Fair Backup

Backup encryption is something rarely thought about, as “Whatever can happen to my backups?”. Let’s see if it is really true.

Sure, if you backup to your own external hard disk drive, you may not fear, if you keep your drive safe (with you, at home, or in a bank cell). However, even if you keep your HDD in a car or at work, you’d rather encrypt your backups, in case your external hard disk drive (or a USB flash drive) is stolen.

Normally, just scheduling your backups is a good thing. But for how long do you need to store your backup files?

Of course, everything depends on your backup schedule and on the backup medium you use. If you backup every day, you’d rather backup daily during a week, and then only keep weekly and monthly backups (and the recent week ones, of course).

As you know, backup isn’t something you rush doing every day in the morning. Here is a list of things you may think of not to run your backup.

Backup will eat my free time

Yes, you only have your own amount of years and you don’t want to spend an hour a week on backing up your data. Setup a backup schedule, then.

Sure, you may think that you don’t need to have a second copy of your files. Noone will steal your computer, external hard disk, a flash drive or there won’t be a fire (or flood) in the house or office. Right.

Apart from simply using backup programs, there are other methods you can use to backup your data.

Disk image backup

A hard disk drive image backup method saves the whole partition in a compressed file for you to later restore it, in case you need a backup. This method isn’t as elegant and fast as selecting files for your backups, but it works if you need to backup a lot of data often.

Naturally, if you already decided to backup, you may want to backup what you need. But what really do you need to backup?

It goes without saying that you need to backup files that you update often, such as work documents, Outlook e-mail messages, etc. This will ensure that your work and important information can be recovered in case something happens. Work documents and such should rather be backed up with incremental backup.

It has been long been said that storing your backup somewhere else is the way to keep your backups if your house burns, gets robbed or you have forgotten your backups in your car (which was stolen) or your laptop gets a new owner unvoluntarily. So do you store the backups offsite (as your DVDs, external USB drives) or backup to some remote FTP server?

Flash and external USB hard disk drives are one of the most popular when backing up fairly large amounts of data, and for a reason. But when do you need to backup to a flash USB drive or to an external hard disk drive?

No, really, can you buy only one license of some backup software to backup every piece of data you have at home? Read on how.

First of all, you’ll need to connect your computers in a local area network (LAN). Then you need to share the files on each computer

Ultimately, there are two sets of backup software: free or shareware (paid software). Which one do you want to use for your backups?

Basically, it all comes down to how bad you need to backup and how you want to backup. If you backup once a month and you don’t necessarily worry about losing your files, you can either backup manually or use some free backup program.