Best Practices – Types of Backups

OK! We know that we are not backing up our data enough or in enough different places and it is starting to keep us awake at night. What are we going to do to solve our problem?

Let me talk a little about backups and how to make them. We learned before that our computer is made up of the OS and the programs we have loaded on top of them and of course our data. Our data is usually the smallest component though certainly the most valuable. Without our data the computer is just a big dumb box.

When I suggest to a client that we think about backing up the entire system, OS, Software and Data, I at times meet with a bit of resistance. A client recently asked me why if I was just going to make a complete backup of everything, had I made them gather up all their software and serial numbers. If they had all the software, they didn’t need to back it up, right…wrong!

What many people don’t know is that your software is continually being updated. Windows gets updated almost every week as do most other programs. You also have many customized settings that would be lost if you had to complete rebuild your OS and programs.

So what types of backups are there? Glad you asked, you man not be when I am done.

The two primary types of backups I teach my clients about are images or drive clones and data backups. There are full and differential backups that are often discussed though I will leave those alone for now.

What is a drive image? A drive image is a snapshot of your computer OS, programs and data at the moment you create the image. I use Norton Ghost as my drive image software. With Ghost I am able to create an exact duplicate of the current configuration of my computer system. Ghost has many options for me to store this image by writing it to another hard drive, a CD/DVD, to a network drive, and many more.

Ghost also lets you clone a drive to another drive with little or no brain damage.

Great! So what?

I’ll tell you why this is important to both of us. Last week I got a call from a client who had trouble booting his computer. The system wasn’t recognizing the hard drive and was actually booting from a second, older drive that we had left in the machine when we upgraded to the newer drive.

My first inclination was that the drive was bad. I did a little hocus pocus and I was able to get the drive to function. I ran a Windows check disk and soon had the drive running like new. I booted and rebooted with no problem. Convinced that the drive was fine and that something had corrupted the boot up process, I left the client an invoice and went on my way.

I got a call a few days later and the problem had occurred again. I went by my vendor and picked up a replacement drive. Fearing the worst, that the drive had crashed and everything was gone, I packed up my bag of tricks and headed to the not so happy client.

When I arrived I did a little more hocus pocus and got the drive running again. I loaded my Ghost program on the system and created an image of the drive to my USB hard drive. I was able to reload this image onto the new hard drive without any problem and within an hour my client was up and running and happy to see me leave.

Had I not been able to clone or image the drive, I probably would have spent 3 hours trying to recreate the bad drive. I would have had to format the new drive, reinstall the OS and then all the programs. I would have had to recreate all the network shares and remap network drives. I would have had to reconfigure the email and the internet logins.

Three hours of rebuilding compared to less than an hour for the cloning.

I’ll have to tell you that I got lucky. Both times the hard drive responded and I was able to get to the data. I have had many times when the hard drive was deader than dead and there was nothing I could do.

I guess in hind site I should have made an image of the drive the first time I went out. This would have protected me in case the drive failed completely. Like I said, I got lucky.

More on backup types in the next post.

Marc