Over the years, our digital life represents more and more of our real life.  Whether documents, financials, music or pictures, we have an enormous amount of personal data on our computers that cannot be replaced or lost. 

In the last couple weeks, I have first hand experience data loss.  I lost my main data hard drive about 700 GB of data (not the system drive).  My sister lost her hard drive to our desktop computer. That hard drive contained not only the OS but also all of her documents and pictures.  Fortunately, the net result is that we had no data loss.  I have lost data before and it made me feel ill.  Never again.  In the last month, it was a good fire drill on our backup strategy.

First off, there are different types of failures.  I like to refer to these as different scopes of disasters.  

A good comprehensive backup strategy will keep all 3 of these in mind,  In general, no solution fits all situations and none of them are bullet proof.  Each of them has a cost associated with it…whether time, money, bandwidth or discipline.  I personally use a combination of solutions for my needs.  Your mileage may vary. 

Windows Home Server

Hands down this is one of the best products for backing up Windows desktops and laptops.  Microsoft already put in all of the intelligence of what to backup.  It knows that you don’t need a backup of your Internet Explorer cache or other temp files.  It also keeps a single copy of the same file found in multiple directories or computers.  It backups the entire computer, including programs and operating system.  You can boot from a CD and restore a hard drive in an hour or two with little effort…perfect for a crashed hard drive.  I have personally replaced broken hard drives this way twice in the last year or so.  I have also used the disk restore one other time to revert the system drive to a previous state after installing some software I didn’t really care for.   You can restore individual files and folders to previous point in time.  This is done via Explorer like approach and is intuitive enough.  I wish they would have wired up “Previous Versions” in the desktop’s Explorer.

I have all my computers backing up to this.  In addition, my in-law’s computers also backup to this.  I brought their computer over to my house and did the initial backup.  Subsequent backups are done via Hamachi.  WHS is only good for “local computers”.  At least they have be local for initial backup and any restores.

The good:  cheap…you can build your own frankenstein server or buy an OEM.  I got my Acer for $300 plus the cost of some extra harddrives.  Simple to use.  Just works and is rock solid.

The bad:  doesn’t cover the whole house disaster.  If I had a major lightning strike or EMP go off at my house, this would not save me.  There are some plugin’s to do some backup to the cloud but you have be really selective about what gets sent because of network bandwidth and cloud storage fees.

Scope:  operates very well on restoring a PC to any given point in time. Restoring individual files is decent, as well.

This is my primary backup component and has not failed me.

Carbonite

Use a cloud based backup service such as Carbonite, Mozy & Amazon S3.  This is a growing market and many more competitors are out there since I last reviewed them.  I personally use Carbonite and have used them for years.  They offer unlimited backup storage for a fixed rate.  Carbonite has very simple program that just works.  It is totally perfect for grandma and grandpa.

Carbonite is not a comprehensive solution.  It works well to selectively solve the offsite backup gap.  Unfortunately, it’s not very practical for my TB’s of data that need to be backed up.  It backs up “precious” data for me. 

I had installed it on sister’s computer.  After she got her new hard drive and did the system restore, we installed Carbonite.  It walked her through the restore.  It took almost 2 weeks to get it all back.  Biggest issue was we had to turn off the power saver features on her computer; otherwise, the restore would effectively only happen when she was in front of her computer.  After that was adjusted, it still took several days to do the restore.  It is simple math.  It takes a long time to download 100 gig or so.  It restored all of the user data except for video files, including some home videos.  Overall, it did exactly what we wanted it to do at a time that we never wanted to happen.

The good:  it just works.  Very simple UI and is approved for even novice user.   It uses incremental backups which is a phenomenal bandwidth savings when you dealing with a 2gig PST file.  Also, no discipline is necessary other than paying the bill.

The bad:  it takes a long time to get it back but an even longer time to get it up there.  Carbonite is unlimited but storing your 200 gig music collection at most services would be cost prohibitive.  Also, not all files are backed up (e.g. movies).

Scope:  Works well for entire house disasters because it is offsite.  Also, good for restoring a few files…Carbonite keeps versions.

Windows Live Mesh

Distribute enough copies such that all of them can’t be destroyed at once was my primary backup strategy for years.  I had even wrote a Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) client that would upload my files safely offsite.  It was way cooler than FTP but had about the same value.  BITS was really good for slow bandwidth and restartability. 

Today, Windows Live Mesh fills this need.  I started using FolderShare, then Live Sync and now we are stuck with Mesh.  I use this in my family to share our picture libraries  It takes a while but it will eventually get there.  This fits a functional need (sharing) as well as backup.  However, a delete is quickly replicated!  This option saved my sister’s home videos that Carbonite ignored.  It don’t mind sharing your files unencrypted, this is a good choice. 

The good:  free and just kinda works

The bad:  Slow, unencrypted, no versioning, etc.  One big draw back to Mesh right now is that you cannot share your files readonly any more. 

Scope:  really good for entire house issues (offsite)

Shadow Copies

Certain builds of Windows have previous versions  built in.  The OS takes shadow copies of the hard drive typically twice a day.  It is really easy to get back to a previous state when the occasional whoops occurs between backups.  However, this is a backup convenience not a strategy.

Robocopy

I robocopy all of my “precious” data frequently (typically daily) to another computer (or could be a USB hard drive).  This is just my OCD cropping up.  This shouldn’t be necessary but it makes me feel good.  The net is a have exact copies elsewhere in my house.  Some people talk about taking a USB hard drive to work or a family member’s house to get it offsite but I have never been that disciplined.