Data Backup
Data backups are perhaps one of the most important aspects of protecting your data from both hardware failures and the works of the Anti-Programmers. This is an extremely crucial tool that is possibly the most overlooked of any of the defensive tools.
Ask yourself this question: If your hard drive suddenly “failed” at this moment, how long would it take you to get back to being productive? Also, is there any information that would be lost forever?
Sadly, most people neglect this most important part of their computer defense…and are left in deep trouble when disaster strikes.
When backing up your data you need to strike a balance between how much time and money it costs to maintain a good backup versus how much pain you will go through if there ends up being a loss of data. To illustrate this point, let’s examine a few scenarios:
Scenario #1: Complete Hard Drive Backup
In this case, our intrepid user backs up their complete hard drive to another storage device (lots of DVD’s, an external hard drive, an online backup service, etc.). The cost of this solution is:
- Time: The time spent creating the backup (daily? weekly? monthly?)
- Money: The cost of the backup medium (external hard drive? Online storage? DVD’s?)
However, the benefit to this method is that the user can be back up and running after a hardware failure or nasty virus within a short time…the time it takes to restore the backup. At that point, the user is COMPLETELY back to normal…except for whatever work was performed since the last backup.
Scenario #2: Backup Only User Data
In this case, our intrepid user backs up only their data files (e.g. spreadsheets, Word Processing documents, player “save” files from games they play, etc.). They do not back up their entire hard drive. As compared to Scenario #1, this strategy stacks up as follows:
- Time: There is much less time spent in making backups in this scenario as the amount of data to be backed up is only a fraction of what would be needed to back up an entire hard drive
- Money: Again, the cost to this solution is a fraction of the cost of scenario #1 for the same reason…much less data to be preserved
However, it should be obvious that the “con” to this method of backup compared to the method used for scenario #1 is that should a total loss of data on your computer occur (destroyed by a hardware failure, a runaway virus, a mistaken command, etc.), you have a lot more time and effort involved to reinstall all of your system software (operating system, all of your applications, etc.) before you can restore your personal data (spreadsheets, word processing files, etc.).
The good news about this method is that you still recover all of your data in the case of a failure…it just takes you longer to do so.
Conclusion:
What strategy you choose for backing up your data requires you to weigh the time and cost of keeping the backups versus the time and cost of actually having to use your backups (that is, how much time and effort…and pain…will it cause you to actually have to restore all of your data). Hopefully you can see that both methods listed here (and there are many more you can use) are valid…it just comes down to what is most important to you.
The most important thing of all is to make certain that you actually have a strategy. If you want to live on the edge and not have any backups…that is fine! Just make sure that you made that decision based upon a knowledge of what might happen if you choose not to maintain backups.
I should note that there are several computers in the Paladin’s home that do not have any type of backup performed on them. This is a choice given that the machines are used for processing and the data on them is no big deal to lose. If the machines fail I will have to rebuild them from scratch…and I am fine with that…for THOSE machines only!
Next Steps
Now that you have an idea of how to assess your data backup needs, you should increase your knowledge on the subject by looking at the following pages: