Home Backup some recommendations
Monday, October 13th, 2008This article is not related to our web hosting, but as a large proportion of our customers are home users and small businesses, we thought it may help to have some advice from your friendly netOxide support on backups and the options available for you to ensure your data is secure and always available.
netOxide offers this advise to aid our users, and in no way does netOxide or any of it’s employees accept responsibility for loss of data, failure of hardware or any problems directly or indirectly associated with the advice that we have given. It is based on our personal preferences and experiences and is aimed to guide our users in the selection of an appropriate backup policy.
The Importance of Backups
As we progress in the digital age, home users are relying more and more on digital technology and digital storage. Virtually every household owns a digital camera capturing those important moments in time forever. That is until the unfortunate (but very common) event when the home laptop or desktop computer’s hard disk (where the data is stored) develops an error, or worse fails completely. At that point everyone wonders why they never quite got round to backing up all those precious moments….
Backing Up
Backing up data can be a very simple process. Simply copy the data somewhere else, that is not on the same physical storage hardware. e.g. Copy the data from your laptop to DVDs, copy the data from your laptop hard drive to your desktop hard drive and visa versa. However, this is a time consuming process and often gets put off thanks to the “I’ll do it tomorrow” thinking we all suffer from.
The essential thing to learn here is backing up is just the process of taking a second copy of data onto a different media. Media could be another internal hard disk, an external hard disk, tape, DVDs, CDs, NAS Drives, Internet Storage Drives, even in the case of pictures, printing them all out would count as some sort of backup. All of these have varying costs and provide different levels of security for your data.
Some Terminology explained:
Archive - The process of copying your data onto a backup media. This creates a backup of your data at a particular point of time. All the data backed up is associated with this single point in time. Usually all the backup data is stored in a single file, from which one or more files can be retrieved at a later date. The simplest and most well known form of archive is a zip file, which has the added benefit of compressing your data as well. (Note: simply zipping up your data into an archive is not sufficient, that archive needs to be then stored on another media.)
Incremental Archive - Each time you perform an archive, you take a complete copy of your data and add it to an archive. If you have 1 gigabyte of data (assuming there is no compression) each time you archive you will be creating a backup of 1 gigabyte in size. This can be wasteful, because between the last backup you did and the current backup, only a small percentage of the files you are backing up will have changed. Incremental Backups get over this problem by appending only the files that have changed to the original archive. However, to have a complete “picture” of your data should you need to restore a file, you need to ensure you keep the original archive and, depending on the software used, all the incremental backups.
Data replication - Data replication refers to taking a copy of your data as it currently is and storing an exact copy on another media. It does not create an archive, but “mirrors” an exact copy of all the files on folders to the other media. This is very powerful, and probably the most user friendly as you can get software that will run on your pc and replicate the data to the storage media within minutes of you saving a file. It has the advantage of only ever replicating the changed files, so it is a fast means of backup and can run in the background without the user having to worry. However, it does have disadvantages as well. In the most common configurations, if you delete a file on your laptop for example, that delete will be replicated and deleted on the backup media as well. Bear that in mind, it is important.
RAID - You will come across Raid as soon as you start reading about backups. Raid is a mechanism that allows you to have 2 or more drives hosted in a PC or an external device. When data is written to the raid system, depending on the raid “level”, it copies the data to more than one drive. For example, in Raid 1 configuration if you have 2 drives, everything you write to one is duplicated automatically to the other. If one of the drives fails, then the data is still accessible as it exists on the second drive. The failed drive can then be replaced, and the raid system will automatically duplicate the data onto the new drive. However, if the second drive fails at the same time, or before you have replaced the first failed drive, then you will have lost your data backup. It should be noted that in raid 1 configuration, if you have 2x 250gb drives, you do not have 500gb of backup storage, but only 250gb as 1 drive is the perfect copy of the other.
Raid level 5 allows for 3 or more drives to be configured where the data is spread across the drives, with an addition of parity data. This allows more of the actual storage to be used, e.g 4x 250gb drives would give you 750gb of backup space.
For more information on Raid and the raid levels see wikipedia.
Backup Solutions
DVD Backup
Probably the most accessible to all users, and the most cost effective, backing up your data to dvd is secure, has a good shelf life and has the advantage that you can easily give them to a friend or relation to keep copies of your data off-site. However, it requires you to be disciplined and make backups regularly. It is also a good idea to refresh the backups periodically as some recordable media can degrade over time and you don’t want to find that out when you need the data stored on the disk.
