{"id":839,"date":"2009-02-28T16:27:17","date_gmt":"2009-02-28T21:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/?p=839"},"modified":"2012-04-17T12:37:35","modified_gmt":"2012-04-17T17:37:35","slug":"backup-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2009\/02\/28\/backup-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Backup Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

More and more our personal and professional information is stored in digital format.\u00a0 This is great because we can easily make copies and backups of our information and prevent accidental loss.\u00a0 The reality of the situation is that many people do not make regular backups of digital data and often lose everything when one hard drive crashes.\u00a0 Backups take time and most people do not take the time every day to manually make copies of important files.\u00a0 Personally, I cannot spare the time to do backups every day.\u00a0 That is why I have automated the entire process and it happens either in real time, or while I sleep.\"Quantum<\/a><\/p>\n

When asked, I tell people that my computer does more while I sleep than most computers do all day long.\u00a0 Truthfully, my computer probably does more while I sleep than 90% of the people I know do at any time.\u00a0 I did not pull that number out of the air.\u00a0 Over the years I have determined nine out of ten people that I know do not backup computer files regularly.\u00a0 I know this because I am the person that gets the call when their hard drives fail.\u00a0 In 2008 I had more than a dozen of these calls.\u00a0 They always start with, \u201cI know I should be backing my files up, but\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Finish that with some story involving a lack of \u201ctime.\u201d<\/p>\n

To take the time constraint out of the equation I have a two-pronged approach to my backups.\u00a0 I start with Microsoft Mesh (blog post here<\/a> and here<\/a>).\u00a0 I have four computers (office, Dell laptop, Macbook, home desktop) on my mesh.\u00a0 When I create or update a file on any one of these computers, the file is automatically pushed to all other computers in my Mesh.\u00a0 In addition, a copy is uploaded to my Mesh web page.<\/p>\n

Here is a typical example of how the process works.\u00a0 I use my Dell laptop in class.\u00a0 Many times I have edited a PowerPoint (added or updated a slide) immediately before class starts.\u00a0 As soon as I hit \u201csave\u201d on my Dell laptop, the updated file is copied to my office computer and to my Macbook and desktop computer at my house.\u00a0 Without the Mesh, I would have at least two copies (one on my Dell laptop and another everywhere else) of that PowerPoint file and at some point I would have to figure out which one is the \u201cbest\u201d one to use in the future.<\/p>\n

There is a downside to the Mesh.\u00a0 When I updated that PowerPoint file, the old version of that file was destroyed forever on all four of my computers and replaced with the new version.\u00a0 This is why I have a second automated backup of everything.\u00a0 This is a full backup of my data files stored in a classic grandfather-father-son rotation.\u00a0 By this, I mean I have three separate and complete sets of backup files.\u00a0 I create a complete backup on Monday.\u00a0 On Tuesday another full backup is created in such a way that Monday\u2019s files are not touched.\u00a0 Finally, on Wednesday a third complete backup set is created leaving both Monday and Tuesday sets intact.\u00a0\u00a0 On Thursday the process starts over and the Monday set is erased to make room for the Thursday backup.\u00a0 Friday replaces Tuesday and Saturday replaces Wednesday.\u00a0 I do not run backups on Sunday because I do not normally work on Sunday.\u00a0 More importantly, I have three external hard drives and adding Sunday would mean purchasing a fourth drive.<\/p>\n

At one time I used Cobain Backup<\/a> to automate my backups at night.\u00a0 Last year I switched to Microsoft\u2019s SyncToy<\/a>.\u00a0 Cobain and SyncToy are both free.\u00a0 To make this process work, I did have to spend a little money.\u00a0 I bought three USB hard drives.\u00a0 You can pick up 250 GB hard drives online for as little as $50 each.\u00a0 The size of the drives you need is dependent on how much data you have to backup.\u00a0 I use three 500 GB drives for my backups.\u00a0 On any given night I backup about 180 GB (docs, databases, photos, music and videos) and that amount is growing all the time.<\/p>\n

SyncToy does not have a built-in scheduling tool, but the operating system scheduling tool can be used to automate sync\u2019ing.\u00a0 In the Help file of SyncToy read the section called \u201cLearn How to Schedule SyncToy.\u201d\u00a0 I switched to SyncToy to make recovery easier.\u00a0 All the files are copied over \u201cas-is\u201d to my external hard drives.\u00a0 Cobain created one big archive file which made recovering a single file more complicated.\u00a0 SyncToy also has a \u201ccontribute\u201d mode.\u00a0 Using this does not actually wipeout older backups.\u00a0 The software compares what is already backed up and adds anything new.\u00a0 If I delete a file from my desktop, the file is not deleted from the sync\u2019ed hard drive.\u00a0 Because of this, any deleted files will still be on the backup even after the three-day recycle period has started.<\/p>\n

The beauty of my system is the amount of my time it takes.\u00a0 Backup files are created for me as I work (Mesh) without any interaction on my part.\u00a0 While I sleep full duplicate archives (SyncToy) are created for me.\u00a0 Each morning, the first thing I do on my computer is check the previous night\u2019s backup to make sure they were created.\u00a0 It takes less than a minute to do that check and that is the total amount of time I spend on backups.\u00a0 It is time well spent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More and more our personal and professional information is stored in digital format.\u00a0 This is great because we can easily make copies and backups of our information and prevent accidental loss.\u00a0 The reality of the situation is that many people … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[51,133,47,134],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","category-efficiency","tag-backup","tag-hard-drive","tag-mesh","tag-synctoy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}