If you backup, you are one step away from a disaster. If you backup often, make it several steps. Learn how often to backup and how to make your own backup schedule.
Backup often
Surely, one can backup to whatever backup medium he wants, but if one does not stick to a backup schedule, most of the efforts, aimed at storing or securing the important information will be spent in vain.
Determining how often to backup
First, we need to figure out what we are backing up, as the backup schedule largely depends on the size of the backup data:
- small amounts of data (important work documents) can be backed up often, hourly, daily and at least weekly
- medium amounts of files (e-mail messages, project documents and work documents) can be backed up daily, weekly or monthly (at least)
- large amounts of data (e-mail messages, project documents, data files, settings files, etc) can be backed up weekly or monthly
- huge amounts of data (all of the above plus images, audios - mp3s and videos - mpegs) can be backed up monthly or yearly
- total backup (a backup of all the data on the computer) can be backed up weekly, monthly or yearly
Which software to use?
Which backup schedule to choose is up to you, but you will also need to choose a backup software to do that and set up the time when to perform a scheduled backup.
First of all, the backup software needs to support the backup medium you want to backup (CD, DVD, FTP, LAN, external USB or flash drive, etc). Next, you select the files you want to backup, choose the time you want to backup and leave it there. Some programs can run as a service and don’t need to be launched, but some need to be running when you want the backup to be run. At any case, the computer has to be on at the time of your backup schedule.
7 responses so far ↓
Fair Backup » Backup to DVD easily, efficiently and securely // Jun 13, 2006 at 5:25 am
[…] when backing up a small set of files to a DVD-/+RW often, you can schedule a backup for convenience […]
Fair Backup » Learn how to backup data files: why, what, how and where // Jun 13, 2006 at 5:27 am
[…] The rule is simple - the more important the document is and the more often it changes - the more often you need to back it up. So, documents need to be backed up more often than your photo collection, as the latter does not get changed but only updated. Normally, backing up your data files daily should be enough, but you can also backup your most important hourly just to make sure they are safe. Read more about backup scheduling. […]
Fair Backup » Backup with WebDAV: use the new medium wisely // Jun 13, 2006 at 5:29 am
[…] to save space on the destination WebDAV server. del.icio.us - Digg it - Furl - reddit - Spurl - Yahoo MyWeb- […]
» Offsite backup versus remote online (FTP) backup - Fair Backup // Jul 24, 2006 at 11:36 pm
[…] Disadvantages - you pay a lot if you backup huge amounts of data (hundreds of GB or TB) - if the remote server crashes, you lose the data (unless you get it recovered, which is unlikely) - sometimes backups take a while to proceed and it may eat your time (unless you schedule them) […]
» Top 10 reasons not to backup - Fair Backup // Oct 10, 2006 at 5:00 pm
[…] 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. […]
Backup to an external hard disk drive | Fair Backup // Nov 26, 2006 at 10:54 pm
[…] set up a backup scheduler: this way you won’t have to operate your backups manually. E-mail notifications of successful or unfinished backups are helpful, too. […]
For how long do you need to keep your backups? | Fair Backup // Jan 16, 2007 at 2:35 am
[…] 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). […]
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