Backup Your Hard Disk

Posted by wadehatler on 08.27.2012

Part 5 of Make your Computer Fit to Use (Introduction - Contents)

In the previous two sections, we used AutoRuns to clean up a good portion of the junk that starts up when you log in. We're going to come back to AutoRuns a little bit later to clean up the Services Tab, but for the moment where you move on to something that's more likely to produce results: cleaning up your hard disk.

Backups

Before we start this next section, I'm going to strongly, sternly and strenuously <insert more nagging adjectives here> recommend you do a backup. Backups are sort of like diet and exercise... everybody knows you should do it, everybody says "I really should be backing up regularly", but most people just don't get it done. For much of my career, I counted myself in that group, so don't feel alone.

There are many reasons why people don't do backups. Some people get by for years without doing one, so you feel like they lead a charmed life. Others have been bitten once or twice and still don't learn. Others always found the Windows backup tool so confusing, obtuse and hard to use that they just never bothered to learn how to do it. A lot of people are also stuck in the past remembering how difficult it was to do backups 10 years ago, and they don't realize that it is now actually very easy if you're willing take a couple of simple steps and spend a little bit of money.

All of these reasons cause people to avoid backing up, and most of the time they get away with it. However, if you don't have backups, eventually, you'll really wish you had - Mark my words! My wife lost months of emails very recently because I hadn't backed her computer up properly, and I'm the one giving the stern lecture ;(

This is probably something you've heard a hundred times and this is the one-hundred-first stern lecture, but since I'm going to tell you to delete a bunch of stuff from your hard disk next, I want to be sure they at least have been warned.

Backup Strategies

There are several different ways you can backup your hard disk, and if you don't have a good spam strategy (a post for another day); you probably get 50 emails a day trying to sell you some system or other. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be you can completely disregard most of the strategies because they are terrible. You can pretty much assume that anything you did five or 10 years ago is probably wrong, because the technology has changed substantially in that time.

To come up with a good backup strategy, you need to answer three questions:

What kind of media are you going to back your data up to?
What particular style of backup do you need?
What tool are you going to use to do it?

All of these questions have many choices, most of which are suboptimal. Let's start with the media, because that's the most important decision you have to make:

Portable hard Disk

My favorite is a Portable Hard Disk. These small inexpensive hard disks usually plug into a USB port to provide extra storage. They're cheap, work exceedingly well and are by far the least troublesome, most reliable and nicest to use backup system available. This is what I use, and have for several years.

CD/DVD

You can backup to a bunch of DVDs or CDs. You can do this in a pinch on most machines, but I don't really like it very much. It takes longer do, and the DVDs aren't as reliable as I'd like. I've also had too many failed backup DVDs to be completely comfortable with this approach, although it's certainly a lot better than nothing.

Online

There are a lot of online services that offer to let you back up over the Internet. I've tried a couple of these, never really liked the results that much. Part of the problem is that they cost a few dollars a month, which doesn't sound like much, but over the course of a year, it adds up to more than it cost to buy a portable hard disk. It's as slow as your internet connection, so if you have a lot of data, it's going to take a long time to make a backup, and if your machine crashes, it will take forever to get it back. They are excellent for disaster recovery though, because if someone steals your computer and your portable hard disk, you're pretty much hosed without a second backup.

Tape

Back in the day, we used to back everything up to tape because that was the only thing you can get it had enough capacity to do the job. Almost nobody does this anymore for local hard disks because this is been replaced by portable hard disks DVDs. Tapes are still used in high-capacity network systems, but you almost certainly don't want this option for yourself unless you already have a good DAT drive laying around.

Portable Hard Disk

My hands-down personal favorite is the portable hard disk. You can find a good reliable one for about $100 that can act as a backup, and can do double duty as an archive medium to store family photos, documents, etc. For example, I frequently have development trees but I think I'm probably done with but I don't want to get rid of them forever, so I simply copy them into an archive folder on my portable hard disk just in case I ever want to look at them again. If you can afford to buy a portable hard disk, just do it immediately and you'll never regret it. I've been using this method for a few years, and I've actually recovered from it several times (usually deliberately). It's the only medium I've ever used that has never failed me in a pinch.

If you have a local discount electronics superstore or a reasonably good office supply store, you can simply walk in and look at what they have on the shelf. You can also use a shopping site like amazon.com, Bing, or Google or Yahoo Shopping. For example, this Amazon Search recently showed me at least three hard disks going up to 1 TB (1000 GB) for less than $100. A good rule of thumb is to go with the biggest one you can afford, because bigger is always better. In an ideal world, your portable hard disk should be around 2-3 the size of your built-in hard disk. The speed of your portable hard disk doesn't really matter that much - It's the size that matters.

