Love Your Backup Routine
Written by Roman on March 13, 2008 – 10:00 pm
Couple months ago I got the issue that might cost mе the entire week of my work.
I used to make backup of all critical data from my laptop once a week. In the middle of January, just before I left for a short vacation, I went to another room in my home to pick up the external hard disk to make a final backup of everything I’d been working with for the past few days. It takes normally about 3 seconds to pick up the hard disk and come back, so I left a cup of tea just next to my laptop as my 10-month son was playing with my wife at this time.
When I came back to my desk (and it took me the standard 3 seconds), I saw a very nice picture. My son was staying at my desk with my cup of tea in his hand spilling tea on my laptop…
The first thought was ”good that he hasn’t hurt himself by hot tea”. The second thought was “we need to learn that wherever he is not able to reach today, he will be able to reach in a couple of days”. And the third thought was ”good-bye my vacation as I would need to restore all my work made for the past week”. And the last week work was very productive, unfortunately.
When I lifted my laptop up, it was leaking with tea as a small lake. The display was blinking, getting spots and finally, the computer died.
I removed the back cover and dried the laptop using hair dryer of my wife. I was just lucky that my farther-in-law got a friend who’s smart enough to fix my computer for just a few hours at night. He just told that it’s good that tea had no sugar in it.
The main conclusion from this story is that backup must be made daily. But it takes time to copy all my data to the external hard disk – only e-mails take more than 1 GB at the moment. I think that backup would be some kind of incremental one. Like if I make full backup once a week, and then I just make an incremental backup of all the changed file for the passed day, or since the last backup. I would be able to save all those incremental backups on a USB Flash Drive even.
So I have a question to those who read this blog – do you use any backup software for your personal computer? Are you aware of any such incremental backup tools that would allow making reliable backups fast and for the reasonable price?
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March 18th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Microsoft has got a new software for sync, still beta but reviews say that it is promising.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0FC1154-C975-4814-9649-CCE41AF06EB7&displaylang=en#Requirements
When it comes to you mail I would suggest you to use either POP3 with saving a copy on server, IMAP(keep everything on server) or Exchange for your entire company.
Actually backups should not be your headache, disaster recovery must be outsourced. Then you have both SLA and no reason blaiming yourself in case of accidents.