Nlightenedthoughts

October 2011 William Blinn Communications n Worthington, Ohio 43085 LightenedThoughts www.n-lighten.us • 614/859.9359 Backup Means Never Having to Say “I Lost It” T - ( ) ’ 5400 7200 ( 10,000). F ’ - . Given the speed and the tolerances involved, What does a Lamborghini When I opened the enclosure, I found a disk drive this is rather like ying a Boeing 747 with no label to identify the manufacturer. airliner at 500MPH 10 feet o the have to do with backup? e best guest was that the drive was a ground. If the head touches the spin- Read the article and recerti ed Western Digital or, more likely, ning disk for even a millisecond it you’ll fi nd out. a counterfeit Western Digital. will be destroyed and the data on e cost of online backup services and your drive will be lost. Even though large-capacity USB drives has changed the disk manufacturers now routinely backup landscape. By de ntion, any le that quote meantime between failure rates exists in only one location is not backed up that equate to a century or more, you’d be but the cost structure is now such that you can foolish to bank on having the drive continue have many copies of your les. to perform awlessly. e story for my acquaintance ended reason- What’s on your computer that, if it ably well because many of the les were also suddenly disappeared, you would be at available on CDs and DVDs. least mildly distressed? Financial records. Photographs. Word documents. E-mail les. have access to my data. at’s what’s on those local My Process Music. Videos. drives that sit beside the computer. (Following I ’ You could get some of the les back but most that crash, I upgraded the computer to an older I - of the les, if lost, are simply lost. Gone. Unre- version of Windows XP and continued to use it : coverable. For that reason I use external backup until Windows 7 became available.) • Norton Ghost creates a system image and drives that I store at the o ce and Carbonite I’m a bit of a fanatic when it comes to backup backs up all critical data les weekly. e drive (whose servers are hundreds of miles away). at and someone I know recently learned an impor- (currently it’s just a single 3TB drive) with covers most of the potential disasters but what if tant lesson about backup. these backups is stored at my o ce. the computer stops working and I need my les • Carbonite backs up essential data les. e right now? is is not a hypothetical situation. It Lesson Learned online service doesn’t create a system image has happened to me. T , . F le but it does keep all of my Word documents, When Vista crashed for the last time, I was - USB . S Excel documents, Access databases, digital out of business for about 5 minutes because I was images, video les, and such on a server in able to start up a laptop computer and attach it . I , Boston. Restoring all of these les via the to a couple of local backup drives. e notebook ’ . Internet would be slow so I consider this my computer has most of the applications that are on e inevitable happened, of course. Just as second line of defense. the desktop so I can continue working as long as I the “backup” les were needed, the drive failed. nLightened Thoughts (ISSN 1543-1533) is for clients and friends of n-Lighten.us, 179 Caren Avenue, Worthington, Ohio 43085. Phone 614.859.9359. On the Web at www.n-Lighten.us. All rights reserved. Norton Ghost (left) creates an image of the computer’s boot drive. Although Ghost Carbonite (above) stores copies of my fi les in could back up fi les on the other drives, I use Boston, hundreds of miles away. GoodSync (above) for local copies and for backups of non-system drives. • Data les are backed up locally with GoodSync. e trick is keeping them up to date. All I need to do is de ne the source of the data Anything I’m working on is backed up within To do this, you need a le synchronization and the destination. e source is the internal seconds to one of two local USB drives. program. Until recently I used Allway Sync but hard drive directory that contains all websites I’m Because these drives sit beside the computer, some recent so ware additions caused Allway working on. e destination is a directory on the I can’t consider them to be a true backup but Sync to fail and I began looking around for another external drive where I want the les to be stored. if the main computer su ers a catastrophic application. What I found is called GoodSync. Although I have taken steps to ensure that the failure I can attach the USB drives to a note- A er downloading and installing the trial local backup drive will always mount as drives X book computer and continue working as if version and even before I could notice that the user and Z, GoodSync realizes that the drive is a USB nothing had happened. interface was far superior to what I had been using, device and that it might someday be mounted as So far I’ve never lost a le. I’ve used each of I was astonished by the speed of the application. a di erent drive letter. When o ered the option the systems to recover les that were deleted or Instead of a 1973 Chevy Vega, I now had a 2010 to refer to the device by name instead of by letter, damaged and that’s my primary message: I have Lamborghini Cabrea. Well, maybe the di erence I accepted the suggestion. been able to recover lost or damaged les. wasn’t quite that extreme but within half an hour I By default GoodSync will propagate deletions You may think of your computer as being was sure that I would buy the Professional version. and that’s a reasonable choice for synchroniza- expensive but it isn’t. You may think of the applica- e free version works only when the backup job tions. For backups, it’s not. I’d prefer not to lose tions running on your computer as being expensive contains no more than 100 les and you’re not the backup copy of a le if I accidentally (stupidly?) but they aren’t. You may not give much thought at allowed to de ne more than 3 jobs. During the trial delete it from the source directory. For that reason, all to the documents you’ve created but they are period and when you buy the professional version, I visit the Options panel and deselect “Propagate more valuable than the computer or the applica- both le count and job count are unlimited. Deletions” for most backup jobs. tions on the computer. ese days you can buy a 3TB USB hard drive Once you’ve set up a backup or synchronize job, for about $130 so it’s easy to set up a local hot- all that’s le is determining how and when it will Why Three Backups? backup drive in addition to whatever o site backup run. For most jobs, I set GoodSync to copy new F I you have. GoodSync doesn’t back up system les or modi ed les to the external drive the instant so it’s not the right choice for backing up your it sees them. For some backup jobs, I use the built- I’ operating system. For that you need Norton Ghost in link that connects to the Windows scheduler, . F or Acronis True Image. GoodSync is more than but other backup jobs make more sense not to be C capable of ensuring that all the data on your local scheduled. I run these manually as needed. I . S hot backup is current. Disk drives are far more reliable than they used Here’s how it works: When I update a Web to be but they can still crash. When that happens . F page or create a new page, I want to be sure that to you, having a recovery system in place will be - the page and any les the page depends on (CSS, remove much of the stress. Ω ’ graphics, audio, RSS, and such) are immediately . copied to my local hot backup. ese les will By de nition no le backed up to a device that’s be also copied to Carbonite within a few hours in the same physical location as the device it’s and to my local o site backup drive at the next n-Lighten.us backing up can be considered a backup. But it weekly backup. Because no new content will ever Division of William Blinn Communications can be considered good insurance against hard be added to the backup drive directly, I don’t want drive crashes, errors, forgetfulness, and plain old the “synchronize” option although GoodSync 179 Caren Ave., Worthington, Ohio 43085 614/859.9359 • www.n-lighten.us human stupidity. o ers that capability..

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