Once you have the hard disk, plug it into your USB port. A lot of these drives will offer to install some kind of backup manager for you. Some of these external backup manager's probably work really well, but I don't know because I never actually try them. Windows has a perfectly good backup system built-in, and as long as you're sure to use it correctly it will reliably restore your machine no muss no fuss. Windows also has a built-in scheduling mechanism that can set it up to do automatic backups every night, or every week so there is no particular reason to add yet another tool to the mix.

Before you do a backup on your new hard disk, you should make sure that it is formatted as NTFS. I know that's a somewhat technical term, I'll explain it in a later post (maybe), but the upshot is that of hard disk is generally formatted as either FAT32 or NTFS. NTFS is much better in all ways, but many portable hard disks are formatted as FAT32 because that's what you have to do to make it work with older machines like Windows ME or 98. Some portable hard disks are also set up to work with Macs or UNIX machines, most of which don't natively support NTFS. The portable hard disk manufacturers are given a choice of one format that is better, and another that always works and never generate support calls. Try to figure out which one or more likely to choose.

Before you get started, you'll want to reformat the drive as NTFS if necessary. Here's how to do it:

Plug in your portable hard disk. Most of the time, you'll get an auto-start box that starts searching the drive for content. Set it to do nothing when you plug in this drive, and then close the search box.
Double-click on Computer on your desktop or Start menu.
Right-Click the hard disk icon and select Properties.
Near the top of the properties window, on the General tab, you should see an entry for File System: It will say FAT32 or NTFS. Of its NTFS, then you're good to go:
If the drive is FAT, and it's brand-new, it probably has bunch of junk that you don't want. Even if you've had it for a while, there's a reasonable chance it'll be full of worthless junk. Either way, if you want to discard everything that might be on the drive, you'll simply reformat it to wipe it clean:
1. Close the Properties window
2. Right-Click on the drive icon and select Format
3. Select NTFS as the file system, and work your way through all of the warnings until it starts formatting. The format can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. You can let go in the background while you move on and do other things for a while.
If the drive has information on it that you need, you can convert it to you NTFS while retaining all of its current information. It's a little bit harder, but not terribly so.
1. Notice the drive letter assigned to the hard disk, because you'll need to type this in.
2. Open a Command Prompt. You can usually find it in your Start Menu under Programs | Accessories | Command Prompt. If you never used a command prompt before, you might find it a little intimidating but it's not a big deal. Just type what I tell you.
3. In the command prompt, type this command to replace the letter Z: with the letter you found that is assigned to your portable hard disk, which used on the first step: C:\Windows\system32\convert.exe Z: /FS:NTFS
4. This will take a while, so just let it run in the background.

Once you've completed these steps, you should have a nice clean disk ready for backup.

One other thing I like to do is to map my portable hard disk to a particular drive letter. By default, when you plug in the drive, windows assigns it to the first available drive letter. If it's the first drive you plug in, that will usually be E: This would be fine, except that if you plug in your camera or some other tool that maps to drive E:, then it will be assigned to the next drive it becomes available. This makes it hard to work with, and also makes it hard to write batch files to copy things to the portable hard disk. I solve this problem by always mapping my portable hard this to a specific drive letter. I use Y: but it doesn't matter. If you want to do this:

Right-Click on the Computer icon on your desktop or Start Menu and select Manage.
If necessary, expand the Storage icon, so you can see the Disk Management entry, and click on it.
You should see your portable hard disk in the pane on the right side of the window.
Right-Click on the icon for the disk, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Pick a new drive letter, and click OK. It may warn you that the drive letter is in use, but most of the time it is not. If you're sure you're not doing anything with the drive, then simply ignore that warning.

If you do this, the change will be persistent so the next time your machine starts up you'll still have the new drive letter mapping. When you do this of course you want to pick a drive letter that is high in the alphabet so that is not likely to conflict with other devices you might use, and you also want one which are not using for anything else. For example, many corporate systems have shared drive mappings and everybody uses, see the need to find a drive letter that nobody is using for any other purpose if possible.

DVD/CD

Most modern computers have a DVD drive burner, or CD burner. You can use these to make backups by simply splitting your backup across a fair number of discs. I'll occasionally do this if I'm working on somebody else's computer that doesn't have a portable hard disk, and doesn't want to spend the money for one. You can buy a big box of DVDs for about $20, and that's usually sufficient to back up most machines. All you have to do is start a backup, and feed in the disks one at a time. This takes a while, but it doesn't really bog the machine down very much, so you can do other tasks while you're making a backup as long as you are not making substantial changes to what's on the disk.

