Home Page Tips and Tricks Application Information Networking Information Installation Information E-Mail Bob

Google
 
Bob Cerelli's Windows Page Web


For an excellent range of Windows security and utility products,
I highly recommend PC Tools Software

 

Basic Backup Suggestions

This page covers some basic backup ideas and suggestions.
It is designed for the average home user or small business in mind.
And it is basic. Obviously if you have something like an Exchange or SQL Server, the complexity is more than a simple page can cover.
This is also my ideal configuration. You can use it in it's entirety or make any modifications to suite your specific situation and needs.

Backup Overview
Organizing the Hard Drive with Partitions
Organization Your Data
What Do You Want to Back Up?
Where Do You Want to Back Up?
How Often Do You Want to Back Up?
How to Back Up
Using the Backup

Backup Overview
1. No One Wants To Back Up
2. We all want our computers and the information they contain to last forever and be problem free.
3. Now to the real world.
4. Computers, just like anything else, can have problems. Major problems. There are any number of components that can fail at any time. There is also the human error factor.
5. Knowing that, plan for it. I plan for what would happen if any of my computers or my customers computers would completely fail....and they have.
6. With even the worse case of a total server failure for a large company, they were up and running in just a few hours. User accounts, Applications, all the Configurations and most importantly all the years worth of Data were all easily restored.
7. Fortunately it is relatively easy and inexpensive to have a good backup method in place.
8. Basically it comes down to...do you want to spend a little time and money now to backup your critical information....or spend a lot of both later on.
9. Hopefully the following steps can give what I use most of the time for myself and my customers. It is easy to create and use. That is why they like it.

Organizing the Hard Drive with Partitions

If you are installing your computer from scratch, you have a good opportunity to start planning for what you want to backup. It is much easier and safer to make things the way you want now than to try and change them later.
1. Generally I like to recommend at least two partitions
2. One would be for the Operating system and Programs. Some people like to just have the OS on the first partition and Programs on the second one with the Data as well. Either way is fine. Just allow for enough space on the partitions for future additions.
3. The other would be for all your Data, source files etc.
4. Given the size of drives these days, I also like to make something like a D:\Install directory and copy the CD's for all my major applications to directories below that. Typically I even like to install from those directories. This way should a program like Office need some additional files, it gets them right from the hard drive. Then I never have to hunt for CD's or risk them getting damaged.
5. Sometimes it helps to create yet a third partition which can hold an image of the first one.

Organization Your Data
1.

Probably the most important thing I do when setting up a backup system for people is to organize their data. This is regardless of whether it is for a single user or a company with a number of employees. Organizing the data is always the first thing I do.
2. For example, it is fairly common for people to have My Documents in one area, E-mail in another, Internet Favorites in yet another. And then there are programs that default to their own directory for storing data files. This makes it much more complicated not only to find data, but the back it up and restore it if necessary.
3. It is much easier if all data is stored under a single directory like \data.
4.

You can then create all the necessary subdirectories below this. For example:

\data\ my documents
\data\e-mail
\data\bookeeping
5. If you have a server environment, you can add user's home directories. For example:

\data\user1\my documents
\data\user1\e-mail
\data\user2\my documents
\data\user2\favorites

Then just redirect their My Documents, Favorites and E-Mail to point to the proper location on the server
6. Using this scenario, then just the \data directory (with the subdirectories), needs to be backed up.
7. If you have a central file server, you can also redirect your My Documents and IE Favorites to a user's directory on that server.

There is a program called TWEAKUI from Microsoft that will let you change this as well as many other settings. This will work for Win9x and Windows2000.

You can also download one for XP

Change these through the My Computer / Special Folders section.
 
8. You can also configure Outlook to store it's PST data file to a specific location on either your local computer of file server. Being able to store them on a server is one main advantage Outlook has over Outlook Express.
9. The advantage of these last two in an office environment is that each document, favorite or e-mail that a user creates will automatically get backed up. Nothing important like these will be stored on the local computers.

What Do You Want to Back Up?
1. One thing to do when planning a backup strategy is to decide what you want to back up....The Operating System, Data, Both, Other.
2.

If you have the hard drive structured well, it is easy to select exactly what you want to back up.
3. Since often the operating system can get corrupted and not boot, I like to create an image of this. It generally only takes 15-20 minutes to create or restore, which is a lot less time than a complete reinstall. A corrupted operating system is also certainly more common than hard drive failures.

