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The Art of Backup If you've never lost any data before, it's only a matter of time until you do. With that cheery thought in mind, Iain Laskey investigates some of the current crop of backup options. Things go wrong. It's an unfortunate fact of life. It's all too easy to delete an important file or to save something else over the top of your lovingly crafted spreadsheets. Perhaps you might be trying to install a new card in your PC and suddenly it's all gone horribly wrong and Windows won't start. Perhaps some helpful soul decided to tidy up your hard disk by copying everything in to nice neat directories but messing up Windows in the process. Worse still, your hard disk might go belly up losing everything on it. It can and does happen. Whatever the cause, it's nice to know you can get it all back again from your backups. What, you mean you haven't got a backup strategy? Read on. Cheap and Cheerful By far the cheapest and easiest option is to copy anything important to floppy disk. It's not usually worth backing up everything as broken applications and games can always be reinstalled off the original disks or CD. What you do need to take copies of is the data. This can be documents, spreadsheets, graphics or anything you have created yourself. Don't forget things like your emails, names and addresses or files you have downloaded.
The quickest way to backup to floppy disk is via Windows Explorer. If you want to be more sophisticated, you can use WinZIP to compress things first so you can pack more on each floppy. Just make sure you have a backup copy of WinZIP to unzip them all with afterwards. A floppy disk can only hold a small amount of data - typically 1.44 megabytes. If you have more than a small amount of data to backup you'll find yourself swapping disks with alarming regularity. Happily, there are higher capacity options such as the LS120 SuperFloppy (my personal favourite) which acts as a direct replacement for the 1.44 floppy drive but holds 120 megabytes and runs around four times quicker than a normal drive with 1.44 disks and faster still with 120 megabyte disks. These cost around £60 with media costing about £8 each. Another popular choice is the ZipDrive. These come in various models with internal and external ones to suit your needs. The original ZipDrive held around 100 megabytes of data but the newer versions hold 250 megabytes. Expect to pay £90 upwards for the drives and about £8 for the media. Middle Ground For those with slightly deeper pockets there are a range of tape streamers. Like the ZipDrive these come in internal and external formats and in a wide range of confusing formats and types. Tape streamers copy whatever files you require on to a tape cartridge. They tend to hold a lot of information and can be very quick at backing up. However, due to the serial nature of a tape, recovering individual files can be time consuming. It's a lot better than not having a backup at all though. Not so long ago a tape holding 250 megabytes was considered adequate. With newer PCs sporting 10-gigabyte or more hard disks, you should be looking at something a little larger. Most tape streamers can hold at least 5 gigabytes with some going up to 30 gigabytes and beyond. If you buy an external unit, you'll find that they are generally more expensive and a slower than internal ones. Where they score over the internal drives is their portability. You can use one tape streamer to backup several different PCs.
At the lower end, Hewlett Packard and Iomega do some well-priced tape streamers. Examples include the Iomega Ditto Max Pro which can store up to 10 gigabytes on a single tape and the HP Colorado range which starts at £140 for a 5 gigabyte unit. Higher up the price scale there are tape streamers like the 20-gigabyte unit from Tecmar recently reviewed here on Practical PC or the OnStream ones which hold from 30 to 50 gigabytes for £250 or so. These kinds of devices can backup your hard disk in its entirety at 50 megabytes a minute or more. It should be noted that it is usually wise to run a verify after a backup. This compares the contents of the tape with the contents of the hard disk to look for any errors. Accordingly, the time allowed for a backup should be double the time you'd think, once for the backup and the same again for a verify. Bells and Whistles If you have deep pockets you have yet more options. Faster and higher capacity tape streamers such as DAT drives can be extremely quick both at backing up and restoring. Look to pay £450 for an 8-gigabyte DAT drive. Models which hold up to 24 gigabytes and even 40 gigabytes are available with prices to match. A slight worry is that some people have found tapes created on one DAT drive won't always read on another so if your drive fails, you could lose access to your tapes. This is rarely a problem with the other tape formats though. Tumbling prices have resulted in recordable CDs being an economic choice in recent times. A good quality CD-RW/CD-R drive can be had for £250 or less with media costing around £3 for a re-recordable disk and under a pound for record once disks. CD-RW and CD-R disks each hold around 650 megabytes of data. The difference being that whereas a CD-R disk can only be written to once, a CD-RW disk can be used again and again.
There are two ways of using a CD-RW disk. You can format it with a special layout that allows it to act just like a hard disk. You can then copy files to and from it, delete files or update them just as you normally would. The downside is that this loses around 100 megabytes of space on each disk to store the extra information needed to perform this feat. You can also use it to its full capacity by recording it using special CD creation software. A technique I find useful is to create a series of CD-RW disks with one holding ZIP files, one holding graphics and so on. Whenever I want to make a backup of any suitable files, I load up the appropriate CD-RW and copy the files over with Windows Explorer. Quick and easy. Other Options If you have a network of two or more PCs, you can make multiple copies of your important files by copying them to different machines on the network. Whilst this does waste space, it is a simple matter to recover any copies from the other PC(s) should a problem occur. You may also want to consider adding a second hard disk to your PC and using that for backup. With disk prices being as low as they are you could get away with spending £130 or so for a good sized drive. Once installed, you can copy the entire contents of one drive to the other. You can of course only copy the data files if speed or space is an issue. Finally, some firms are starting to appear that offer the ability to backup across the Internet to their servers. This can be expensive with our telephone pricing structure in the UK but may be worth considering as an off-site option. An advantage here is that if your entire home burns down taking your backups with it (assuming they're stored there), you can still get your files back. Whilst at this point your PC may not be your first priority, you'll be able to recover your data again once things are back to normal. Strategies Having chosen your medium for backing up to. What else should be considered? As hinted at earlier, you should decide if you want to backup just your data or the whole lot. Backing up the data only will be quicker and need less storage but if your PC goes wrong and needs rebuilding from scratch, it can be a lot quicker simply sticking in a tape and restoring the whole shooting match including Windows, Applications and data in one hit. Another consideration is how often do you backup? As I use my PC for work as well as email, programming, PC banking and more, I need regular backups. I've chosen a fast, quiet tape streamer that backs up everything once a week when I'm asleep. Other people may find that just copying a few important files to floppy disk once a month does the trick. You need to ask yourself, what can I afford to lose? If you're only backing up a file that would take 10 minutes to type in again it's not worth backing it up all the time if each backup takes 5 minutes. Returning to tape streamers, you may want to consider upgrading the 'free' software that comes with these drives to something a little better which can do unattended backups. All you'd need to do is ensure there is a tape in the drive. The software would then dutifully backup what you wanted as often as you wanted without you having to do anything more than change tapes periodically. Another time saving method is to do an occasional full backup followed by incremental backups. An incremental backup only copies what has changed since the last backup. This way you may find the first full backup takes 5 hours but subsequent incremental ones are over in 10 minutes. The downside being that when it comes to restoring the entire system, you'll need to restore the full backup followed by all the incremental ones. Some backup software offers variations on this concept so it's worth reading the manual to see what is available. Conclusion The bottom line is sooner or later you will lose some important data. Whether it's because of a hardware failure or because you do something accidentally, it will happen. Before it does, you need to work out what you want to keep and how often. Hopefully this article will have given you a taste of the options available to you and how you can avoid loss.
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