Nobody likes backing up, but one day it'll save your bacon. Here are the seven most efficient methods of protecting your data, no matter what your situation.
Strategy 2: Automate your backup and store it at a safe distance
Good for: Your documents (including your recent documents), and application data
Frequency: Daily
Recovery features: Versioning but no full-system restore
Automatic off-site storage: Yes
A backup continuously connected to your computer is vulnerable to the same dangers that might threaten your PC, as is a backup kept in the same building as the PC.
But if your system rarely lacks a fast internet connection, an online backup service can perform completely automated backups that it saves to a server miles from your PC.
You don't have to purchase hardware or plug anything new into your computer, though you must install software. This arrangement gives you access to your data from any internet-enabled computer.
Backing up Windows and applications online is impractical, however, so online services don't offer that option.
A number of online backup services, such as Comodo and SpiderOak, are available, but I recommend Mozy for its versatile software and low price. As with Rebit, you can right-click a file in Windows Explorer and restore any version of it that Mozy has on hand.
The MozyHome service costs $5 (£3) per month per computer, with no storage limit per PC. The company also provides a professional service.
Internet backup services share some inherent flaws, starting with their being horribly, horribly slow. Your first, complete backup can take days or even weeks (you can work while it backs up). The agonisingly unhurried upload speed may explain why Mozy offers unlimited storage per PC.
Anyone trying to back up 500GB of video over the internet would soon give up. In general, if you use online backup, consider finding another medium for your large media files (see Strategy 4 for advice). But I do use the internet to back up photos.
For similar reasons, I don't recommend online backup services for people who work with music or video files. If you're editing a movie, for example, the daily backups will be much too large for a once-a-day upload to manage. Also consider cost. Although $5 (£3) per month per machine may sound cheap, with multiple systems the charges add up.
See all laptop reviews
NEXT PAGE: Backing up on your home network
Comments
Bill said: agree with the comments so farI have taken a different approach under Win XP by separating my data from the system by using a second hard drive both my documents and outlook express make it simple to change the location of the store folders away from the C drive I use the Echo function in MS Synctoy to backup the contents of my data drive to a USB hard drive together with Ghost for the occasional image When things do go wrong with the system Im happy to reload XP from scratch it takes time but gets rid of the crud and the data photos and music etc are safe I wonder if this will continue to work for me with Windows 7
Luke Addison said: I had been using a Windows Home Server but had problems with it failing every now and thenIve now started running a Linux Fedora based solution at home called Amahi Its very simple very stable and runs well on an old PC I had doing nothing All my networked computers 3 attached to it are backed up dailyYou can read about it at my blog if youd like not sure if links work on here though at wwwlukeaddisoncom
Cyteck said: No where in this article has the author mentioned Disk Mirroring ie RAID 1 mode Disk mirroring ca be done in real time or synchronization can be scheduled for a specific time each day Disk Mirroring can be a really valuable option even for home used as the cost of hard disk drives has fallen so much in recent years whilst storage capacity has jumpedI have amp use a program called Mirror Folder made by Techsoftpl which provided RAID1 mode amp real time using a pair of disk drivesSEE wwwtechsoftplcom I highly recommend Mirror Folder to anyone who wants the benefits of continuous data back ups on the fly in real time Restoration of a broken mirror is pretty quick amp straight forwards too
Peter said: Nice article would also recommend that for online backup people take a look at Syncplicity which Ive used for the last 8 months or so to back up frequently changing files the free version giving 2GB of backup space Also Recently moved over to Macrium Reflect - the free version - having used Drive Image 7 for yrs Reflect is very easy to use makes fast backups and having used it recently to recover my PC system I can vouch for its effectiveness when it counts