If you want to back up the operating system, I recommend using an imaging program like Drive Image or Acronis True Image. You can then keep this image on one of the other partitions on the same drive. This image can also be backed up as well.
4. If you want to backup your Data, you can use several methods to do this. But now it is organized so you only have to back up a single directory.
5. If there is anything else you want to back up, just make sure there is enough space on whatever you are backing up to.

Where Do You Want to Back Up?
There are basically three devices I like to recommend using for backups.
1.

USB Flash Drives - There are typically lower capacity drives (1-2 gigs) I recommend for just for data backups.

2. External USB drive - These are basically regular hard drives in a case that lets you connect it to a USB port. You can either purchase the drive and case separately and assemble it yourself or purchase one already made. Price usually dictates which one I choose. Since it uses a regular hard drive, the size can be fairly large.
3.

Internal / Removable Hard Drives - These would be regular IDE hard drives inserted into a drive bay that gets installed into a regular CD ROM slot. Again, since they user a regular hard drive, the size can be whatever you need.
Generally I Don't Recommend Backing Up To:
1. Floppy Disks - Too small and vulnerable to defects.
2. CD's or DVD's - Too much manual work for most people to use over a long period of time. They also often don't hold enough for many situations.
3. Tapes - Too expensive, unreliable and difficult to restore.

How Often Do You Want to Back Up?
1.

This part is pretty easy.
2. My recommendation is to simply backup as frequently as your situation demands.
3.

If you can't loose a day's worth of work, then backup daily.
4. If you don't work that much on your computer and a week is ok, then backup weekly.
5. If you need to backup every two hours, then do that.
6. For most companies, I like to keep a separate backup for each day of the week. This way, in case a file gets corrupted on Wednesday, doesn't get noticed until Friday, you can always go back to Tuesday's backup. It has happened more than once.
7. For companies, you can also back up to multiple computers over the network. This ensures that in case there is a problem with one computer's backup, you have another's to rely on. This has also happened on more than on occasion.
8. I also like to have backups taken off site. So my ideal for companies is to have at least something like two removable drives, going to alternating computers, taken off site once a week. The cost isn't that much and certainly well worth it the first time you need to recover some critical data.

How to Back Up
1. There are so many ways to backup, it is impossible to cover them all. There is also no one best method.
2. I'll go over what has worked the most frequently for me and my customers.
3. After you have figured out what you are going to back up, where you are going to back, and how often, it is pretty easy to figure out how you are going backup..
4. The easiest method (maybe because I don't mind little batch files), is to write one for your backup. It's simple, easy to understand and edit. Also no additional software is required. They just copy the files to another drive. Then if they get erased on the main computer, you just copy them back.
5. For example, on my computer I run a one line batch file to backup all my data. I just created a plain text file called backup.bat and run it whenever I want. The contents are a single line:

xcopy  d:\data  g:\data  /s /y /c /d /i /r /h

Where d:\data  is where all my data is located and g:\data is where my backup drive is located.

6. If you want to have separate backups for each day of the week a monday.bat file could be:

xcopy  d:\data  g:\data\monday  /s /y /c /d /i /r /h

tuesday.bat would be:

xcopy  d:\data  g:\data\tuesday  /s /y /c /d /i /r /h
7. xcopy  d:\data  g:\data  /s /y /c /d /i /r /h
8. Any additional directories can be included with additional lines:

xcopy  d:\data  g:\data  /s /y /c /d /i /r /h
xcopy  d:\e-mail  g:\e-mail  /s /y /c /d /i /r /h
9. There are several third party utilities that will let you do somewhat similar things but this has always been too easy and flexible. Never needed more than a few lines to deal with even the most complicated typical user or small business.
10. So if you do this, you could have five separate day's worth of back ups on site.
11. If you want, you can alternate computers and have one do Monday, Wednesday and Friday while the other does Tuesday and Thursday.
12. If you have two removable drives, you could also take one off-site and swap them weekly.

Using the Backup
1. So even with the most complicated setup, you would just have 5 icons on the desktop that are shortcuts to the five batch files for each weekday.
2.

When you want to back up, just click on the icon. It's that simple.
3. You can also schedule them to run at whatever time you like.

This site is copyrighted. No portion may be reproduced without my written permission.

This site is copyrighted. No portion may be reproduced without my written permission.