Preserving Your Precious Data

Posted on: August 13th, 2008

Backup.

Most people only think of this when it’s too late. Hard drive crashed, data lost, many times irrecoverably.

A hard drive is the most likely component to fail in a computer. My experience confirms that. I had to replace more hard drives than any other parts in computers.

What can be done? How does it work? How much does it cost?

If you read further I’ll make an attempt to give you an overview and solutions that will suit your need and budget.

First let’s look at what the ideal backup would be:

It would have an infinite storage capacity
It would be very fast to back up and restore information
It would have the ability to restore any earlier stages of any file
It would be able to back up and restore not only your documents but your whole system

Now, let’s see what’s the case in the “real world”. But before I go further let’s clear up a very important concept. The measurement unit of information is “byte” which is approximately equivalent of one written letter. In the backup world the most common measurements are MegaByte, or MB, and GigaBye, or GB. 1MB of data is equivalent of about 1,000 pages of written text, or one picture made with a digital camera. 1GB is 1,000MB (or 1,024MB depending on which definition is being used) which is equivalent of about 250 songs in digital format.

Storage:

The situation on this is getting better each month with higher and higher capacity hard drives and other storage solutions getting available while prices are dropping. Here are the most common options for storage:

Tapes: This is a method that’s dying out. It’s slow, complicated, cannot be automated and unreliable. It’s still around at some places where it was installed when it was one of the most viable options.

Recordable CDs and DVDs: These are very cheap media for backup up data if you don’t have a large amount to back up and the data doesn’t need to be backed up frequently. It also cannot be set up on “autopilot” because a human is needed to put the CD/DVD in and take it out. The storage capacity of a CD is generally 700MB, while a recordable DVD can hold 4.7GB of information (or 8.5GB if you use a duble layer DVD – which is more expensive and not all burners can handle it). The cost of a recordable CD is around 15-20 cents. A recordable DVD is around 30 cents for single layer DVDs, or $1.5 – $3 for a duble layer DVD (clearly is not a very good choice – nearly 10X price for less than double capacity). And then the HD (High Definition) DVDs, and Blue Ray Disks are coming up with 15-60GB capacity – with the current price of a 25GB Blue Ray disk being around $13 and the burner for them at an astronomical $500 price range. But over time prices will come down on these equipment too. The CD/DVD market isn’t likely to go down on prices.

Hard Drives: There’s two main version of this – external and internal hard drives(meaning they are used inside a computer). I’d like to put them in as one because an external hard drive is nothing more than a case with some electronics put over an internal hard drive – so they are essentially the same thing. They have some very good qualities such as very fast operation, very low price/capacity ratio (around 25-50 cents/GB), ability to be rewritten as many times as needed. However they come with a great liability – as you recall I said “A hard drive is the most likely component to fail in a computer”. So you cannot fully trust them. There are solutions that decrease the probabilty of data loss by using multiple hard drives in combination which can withstand a loss of one, or more hard drive in the array without data being lost. However this also increase the cost too. Despite of this my favorite simple backup solution is using an external hard drive as a backup of the internal hard drive. The reason is that the chances are that both the external and internal hard drive failing at the same time are very, very slim. And because the external hard drive used far less often than the internal hard drive, it usually outlasts the internal drive several times (unless it is subjected to undue mechanical shock or extreme temperatures). And one of the best features about the backups to hard drives is that they can be put on autopilot – with occasional supervision they don’t need any action from the user to operate.

Flash Drives: These are the devices that you see everywhere. They are little, thumb-sized and they contain special memory chips that don’t lose their content when they are not powered. They are still in rapid growth of capacity (not size!) with current ones are at 16Gb with the price tag of about $140. So their price per capacity is around $8/GB which is a lot higher than the hard drives. But their advantage over hard drives is their extreme portability, small size and their resistance to mechanical shock. Because they don’t have any moving parts they are faster than hard drives (except for writing data – but I’m sure that will be fixed in the near future) and they last longer as there is no mechanical wear. Their main use is for transferring files between computers but they can be used as backup devices for the most important data. Because of their limited capacity they are usually not considered for backup purposes but with the rapid growth in technology they might be a good choice in the near future.

Online Backup: This is a technology that is going mainstream now with literally hundreds of companies offering online backup solutions. Because of the continous price drops in storage devices and the fierce competitive market these service providers now offer very affordable storage for your data. How does this work?
On the image above you can see a protion of a data center. These are climate controlled, continually monitored buildings which hosts hundreds or thousands of servers with high capacity drives in redundant arrays so there’s a very, very slim chance of any data loss ever. Many of these buildings are designed to withstand almost any natural or manmade disasters. When you subscribe to an online data backup service you will have a certain amount of that storage capacity at your disposal. You will also have a small software installed on your computer that is responsible for watching for changes of your files and backup them up by sending them over to the data center via the internet (in an encrypted form, of course), and for restore the files as needed.
Why is this good? The huge advantage of this is the total separation of your data and the backup. So even if all your computers and equipment are destroyed by fire, tornado, eathquake or even just plain stolen you still can get all your data recovered that you backed up. The only disadvantage of this approach that I know of is the relatively slow backup and restore, compared to the above mentioned methods. The solution to this lies in a combination of methods – probably best one is a local external hard drive backup and an online backup. This way you can quickly recover any files needed but you can have the piece of mind that whatever happens your data won’t get lost.
To give you how affordable these servics go: you can get a 250GB online storage capacity for about $50-$60 per year.

