This post will cover:
- What type of back-ups you should be doing
- How often you should be doing a backup
- How to store your back-ups once you’ve done them
- Which services/programs are out there to help you securely backup your information (Part 2)
- How to recover your deleted data (Part 2)
Most people never think about doing a back-up, and there are many reasons why people don’t. Have you ever thought to yourself ‘I wished I done a back-up!’ I personally have done – many of times. There are many types of back-ups that you can do easily, these are:
- Full back-up – this pretty much explains itself – it’s a entire backup of all your data including files that have been modified and not modified. This type of backup should only be done occasionally.
- Pros – it’s a complete back up of all files, so it can be easily restored
- Cons – it can take a long time for the back up to be completed and can take up a lot of space
- Incremental back-up - only backs up the files that have changed since the last time an backup was ran
- Pros – uses the least time and space, and also lets you have multiple backups of the same file
- Cons – this can take a lot of time to trying to restore a particular file. Makes restoring a bit of a nightmare as you have to restore the full backup and then all the increments in order.
- Differential back-up – this is similar to incremental back-ups, but only backs up modified files since the last full backup has been preformed
- Pros – takes less time and space than a full backup, and provides a more efficient restoration than incremental backups
- Cons – stores a lot of useless information as it saves the original information including the changed information since the last full backup. The more files that are changed, the longer differential backup will take
How often should you being doing a back up? Well….. every person/company is different depending on how much data is changed. If your an online eCommerce website, then you should be doing backups at least every night to prevent loss of customer data! I’ve listed a few options to help you decide how often you should be doing a backup
- Daily – Much much back-up every day to prevent loss. This is useful if your creating / editing a lot of files / information daily. Also can be very useful for busy online sites such as a eCommerce.
- Weekly – Similar to daily, but less files being updated. A waste of time and space if your not changing files / information every day.
- Monthly – Only occasionally you update files, this type can be useful for a static website that you change only change a few times a month.
- Yearly – Pretty much if you don’t change much or just haven’t got the time nor space to store all backups.
Great, you’ve done all these backups and all but where to store them? There isn’t much point of doing a backup and storing it on the same computer is a bit of a waste of time. As if something does happen to the computer your backups could be lost during the process of it being fixed. How to store and where are good places?
Well there are many places you could store it such as a external hard drive (also known as portable hard drives ). You could save it to CD/DVDs but theses can take up a lot of space and are easily damaged. This isn’t a recent way of storing your backups but it has became more popular in the last few years with so many companies offering similar services. Next week I’ll write more on this topic, including a small list of online backup services and different programs that you can use to make daily back ups!
My next post will cover:
- Which service/programs are out there to help you securely backup your information
- How to recover your deleted data
