How do I use hardware to back up my computer?
If the hard drive fails, it’s easy to lose precious photos, videos and emails if they’re only stored on one computer. But there is a way of preventing this from happening to you – by making sure you have backed them up elsewhere. Therefore if the worst happens, you have copies of the lost files safely stored away.
Hard drives fail. If that happens, it’s usually expensive and sometimes impossible to recover all the lost files. But there are several ways to ensure that your precious photos, videos, emails and other files survive a computer disaster. You can back them up to CD or DVD discs, to external hard drives, and even to online services.
There are two main approaches to backing up your computer. The first, and possibly the most common, is to make copies of important files. The second is to back up your whole PC hard drive. This makes it easier to recover from a disaster, but uses more space.
Backing up files
It never hurts to take security copies of important files, such as photos and financial data. One cheap and easy way to do this is to ’burn’ folders full of these files to blank CD-R or DVD discs.
Backups need to be reliable so don’t buy the cheapest discs, and don’t use rewritable ones (eg CD-RW). Also, always use the ’write at once’ option and burn a whole disc, even if it’s not full. When you are saving data, it is not the time to save pennies. Label the CDs or DVDs and store them safely.
There are some drawbacks to using these kinds of discs – the main one being that you need a lot of them to back up a big hard drive. A CD-R, for instance, only holds 700 megabytes of data. There is hope for the future, though. A Blu-ray backup disc holds up to 25GB, and potentially much more. However, Blu-ray still looks as if it may be a bit too specialist and expensive for the mass market.
External hard drives
Fortunately there is an affordable solution - the external hard drive (EHD). This is exactly the same as an internal hard drive, except it’s packed in a separate box. It’s very easy to copy files from your internal drive to an external one, although it can take a while. (If you have Microsoft Windows 7 or Vista, try using the built-in Robocopy, which is short for ’Robust copy’.) Usually, copying is done via a USB 2.0 cable, since most PCs now have at least one USB 2.0 port.
Remember that external hard drives fail just as fast as internal hard drives, and that having backups means having at least two copies of everything. If you move files from your PC to an external hard drive to free up space, you still only have one copy. That’s not a backup.
If you buy a big external hard drive, you can have it ’mirror’ directories on your PC so that they are always backed up. Centred System's Second Copy is a sound option, and one of the simplest to use is Microsoft’s free SyncToy v2.0.
An alternative to backing up selected files is to take a ’snapshot’ of the whole hard drive. Many programs can do this, though the current favourite is Acronis True Image. The latest version, Acronis True Image Home 2010, includes Nonstop Backup, which provides a continuous backup. Free alternative disk imaging programs include Runtime’s DriveImage XML (free for personal use), Easeus Todo Backup and Paragon Backup & Recovery.
Network storage servers
Today, many homes have several computers, so people are starting to move to the sort of systems used in businesses. The leading example is NAS (Network Attached Storage), which allows people with different computers to save files on a shared stack of hard drives. You can now buy NAS drives for not much more than the cost of an external hard drive.
Apple offers its own NAS drives under the Time Capsule label. They are expensive in terms of the storage they provide, but are very easy to use and have a strong appeal to Mac users.
Another expensive but versatile backup solution is a Windows Home Server, such as the HP MediaSmart Server EX490. This has a similar specification to a desktop PC but works as a dedicated media server and backup system. It can handle several internal hard drives plus external hard drives, and will back up both PCs and Macs.
People generally seem reluctant to spend money on backing up their files because - as with insurance - there’s no real benefit unless something goes wrong. But think how much you’d pay to get your photos back if you lost them all in a hard drive crash. That might encourage you to spend a bit more.
Jack Schofield
Jack Schofield is a technology journalist and blogger who covered IT for the Guardian from 1983 to 2010. Before specialising in computing, he edited a number of photography magazines and books.