The future: The above picture is from a website named holocube.net. I believe this technology will be the future of storage. Basically all of our current storage technology based on 2 dimensional technology (disks, tapes and single layer memory chips). The logical improvement is moving to the third dimension. The holographic storage is such a technology and although it’s still in its infancy it holds a lot of potentials. Probably in the next couple of decades we will see these devices getting out of the laboratories and into the markets. They will provide virtually unlimited storage with thousand or million times bigger capacity than the highest capacity hard drive today. What will we be doing with that much storage capacity? Well I’m sure somebody will come up with ideas on how to fill those devices too.

The Backup Methods

Backup is one of the oldest problem in Information Technology so there’s a tremendous amount of software, solutions and methods. But I want to just give the basics to keep things simple.

Full backup and mirroring: This method is the oldest one. It simply consist of copying everything from one location to another one. A special case of this is called mirroring which is setup where two or more hard drives are so connected that they all hold the same content, every change is made to all the hard drives.

Incremental Backup: Another classic technique. Incremental just means that only the changes will be backed up. The backup program goes through the files to be backed up and determines which one changed since the last backup and backs those up. An newer, improved technique of this is called block level incremental backup. The difference is that this technique doesn’t look at files as units but breaks them up into smaller parts and checks whether those parts changed. An example: you have a very large spreadsheet, you open the file and change one number in it and save it. The size of the file is maybe 10MB but there was only a couple of bytes changed in it. The block level incremental backup only saves the small portions that have changed. This technique got developed mainly for online and networked backups because there it’s crucial to decrease the amount of data transmitted over the networks as much as possible.

Versioned backup: This is the time machine of backups. A backup software that provides versioned backup will let you recover earlier versions of the same file. I give you an example: you working on a book and type up some pages every day, the file is backed up every day. Let say on Tuesday you decide to delete some paragraphs. The file gets saved. On Thursday you realize that you actually need those paragraphs for your story. If you have a versioned backup then you have an easy job: go back to the Monday version of the file, restore it to a different location, open it and copy and paste those paragraphs into your latest version. If you have only a regular backup then you would get into a tight spot because you could only go back one day so the only solution you would have is to rewrite those paragraphs from your memory. This could be a very important feature in applications which tend to produce data corruptions which are not always noticeable right away.

Single Instance Storage: This is a relatively new technology and a very useful one. It eliminates the duplicate files (or file portions if it’s implemented at a block level) and could save significant amount of storage space. Imagine this: there’s five computer in a company which you want to fully back up to a central location. With the normal backup methods you would have to store every file of every one of these five computers. With single instance storage (SIS) only the unique files are stored, no duplicates at all. It could cut down the required storage to one third of the full size easily. Many online storage solutions use this technology also to reduce network traffic and the storage needs.

Full system backup: This is not a separete technology but it’s an important concept to clarify. When you are working on your computer there are several files on the hard drive that are not accessible for normal access because they are being actively used. For example the registry files in Windows – where all the settings are stored. A full system backup software uses special techniques to be able to save every file on your system. This is vital in order to do a system recovery after, let’s say, a hard drive failure. If your hard drive fails and you need to replace it and you don’t have a full system backup then you need to reinstall Windows, all applications, configure those applications, etc — many, many hours of work and you will never be able to get back the exact same look and feel of your system. With a full system backup you can just get it started, lay back and when it’s finished you get the same system back.

Software that you can use

Now, I’d like to give you a list of software that I found to be workable:

SyncBack: This is my favorite. It’s small, relatively easy to configure, free but still has a lot of options and capabilities. It’s good for simple backups without versioning, or for syncronizing, that is, making two folders have the same content. It has scheduling capabilites and no limitations built in. You can download it here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_syncback/

DriveImage XML: This is a freeware that is able to create full system backup. It’s for more advanced users and it cannot be easily set up to do the backups automatically. But it has the nice feature to being able to do the full backup without having to restart the computer and it’s very fast on backing up any hard drives. You can download it here: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/DriveImageXML.html

Genie Games Backup: This is a free backup program from Genie-Soft that is very user friendly and aesthetic looking and does a good job of backing up. Because this is a free version of their more advanced softwares it has some limitations (like max 2GB of backup per job). Their more advanced products are also worth checking out: www.genie-soft.com

Acronis TrueImage: It’s not a free software but it’s definitely worth the money. It’s easy to use and has the one of the most comprehensive set of features. It can do full system backups and restores which is easy to do even for not computer savvy people. Their website is: www.acronis.com

Mozy & Carbonite: These are two of the hundreds of online backup solutions. These two have very resonable prices while providing large storage. Mozy has a little bit better security because it lets you use your own encryption keys so you are the only one who can access them. Carbonite stores the encryption keys on their servers and the access to data is with passwords – they say that in the future they plan to provide the option for users to use their own encryption keys. Their websites are:

www.mozy.com

www.carbonite.com

Conclusion

Data is important and losing data is not only frustrating but could result in very serious financial loss. With modern technology having a proper backup system is very affordable and there’s no real reason not to have backups. Please contact us to discuss which backup solution would be best suited for you .

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