Second Hard Drive Backup
If you have the space in your machine (usually most desktop machines will, laptops will not) add another hard drive to your system and simply copy the data from one disk to another at intervals. You have an alternate copy of your data, but the second drive may be continuously running whenever your computer is on (depending on the power settings of your operating system) which means the chances of failure are increased. Synchronisation software can be purchased that will automatically mirror your data to the second drive for you. (see later on for some software recommendations)
External USB drive backup
External USB drives do not cost much more than an internal drive. Backups would work the same as an internal drive, with you mirroring the data from the main machine onto the external drive. This is only really feasible if your machine supports USB 2.0 which has good data transfer speeds. If your machine is old and only supports USB1.1 then either look at using firewire (if your machine supports that) or purchase a USB 2.0 card. The advantage over having a second hard drive are: the external drive only needs to be switched on whilst performing the backups reducing the chance of drive failure. You can take the drive off site if needed. It can be used by multiple machines. Most external drives come with free backup software to automate and remind you to do backups.
External drives can be purchased in several configurations, usually they have a single drive, but some can be purchased with 2 or more drives and support RAID configuration giving you extra peace of mind that if one of the external drives fails you still have your data protected.
Network Attached Storage
Sometimes available as a single drive but more often more then one drive in RAID configuration, Network Attached Storage provides a hard disk that can be plugged into your network. They are designed to be always on, usually you attach them to your wireless router and the provide data storage that anyone on the network can access (These can be protected with security to limit access for different users). NAS drives usually cost more than an external drive as they are like a mini-computer running 24×7. They offer the most flexible backup solution in our opinion.
Tape Drives and professional backup solutions are available, but are aimed at medium and large businesses. The costs is usually prohibitive to the home user.
Internet backup Services
More and more, internet backup services are becoming available. They provide off-site storage for a monthly cost. The feasibility of internet backup solutions depends on what data you to wish to backup, how much of it and the speed of your internet connection. When looking at these services, you need to decide if you are happy with the fact that you are moving you data backups to a provider that you trust to look after your data. You need to ensure you are happy that potentially sensitive data will be held on servers somewhere in the world with a provider that may inadvertently give access to your data to someone else (this is unlikely but it is still a risk). In addition you need to pick a provide that is going to be about in years to come. The advantage is the data is truly off-site, usually the data is stored on resilient RAID systems, but depending on your usage the costs can be prohibitive. If for example you want to backup home videos, because of the amount of data the transfer time will be slow, even on the fastest internet connection and the storage requirements will be excessive.
Recommendations
So what are our recommendations ? It depends on how much data you want to backup and how important it is to you. DVD backup should be a minimum and we would suggest producing DVD archives of your data irrespective of the day to day backup mechanism you choose. If you just want to backup your documents and a few photos (say < 100 photos a month) then an Internet Backup Service. Have a look at http://www.jungledisk.com/. http://www.getdropbox.com/ is an new service that synchronises a folder on your pc with the server automatically. It also allows you to synchronise your documents across multiple machines (great if you have a home desktop and a laptop for example) and allows you to send links to galleries of images to your friends and family. Look at how much data you have though and how much you expect to accumulate over the next year or so, as on-line service costs can become prohibitive.
If you take a 100 photos a month, (Personally, I probably take that many on a single day out with the children), at 2mb per photo your are going to require 200mb of extra storage a month so you need to be looking at an external drive backup solution. USB drives cost from £50 to £200, depending on the size and whether they are single units or RAID and usually will come with backup software that will perform “one click” backups and make the backup process easy.
NAS drives start at about £200 and will stretch to thousands for a 5 bay RAID drive, but provide a balance of ease of use and data security.
Deciding between USB / NAS drives is mainly dependant on how much money you want to spend. If you want a fairly cheap mechanism for backing up your data get a large USB drive (500Gb at least to last you for a few years) Be aware that this drive could fail (if it is a single drive) and you are hoping that it doesn’t fail at the same time as your PC. if you are happy to accept this risk then this is the best solution for you.
If you want more assurances either get a USB RAID drive or a NAS RAID drive. Raid 1 decreases the failure chance again but at the cost of loosing half the space or RAID 5 where the chance of failure is reduced and you lose less storage space.
http://drobo.com/ provide a relatively new, easy to use backup solution. Its quite expensive as an initial outlay of $349, but it is designed to expand as your data backup requirements expand. It’s like a RAID Drive, but is created to be very user friendly. It will connect via USB or you can buy a module to host it as a NAS drive. When you initially purchase it you can have just a single drive in it, which can be used like an external USB drive, to provide a second copy of your data with no resilience. When you can afford it, add a second drive and it will automatically move into a RAID 1 like mode, where the data is copied to both drives at once. Add another drive and it will move into a RAID 5 like mode.
The options available are quite varied and really, given the options, you are sure to find a solution to suit your needs. The important thing is that you act now and don’t risk losing important data. You have insurance for your house and car get backup for your data and ensure you don’t lose it.
All prices quoted correct at time of publication.
