How I Back Up My PCs

Readers of Support Alert newsletter know that I'm firmly committed to the idea that backed up data should be stored in standard file format. Forget about proprietary formats, non-standard compressed formats and product-specific password protection.

The reasoning here is that when I need to recover data from backup, I want to do so quickly and conveniently on any PC using standard programs. Given the most common reason for needing to access your backup data is that your hard drive has crashed or your whole PC has failed, you'll understand my logic.

The same logic influences the way I backup. If my hard drive goes down I want to be up and running in minutes, not hours or days.

To achieve this I do a daily backup of all my working documents from each PC on my network to another PC on the network. So vital information for each PC is duplicated on another machine.

But I go further. Not only is the key data backed up, it's also stored in the My Documents folder of a Windows account specially set up for backup purposes. This means that if a PC fails, I can simply move to the another machine, sign on as the backup user and have immediate access to my data. If I want to open a word document, i just open Word and voila, there's all my data. Similarly I can open Outlook and there is all my email. Or more accurately, all my mail up to the time of last night's backup.

Most of my data I backup daily. Key data, such as the next issue of Support Alert newsletter I back up hourly. Your requirements may well be different but that's your call. The principle however, is the same.

I handle off-site backup by making CD-RWs of my data monthly. Again, other folk may choose a different interval. It's all a question of balancing risk against effort.

Security is handled by encrypting key data at the file level. So when my data is backed up to another PC, the encrypted file is backed up. For encryption I use one of strong encryption algorithms available within Office XP which is a standard program available on all PCs in the network. If need to access the encrypted file from the backup PC, I just type in my password in the same way I would if I was using my own PC.

All backup is handled automatically at pre-scheduled times. Apart from the monthly CD backup, I have no involvement in the procedure.

Over the last year I've looked at many different backup programs. Most didn't provide the features I need.

The product I ended up using was not the fanciest nor the most expensive. It's called Genie Backup.

Genie is easy to use, has a great interface, will backup to separate drives, partitions, across a network, by FTP and to CD. It supports incremental as well as full backups and can create native file format backup sets or compressed and/or encrypted sets if that's what you want.

Genie just sits in the background silently doing its job. A few of my critical files are backed up hourly, the rest overnight and once a month, I also use Genie for making CD-Rs for off-site storage.

In fact, if it wasn't for the task bar icon, I would hardly know Genie was on my PC. And even the task bar icon serves a useful purpose as it changes if a backup is in progress or if a backup has failed.

Genie is one of those rare products that works so well as to be almost flawless.  If you need a backup program I suggest you download a trial copy and see for yourself.

Genie Review: http://www.backup-software-reviews.com/review-genie-backup-manager.htm

Despite it's strengths, Genie is only suitable for backing up user files. It cannot handle the more complex task of backing up Windows itself. For that, I use Acronis True Image. Why? Total reliability, ease of use and the availability of full partition recovery from a bootable CD. That's enough for me and I suspect, you as well

.Gizmo

Back to Supporters Area       Logout