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New Years Resolution: Back up your Home Data Regularly

By Dale Taylor (Intel) (46 posts) on January 1, 2009 at 1:18 am

Many of us have Corporate IT managed systems that include automated backup processes.  That’s great for work systems and makes economic sense for the company.  How about your systems at home?  What are you doing to protect your personal and family data?  I’ll suggest a few things you might want to consider.

In a previous blog I mentioned that images and other family data resides on my home system.  I want to protect this data so a plan is necessary.  I start by setting up my computer like this.  I boot to a smaller hard drive and keep the OS, applications and anything I can get by reinstalling (from CD, DVD or online) on that drive.  I have a 2^nd larger drive on where I keep all of my data.  This separation of programs and data was something I was taught years ago in college and I’ve stuck to it.  One side benefit of this approach is that I can easily swap out my data drive for a larger one with no negative affects on the system. 

Keeping your data isolated on its own drive doesn’t protect it from drive failure or virus attacks.  I maintain virus software and make sure it’s current and working.  This helps avoid web and email attacks by defeating them early in the process, before any virus has a chance to actually run on my system.  As an Intel Employee we are provided with Virus software to help ensure that the corporate environment stays clean.  Our license includes home use.  I suggest keeping your virus software current.

I backup my data to an external drive which I then keep in a safe in my basement.  This offline backup is my failsafe plan.  I keep enough drive space around to maintain 3 historical copies of my data.  That way I can go back if I realize I accidentally deleted or lost something and can’t find it.  I use Acronis to backup my system and I do full backups to my external drives.  Acronis also supports incremental backups and many people schedule nightly backups of their data to an online drive somewhere on the network or possibly even an external drive.  The incremental backups can be scheduled to run automatically. 

One last thing, Windows Home Server is another tool that helps you maintain automated backups via a home server on your network.  You can schedule WHS to backup any and all computers on your home network on a regular basis.  I have several friends using WHS and they can’t say enough about how great it works for them.

Make a New Years resolution to backup your data regularly. 

Here’s a link to learn about Acronis software:

http://www.acronis.com/promo/ATIH/true-image-2009.html

Here’s a link to learn about Windows Home Server:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

Here's a Blog discussing Photography and backing up your images:

Photo Management with your Computer. Part 1

Categories: Bit Stories, Cool Software, Manageability, Uncategorized

Comments (9)

January 3, 2009 3:33 PM PST Cliffer

Why would you recommend to use Windows Home server and spend hundred of dollars while a Linuxmce is offering more possibilities ? And hundreds of software exists on Linux to do your backup.

January 4, 2009 7:51 PM PST Dale Taylor (Intel) Total Points: 8,824 Status Points: 8,324 Brown Belt

Cliffer, thanks for the comment though I hope you could provide me with some additional details. I would enjoy hearing some suggestions for apps to use in the Linux world as my personal intentions are for a linux based home server. I was suggesting WHS since many don't want to bother with figuring out a new OS (new to them possibly). Thanks again and if you could add some suggested backup programs to look into I am sure others would appreciate that too.

January 7, 2009 12:24 AM PST Brian

Linux is not always the best solution, or even a good solution, regardless of the available skillset. Even if you can assemble your own hardware, getting Ubuntu running with LVM or FreeBSD working with Vinum is no small affair, and then you've got Samba configuration on top of that. RAID 1 is the only way to go from the software side, and at least that is easy to implement. FreeNAS and OpenFiler are both great *nix NAS/SAN solutions, but WHS is a whole different ball of wax. Again, RAID 1 is the only way to go for these solutions (software RAID). $100 for WHS is a steal for the level of integration it offers for XP/Vista clients, beyond simple file sharing and backup and into true network management. The drive extender feature is an amazing piece of work with a fault tolerant array scheme that allows for easy expansion, all software based and portable to another WHS server should the original server drop dead. VSS addresses the "gee, did I really sort the column and not the list in Excel?" previous versions issue with perfection, even better than the old Netware SALVAGE utility. That's not what a backup is for, that's just file management under WHS. With SEVERAL of the RAID5 capable hardware controllers (I'm looking at you, DELL PERC 4/AMI MEGARAID) if you lose a controller, the array can't be brought up on another identical controller. At best, to recover the array, you must have an identical controller to even import the logical volume. This means your fault tolerance ends with the hardware controller. Get a very good controller, spend some serious bucks, get dynamic rezising, array import, blah blah blah. $500 later, why didn't you just buy WHS and 5 500 GB SATA drives? If you've also got Mac or *nix boxes, you lose nothing compared to what you'd have with just a file server/NAS implementation for "free" (except you lose time spent learning & configuring the *nix solutions). No, WHS won't automagically back up your non-Windows clients, so what - neither will any other NAS solution. Break out your rsync kung fu and go to town. I hear the next version of WHS will do TimeCapsule for Macs, anyway. Having addressed fault tolerance, addressing disaster recovery is a whole lot easier with a single backup target, and 1.5 TB drives are down in the low $100 range, so crank up robocopy and put your old eMachine with XP in the potting shed with a wireless card and backup to your heart's content. If your house burns down, you still have all your data in a totally accessible filesystem. Acronis and all the rest of the backup utilities lock you into a single vendor solution, if you have to reinstall any of your computers you will likely be using the OEM supplied disks anyway, so storage wasted on backing up the OS and installed apps is, well, wasted. You REALLY don't want to be fooling around with getting the backup software up and running when you can instead open the files system on your backup box and get to your data immediately. Lots and LOTS of "regular" folks have multiple PC households nowadays, it's not a badge of geekdom to have a LAN at home any more (look at all the unsecured AP's around you). The pain of lost data is the same whether you're a normal person or not. WHS is a shockingly sophisticated solution, I'm still impressed M$ managed to put it all together so well. I have had it up to here with SBS even in a small business environment, but WHS is quite nice. Regards, Brian

January 7, 2009 12:20 PM PST Dale Taylor (Intel) Total Points: 8,824 Status Points: 8,324 Brown Belt

Brian, Thanks for the detailed and well thought out comment. The information provided is great. As I mentioned those friends of mine who have forked out the money for WHS are completely in love with it and highly recommend it. I have setup a Linux home server for playing around with but will be giving WHS a spin also. Concerning Acronis, I really like having full images around since many times now my kids have managed to get a virus that blew their systems away. The ability to do a complete drive restore makes the process very simple for me. Sure you can say it's wasted space but the ease of use when restoring makes it worth the drive space for the images. It also saves tons of time because the images are more current than the CD versions and thus I spend less time updating once I do a restore.

February 7, 2009 2:43 AM PST rreis Total Points: 2,450 Status Points: 1,950 Brown Belt

One could always argue one invests time in learning, if I may comment. Assembling all that infrastructure can also be considered overkill by a lot of persons. And, I might add, it all seems to much product publicity (independent of the software quality in which I won't comment because it's unknown to me). What I can say is some info must be added for Linux especially because the problem you mention is been dealt with for eons in the computer world... What I mean is that presenting a bigger spectrum of solutions would be nicer. And so my setup at home is two USB harddrives (I only have a laptop right now, all others computers are at work) which I backup with rsync. Basicaly one of the drives (500Gb) holds media data, which I don't carry in the laptop and the other has a at least one month system image. I also backup home data every time I arrive home. For this I created a script with rsync but there are pre-made scripts that allows for versioning backup with hardlinks, very handy. As you said, having several versions can be useful for accidental deletes ;) and the hardlink technique allows for a very good space savings. Another thing, having the full disk image (I mean everything else thats not /home) allows, if accidents happen (like droping the machine flat and killing the harddrive, happened to me once) to buy a new disk, partition, make a reverve rsync and start working.

February 7, 2009 2:46 AM PST rreis Total Points: 2,450 Status Points: 1,950 Brown Belt

and by the way, may I suggest: http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/backup.htm

February 22, 2009 12:20 PM PST Michel Derome

Windows Home Server, a great peace of software, I am running this on a old PC sempron 3000 and looking to upgrade the motherboard but I want the drivers be compatible with windows home server. Could you care to give us a list of MB that support it as I am looking for many eSata and one IDE for the DVD/CD writer. I have the opportunity to do a full restore from bear metal and I did it with my son computer. So if you could tell intel to add a shot list of with Motherboard will Support Home Server and of course I want more the 512 mb of RAM, I am looking for at least 2 GB Ram. Thank you in advance Dale

September 4, 2009 2:27 PM PDT online backup

Thanks for the article, we have countless people per week coming through our doors asking if we can retrieve data from there hard drive after it is too late. A sure sign that your hard drive is ready to fail on you is if there is a clicking sound coming from your tower. Back up before it's too late, i know it is a pain to do regular backups but trust me, when you loose all your programs, data, family photos you will wish you did.

September 5, 2009 8:11 AM PDT Computer Support

I have an external drive I backup to. I use FREE Acronis True Image Backup software and backup once per week. Have never had to use it to restore, so I won't know how good it is until the day comes. I have heard good things about it though.

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