Whether you are a small business preparing to close down for a few weeks or taking some time off from work yourself and want to get organised for 2010, now is a good time to consider your drive backup software needs.
To help you I have prepared a mixed bag of tips that will assist you to get and stay protected in 2010.
Review what you have on your PC’s and assess what needs and doesn’t need protecting. It’s probably a good time to also clean out some old downloads and applications that you aren’t using.
If you have been using a hard drive to backup, then get it out and get it to work. Ensure you get a copy of all important files onto the external hard drive. It might also be a good time to set up an auto sync so that in future, when you plug it in it, it will automatically know what to start backing up. There are several tools out there free and paid that will do this for you.
Once you have completed backing with your hard drive, do yourself a favour and test it out. Check to see that the date on the files is today’s and that the files can be opened.
If your hard drive looks like it’s getting pretty full, then maybe it’s a good time to invest in another one. Terabyte drives are under $200 these days so, it’s worthwhile having plenty of space.
Online backup isn’t just for big businesses. Ensuring that your important files are located offsite somewhere is called a sound backup strategy and it’s just as applicable for your home as it is for your business. The last thing you want when you return from your break or a day out is to find that your PC and other hardware has been damaged or stolen. Relying on an external hard drive will not help you in any way. A remote windows backup solution is the only way to recover those files instantly.
Online or remote backup doesn’t need to cost you the earth. Services like Carbonite will cost you less than $6 per month to protect all the files on your PC. To be honest you don’t need to back everything up with Carbonite either. If you are also using an external drive, I would use online backup for the really important stuff, the stuff you can’t live or run your business without.
With Carbonite, you can use the defaults when installing it. This will pick up most files on your C: drive. Alternatively you can manually select the files that you believe are important and you can do this via Windows Explorer. If you are a business, backup files like your email, MYOB/Quicken database, Tax Invoices, Tax Documentation, Contracts and agreements.
Get the backup started early so that you can have it all uploaded well before you shut everything down. Typically, uploading works through 2 – 3GB per day.
If you are already using an online backup service, be sure to check the expiry of your subscription so that it doesn’t fall when you are away and don’t have access to your emails. In most cases your data will be safe for another 30 days but its best to be prepared. We are talking about your data at the end of the day.
Have a great festive season and see you in 2010.
Carbonite Australia Team
As part of our objective to educate home users and small business about backup software and the need to backup, we thought that it would be worthwhile reviewing some of the backup software options in the market place for backing up your PC, software and data (outside of just online backup).
Online Backup isn’t for everyone and not for backing up everything either. Therefore, combining backup software for your PC and operating system (+ software) might be a wise investment and strategy for securing your critical data.
The best way to review these tools is to compare the key features each of them offers. The 4 PC software tools that seem to be the most popular in the market at the moment include Acronis True Image ($70), Nero 9 ($108), Symantec Norton Ghost ($100), and Windows Vista Backup (free).
Lets compare some key features:
Backup Process
What you are looking for here is a simple way to find your files and select them for backup. The only tool that doesn’t seem to offer this in an easy to use way is the Vista Backup service.
The second feature is what is backed up. Does it backup everything all of the time (full backup), or is it just the differences. All services seem to offer both a full backup and an incremental backup service.
Restoring
This needs to be simple. From the research we conducted, Acronis and Nero 8 were best at this.
What was also interesting was that many of the providers didn’t offer a very user friendly process to perform a full system restore (should your hard drive crash and your OS no longer work). The issue with Vista’s service was it required Windows to be reinstalled before a restore could be started.
Nero and Symantec allow you to restart your PC and the restore process directly from the install discs (no Windows required).
Scheduling
Scheduling is available via all of the backup software tools. Some where simpler to use than others.
Compression
Compression reduces the size of the backup data, conserving space on the destination media. All the backup software compressed data in their own way. Vista Backup saved the data in a ZIP format.
Imaging
Imaging takes a snapshot of the entire contents of your computer’s hard drive. Its particularly useful when a PC completely dies on you and you want to restore the software and files to a new PC. If you have the software CDs, you can manually reinstall them. If you don’t, imaging can be a life saver. Imaging was possible with Acronis, Nero and Symantec.
Media support
The backup media supported by each backup software is also very important. All products allowed you to save data to a USB key or separate partition on a hard drive as well as external hard drive. Nero 8 could copy data to both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. Windows Vista Backup was not able to backup to multiple discs.
Comparing Online Backup
So what does Carbonite offer that Backup Software doesn’t:
- Carbonite has a very user friendly interface in terms of setting up your backup. It has a default service that will auto pick your My Computer. You can also manually select and un-select files via Windows Explorer.
Carbonite will backup all of the files on your PC. Once an initial upload has been made of each file, it will then only do automatic incremental updates, ie it will look for changes in files and back then up. So should you require a restore of a file, you will always get the latest file. 3 months worth of versions are also available.
- The key advantage that Carbonite offers is that the process for backing up is automatic. Once set-up, there is no need to make changes again.
- The restoring process is simple. You do however require Carbonite to be reinstalled on the PC (which also requires Windows to be on the PC).
- Carbonite allows you to schedule your backup by time of the day and day of the week. As the data is transferred to remote servers, it is compressed and encrypted.
- Carbonite hasn’t been designed to offer an imaging service of your PC. It was designed for backing up data, not the software itself.
- Carbonite will not backup to external media. All backed up data sent to our remote servers in the US. The restore process via download from our remote servers.
Research undertaken for this post has been sourced from Choice Magazine and PC Authority.
