Backup Solutions for Home
August 20th, 2008 by Jeremy Brock
Data backups aren’t just for companies, home users should also backup to protect against drive failure, theft, and viruses. There are many inexpensive backup solutions on the market today geared towards home and small business users depending on their needs. Investing in a backup solution can save you hundreds in repair costs and thousands in data recovery charges.
The first questions to ask are:
- How much data are you backing up?
- Is your computer stationary or mobile?
- How sensitive is your data?
Online Backup services
If you don’t have much data (less than five gigabytes) and your data isn’t sensitive an internet backup service might be right for you. Most services offer monthly or annual contracts ranging from $5/month to $50/yr. After joining they provide you with an application that lets you choose which folders to backup. Most services will monitor for file changes and automatically backup files as needed.
Advantages:
- Data is stored offsite protecting you against fire/acts of god
- No extra hardware required
- Good for specific folders (my documents, email, etc)
Disadvantages:
- Slow backups, performing a full backup can take upwards of a day.
- Services have surcharges depending on bandwidth usage.
- Doesn't backup the entire hard drive.
Offline Backup Solutions
Unlike online backup services, offline backup solutions store data on an external hard drive or CD/DVD media. These solutions make an image of your hard drive, meaning you can return the computer to exact state of the last backup, not just restore individual files, this is good if your drive fails or you’re infected with a virus. You can buy an external hard drive for under $200 and the software for between $50 and $99, some software will create a recovery partition so no external drive is necessary. Most programs will create a monthly full backup and daily incremental (what’s changed) backup, full backup's take about an hour to complete and incremental backup's take a few minutes. As the drive fills up it will delete the oldest full and incremental backup's to make room for the new.
For stationary laptops and desktops its best to automatically backup to an external hard drive as it protects against drive failure and data loss. If your computer is mobile you can create a recovery partition on your hard drive for backups however it doesn’t protect against drive failure. If you don’t want to carry an external hard drive it's best to manually run a backup to an external drive when you have a moment.
Advantages:
- Fast, secure backups
- Ideal for users with lots of data
- Allows for full system restores
Disadvantages:
- Backups are stored onsite.
- Requires an external hard drive.
@ Jeremy, Good article. I like the tips that you have given here. I recently heard about Carbonite data back up services.
Any idea on this?
I've been considering using S3 as the back end to an on-line backup, since I'd been beating that for a while.
In a few days I'll write about how to do this--I'm only partially through the process right now. But right now I want to lay out the motivation for doing this.
Excellent backup solutions for home and small business are given clearly in this article. Small business IT solution services give importance to this backup solution as it can save computer repair cost and data recovery charges.
While online backup is getting more popular and no hard drive needed, I'd like to point out some pitfalls:
1) Some ISP allows very limited monthly bandwidth for their low end Internet plans, once you've gone over, it could hurt your wallet.
2) Privacy of your data - While I'm not suggest that companies offering online backup services are anything other than legitimate, some people just not comfortable with having all your data on their servers. (somewhere out there, who knows)
3) Secure Transfer? You must use their services where offer encrypted data transfer, since unencrypted data can be intercepted and read by people with nefarious goals.
Recently I have taken to converting my hard drives over to SSD (Solid State Drive) because the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is over 1 to 1.5 million hours. Plus the shock factor is over 1000 G's.
With no moving parts the SSD is very quite, lower power consumption this equates to lower heat generaton, and very light.
I have on in my laptop and one as an external drive, the newer SSD's come with two ways to connect them, the normal IDE or SATA interface and a USB port.
My external SSD is also my primary data back up for my main computer when I am at home, then when I travel I have the external with the data.
Another type of back up that very few people know about is the NAS or Network Attached Storage. When you buy a new computer what do you do with the old one, assuming it is still operational? Give it away? Throw it away? Why not upgrade the storage and use it for your backup storage?
Nice article and you are correct most people don't know what a backup is let alone how to accomplish it.
You have some really helpful information in this blog!
Do you have any specific offline drives that you recommend or prefer? (Or to ask it another way -- what do you use as your personal backup strategy?)
The external HD market seems to be quite prolific, so I'm kind of at a loss as to which ones are most reliable.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Very good range of options provided here. I never ceased to be amazed at the amount of customers that come in with no backup solution in place! But we will persevere and eventually the message will get through.
Cheers
An extra (backup) internal hard drive with "sync-toy" (a windows power toy) works well and is pretty seamless. You can download sync-toy from Microsoft, and an internal drive costs about $60 for a cheap (smaller) one. Most of my instances where I would have or did lose data have been related to hard drive crashes. With other problems I've been able to save my data, but hard drives seem to crash with little warning. Having all important data on another drive can save a lot of frustration.
thanks the tips.. I always keep my data online, I believe is safer.