Backups

How much is enough

[Visit Thailand]

In the AdSense forum there is always a certain amount of paranoia with regards to the dreaded email even by people who do nothing wrong.

Recently though I experienced a different kind of paranoia.

Was on a 3 week business trip, I backed everything up before I left but on the last day of the trip my lap top gave up and died. The hard drive was replaced the next day but I was unable to retrieve any data from the old hard drive.

When I returned to my base, I was very worried whether the backups I had done had worked, would there be a problem with the backup discs etc.

This lead me to think how much backing up is enough, and how often should one back up essential info?

Do you back up just to an external HD or use other methods?

I am considering backing up as I do now to an external HD and also sending the backups to YahooMail or something as an extra safety measure.

Any thoughts, tips or ideas? How safe is safe and is Yahoo Mail a safe back up option?

[keyplyr]

I would like someone experienced to explain just how they backup thier system; what files, to what memory medium, using software or not, etc.

I often read "you must backup everything" but no one explains how.

[bill]

Are we talking about e-mail backups or entire system backups here?

One way you might want to look at the e-mail is to use IMAP instead of POP3. That way all your mail stays on the server and you won't lose anything if your local hardware dies.

[Visit Thailand]

Thanks.

Both really, I know you can use Ghost to backup the whole system to be honest have never got my head around it.

But for those individual must have files, you suggest IMAP, must look into that as I have never used it.

You did gvie me an idea though - if you have .pst and other files would it be safe just to FTp them to a password protected directory on your own server rather than using yahoo mail?

[bill]

I'm a Ghost fan. Symantec bought out PowerQuest's Drive Image package and basically used that to replace Ghost...so anything after Ghost 9 is good stuff. A Drive Image is like taking a snapshot of an entire drive or partition. When you restore from that you go back exactly to that state. If you're using XP's restore or other software, then you're only really copying some files to make a backup, but you're not copying everything. A Drive Image is better on many levels.

IMAP doesn't use the PST in the same way. In fact, they say that Outlook is one of the worst programs to do IMAP with. The current best is supposedly the Thunderbird client from Mozilla. I'm going to be testing that out over the holidays I think, as I'm currently using the same PST/Outlook setup as you.

PST files can get corrupted if you try to copy them while they're in use. Be careful of that. I prefer to take a Drive Image of a partition that contains my important data (PST files), and then I FTP or copy that data to a different computer (hopefully in a different location).

[Visit Thailand]

bill (thinking of the encryption thread) do you encrypt your backups before moving them?

[bill]

Ghost lets you add a password to the Drive Image, so in a sense I'm locking them down every time I make them. I'm not too sure how strong their ciphers are or how tough it would be to crack, but I've got at least a degree of protection there. Where I can I will put these into encrypted partitions. However, I do a lot of file moving with DOS batch files, so that's not always possible on my network.

encryption thread [webmasterworld.com]