Online Backups

I was very enamored with the idea of online backups when the first showed up on the scene. It seemed like the perfect scenario, where the backup would you be done automatically, effortlessly and painlessly, and the backups were offsite and someone else's responsibility so there was zero maintenance. I ran into problems with the first generation because the backup software just wasn't very reliable, and intended to cause other conflicts on their machine. It probably resolve this by now, but I also got tired of paying the monthly fee which over the course of the year would add up to more than a good portable hard disk would cost. While this strategy has some benefits for disaster recovery because the backups were offsite, I generally find that it doesn't work that well for me so I haven't done it for quite awhile.

There are starting to be a few services that offer a couple gigabytes of online storage free, and you might want to consider using one of those for your important documents or your daily backup. One big problem with the portable hard disk is that it doesn't really cover us for disaster recovery because the portable hard disk is in the same place as your computer. If someone steals your computer, they'll probably pick up the portable hard disk all they're at it, and similarly if your house burns down or gets flooded or something like that you'll be out of luck. That's the only thing that's really wrong with the portable hard disk backup strategy, and you may find that you want to use an online strategy to back up the things that are important or critical. For example, you can get 2 GB of storage free with Microsoft's Skydrive, And I think there are several other vendors offering very similar packages. If you're using a portable hard disk, you might want to consider using one of these to copy your Documents Folder or something like that, so that you can be sure to recover it in case of the disaster.

Network Backup

Many IT departments have a built-in system that automatically takes care of backing up your hard disk as long as it's turned on and connected the network at some particular time of the day. For corporate user, this is actually the ideal situation because her laptop is backed up using the same disaster recovery system as the rest of the network, and you don't have to worry about it. Sometimes this is taken care of automatically, and sometimes you have to contact your IT Dept and opt in to it.

Backup Styles

Once you have selected your backup medium, then you need to actually perform the backup. If you aren't intimately familiar with backups, you may find some of the terms a little confusing. This is unnecessary, because what you're trying to do is relatively simple once you understand what you're trying to accomplish. What you want to do is:

Create a Full Backup, which is the name implies is everything on your machine.
Create a Rescue Disk, which will need if your hard disk completely crashes.
Periodically, perform an Incremental Backup to back up just the things that have changed since you last full backup.
Occasionally, do another Full Backup to restart the cycle.

I'm not good walk you through step-by-step how to do this, because windows help already has instructions are very specific your machine. Open Help and Support Center, and search for "Backup". The specific steps vary from version to version, but as long as you know that you need to make a full backup, and in need to make a rescue disk, and you can work your way through this help topic and it will tell you exactly how to do it.

Restoring

I'm not going to go into how to restore the disks in detail, because that is covered pretty thoroughly in the help system. There really are only two types of recovery that you might be interested in:

If your machine crashes, or you remove something critical by mistake that you cannot recover with system recovery, then you may need to restore your entire hard disk. To do this, insert the rescue disk you created in the previous steps into the drive, reboot your machine, press the key you need to tell it to select and options, and then boot from the rescue disk. The rescue disk will walk you through the steps necessary to restore your machine.
More often, you'll want to recover specific files and/or folders. The steps for this change from system to system, but they're usually explained pretty thoroughly in the help system.

Disaster Recovery

One last word on the subject of backups. Do not confuse backup with disaster recovery. The backup is a part of the disaster recovery plan, but it's not the whole plan. For example, if your house burns down and older backups are sitting right next your computer, you will lose everything. If somebody steals your computer, and takes a portable hard disk along with it, you'll still have lost everything. There many different strategies for taking care of this. For example, you could back up your most critical files to some other place as mentioned above. For example, you might want to burn a backup to DVD and mail it to a friend or relative for safekeeping. Even better would be to use an online backup system for disaster recovery, and the portable hard disk for backup.

Even if you don't do a full backup for your disaster recovery plan, make periodic backups of your most important things offsite. Most users could get away with backing up My Documents, and your desktop. You can be slightly more aggressive by backing up C:\Documents and Settings in XP, and C:\Users in Vista or later. For most users, this is quite a bit smaller than your whole hard disk, but almost certain to have everything you care about. Naturally, if you keep your own folders of things that are important, you should back those up as well ? but I assume you know what those are.

Now is a good time to do a backup, because the next post is going to start swinging the big axe.

In For Everyone, For Geeks, Computer Fitness

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