The ultimate guide for harddrive backup
Harddrive backup is one of those things that you really don't appreciate until it finally hits you and a hard disk failure occurs or you accidentally lose some files, either by deleting or by corrupting them. Traditionally in the corporate world the harddrive backup has some mystic aura and is performed with an almost religious care by the admins on a regular basis. The backup medium of choice is usually a tape drive. Of course that with the advent of the Internet a new type of backup was needed, that of internet sites. This is usually achieved by storing a copy of the site on another location, this is called site mirroring and is quite used to prevent site downtimes. But of course for the common user harddrive backup is achieved in another ways. The best way available is to backup sensitive files in a different partition. This is quite an effective method as most of the times when a backup rollback is needed the faulty part is not the hard drive but the human using the system who has done something wrong. In the unfortunate case that a hard drive failure does occur this technique is rather useless. Another good technique for backing up files is to use more than one hard drive. This is an extremely effective method as the chance of two hard drives having simultaneous failures is extremely remote. There are though cases in which both of these methods fail. The most important one is the case of a virus attack who let's say deletes all the .avi files. To prevent such incidents yet another approach is available. You can back up quite easily on CDs. These are read only storage mediums and are completely unaffected by virus attacks. In the long term though a method has begun to be the method of choice for all the PC enthusiasts. Whole hard drive backup is the game and Norton Ghost is the name. This piece of software can help you create an image of a hard drive which can be stored as a single file and used later on if needed. This has saved users in a very large number of cases and is the software of choice for many professionals. Almost all the internet cafes use it not necessarily for backup, but also to create clones of a single computer. This can literally mean that all the computers will have the exact same configuration and that is exactly the purpose at hand. Most modern operating systems also have a built in backup utility. So far Windows XP has brought this concept to an extreme by using the System Restore system. At regular intervals the system will take snapshots and save the essential files to have a rollback option if disaster strikes. And with Windows systems disaster strikes quite often. What makes this system so aggressive is the fact that by default it is turned on. This has upset many of the computer gurus who tend to see this as an interference of a nosy corporation into their computers, but for common users it has proved priceless. The flair of Bill Gates has once again prevailed. In the common backup terminology two terms are most used: recovery point objective or RPO and recovery time objective or RTO. The recovery point objective basically means what moment in time will the hard drive reflect as a result of the rollback. Ideally this point should be as close as possible to the moment when the data loss occurred. The recovery time objective on the other hand reflects the period that passes between the failure and the moment when the files are reestablished. Obviously this period should be as low as possible. Manual harddrive backup is not reliable simply because the people are not reliable. The most obvious choice is to ensure an automatic backup on a regular basis. This is what Windows XP has accomplished with its System Restore software. The literacy among the general public regarding this subject is alarmingly low and many people have lost sensitive data due to their lack of a proper backup strategy. So my advice is that whenever you have some sensitive data you backup those files. Regarding the RTO, Windows XP is practically champion. If the boot up fails, the choice can be made virtually in an instant. With other software such as the Norton Ghost the time needed is much longer, but this reflects on the quality of the backup. Virtually everything is backed up. From time to time it is a good idea to make a manual backup just to make sure that you got the hang of it. When doing such a backup the most important thing is to get yourself organized and by that I mean that you must properly arrange the data in folders and subfolders so you don't forget anything. If all the sensitive files are stored in a single folder you will probably be much more successful with your backups. Also when doing a manual harddrive backup it is best to backup the data on several locations and storage mediums. This will help you avoid those very rare situations when real disasters happen and all the hard drives are compromised. If you are going for the manual backup make sure that you do a habit out of it. For example if you backup weekly set a certain hour on a certain date and stick to it. You must never "forget" to backup as Murphy's law does have some real world applications.
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