Best Practices – Data Synchronization

I’ve had a few questions about how often you should create a clone of your hard drive. I’ll answer that in a later post, when I tie everything together.

We now should know where all of our data is saved, hidden or otherwise stored. We are now ready to create a plan of attack to backup our data.

We have two primary types of data. Static and dynamic. Static data is data rarely or never changes. An example would be downloaded programs, PDF files, videos or audio programs that you purchased on line. Your music that you ripped from your CD collection or the digital photos from last summer’s vacation are other examples.

Dynamic data is constantly changing. Your email is a database that grows every time you use it. Your word processing and spreadsheet files change all the time. Your accounting software is another database that grows and grows. The problem is that not all the files change every day. Backing up the changed files is crucial to your “best practices” plan.

I have struggled over the years to come up with a fool proof way to make sure that your files are being backed up. As the size of our data files has grown, almost out of control, I have had to find better faster ways of backing up.

In just the past year, I have come up with what I believe is a great way to automate and simplify to a point, your data backups.

Synchronization has made backups much easier to complete. I have found a few programs that allow us to backup only the files that have changed since the last backup, without major brain damage on our part.

With the synchronization programs, we identify the data we want to back up and also where we want the data to be backed up to. With most of my clients I am recommending a removable backup system, something that they can take offsite on a regular basis.

After selecting the files and the backup location, an initial backup is created. The next time a back is run; the program checks the local drive and the backup drive and compares the files. The program is designed to backup only the files that have changed.

The programs all have a way to schedule the backups to run automatically. I set the backups to run in middle of the night so that the files for the previous day are saved. The program will email me with the results of the backup. I check the email every morning and if a problem exists, I can contact my clients or stop by and check things out.

At this point our data is backed up. In the next post I will discuss the different types of devices that I backup to.

Marc