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Backup: a bore today, a life-saver tomorrow

Posted 8 May 2007 at 10:03AM by Simon Dickson in Internet security

There's a lot of schadenfreude around this week, as US magazine Business 2.0 lost its entire June edition in a system crash, only to discover its backups weren't backing up. The International Herald Tribune newspaper reports that they managed to piece it all back together in time, largely because so much of it had been emailed out to the lawyers for checking. But commentators have amused themselves by browsing back through the magazine's archives, finding every article which reminded business owners how important it was to keep a reliable backup of your critical data.

Backup is getting ever easier, and ever cheaper. Windows Vista includes a Backup and Restore Centre, with most versions allowing you to automate the entire process; the business-centric editions also include a feature called Shadow Copy, which automatically saves snapshots of each file you're working on, letting you 'roll back' easily or rescue accidentally deleted files. The next version of Apple's Mac OS X operating system (known as Leopard) will include a feature called Time Machine will do something similar, but with added Apple pizzazz.

New web-based solutions are starting to appear, with numerous services offering you several gigabytes of free online storage space. Not only do these allow you to access your files anywhere you can get a web connection, you get the added piece of mind of offsite backup, lest the office should burn down. You can usually also download some free software to make the external space appear on your system as an additional hard disk, making the transfer process even easier.

Among the services which tend to attract most attention are AOL's Xdrive which gives you 5GB free; Mozy, which has a long list of things it offers which Xdrive doesn't, although its free service is for 'personal, non-commercial use only'; and Omnidrive which offers 1GB free, with several well-priced 'pro' packages. There is regular talk of Google launching a storage service; but in the meantime, you could always get yourself a free Google Mail account, which comes with several gigabytes of mail storage, and send yourself copies of your most important files.

My own backup solution relies on a much more primitive arrangement: a 40GB portable hard disk, bought online for about fifty quid, and Microsoft's free SyncToy software. Quite simply, it mirrors the contents of a folder you specify from your main hard disk to your external drive (or indeed, vice versa). It's a manual process, meaning you have to remember to run it regularly, but it hasn't let me down so far. (Can anyone recommend a good freeware WinXP tool to automate the backup process?)

Tags: backup, offsite, sync, system restore

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