the internet but more functional, online backup could be considered a basic form of cloud utilisation. There is though a whole load of additional stuff out there that allows you to do other stuff with your data (such as share it) and at the same time back it up. Here are some examples
Ditch your music – Instead of storing all your music on your computer and worry about the huge volume you have to backup. Why not ditch it altogether and replace it with www.spotify.com. At just £10 per month they probably have every piece of music you do (and about 8 million others), and you can then stream it anywhere in the world.
Share your pictures and videos – What is the point of having pictures if you never look at them? http://www.flickr.com/ allows you to share your pictures with the whole world (or just you if you choose). Plus at the same time as allowing your aunt in Australia see the picture of her grand-niece you’re creating a backup. As the industry standard as well there are a growing number of devices that allow you to send and receive data from Flickr automatically. So your camera can upload the images as soon as you plug it in and your digital photo frame can download the images a few minutes later. If you only need 100MB a month it’s totally free of charge, if you need more it’s only $25 a year.
Sync your email and contacts – If you need your email, contacts, and calendars the same across all your devices (laptops, desktops, phones and pads) why not take advantage of one of the countless programs based in the cloud. These start from the free (but sometimes a little fiddly) GoogleMail through to the great MobileMe to the enterprise class Microsoft Exchange (at £7.5 per month).
Exchange is by far the easiest with Outlook, Entourage, and MacMail now all working natively with it. Plus whatever your device from iPhone, to Android to Windows Phone it works with a few clicks. If you’re entirely Mac based and happy to have a @me.com email address then head over to www.me.com and you’ll be happily syncing away within minutes. If you’re a child of Google or are happy ‘fiddling’ on your other programs/devices then GoogleMail as the freebie of the group is a winner.
Share your files – There are now a whole heap of programs that afford not just backup of data but synchronisation of it as well. If your data needs are modest (under 10GB) you can certainly replace online backup altogether with something like ww.dropbox.com. It’s also totally free of charge for 2GB or under, installs in a jiffy and works effortless in the background.
It not only backs up your data but keeps them in sync between different computers, you can also share files with other people, and access your data from anywhere in the world. It’ll work on PC and Mac as well, and has a wonderfully simple interface. If you want 50GB it’ll sting a little at $10 a month, it’s by far the easiest file syncing program we’ve seen.
Tip 6 – Get a server
Normally the mainstay of businesses servers are essentially computers dedicated to serving files and information to the other devices on the network.
They can have redundancy inside (so they keep working even if something inside fails), and are generally more robust and less prone to error than standard computers (and shouldn’t get infected by a virus from FaceBook).
While we’re not entirely sold on the value of Windows Home Server just yet, the NetGear ReadyNas is a wonderful product affording everything from scheduled backup, remote access to your data, streaming music and videos to your computers and iTunes clients, automatic backup of all your computers, to downloading files from the internet even without your computer being on. They have also just added the ability to view your videos and pictures from anywhere in the world; it’s like setting up your own ‘cloud’ in your living room.
