Backup Backup Backup

Yup I said it three times, because with backups once is never enough.

For home I take three backups of my files

• Local direct mirror on a different hard drive in the same PC- if the primary drive fails I have all my files just as there were before.
• The mirror to a remote site - if the PC dies or is destroyed and takes the primary and secondary drives with it, then I have all my files on a remote site.
• Local incremental on the same drive as the mirror - if I accidentally delete something, this is where I go to get it back.

All of this isn't perfect, but its a doddle to get working at home and needs pretty much zero management.

Note I'd never rely on this level of backup for a companies data, but this is home, its my data, and how often do you remember to change backup destinations and swap them offsite?

Continue reading after the break on how to set this up

Identify whats important to you

First off identify all the locations you need to protect. Personally I don't backup music, it is not content I have created. I can re rip my CDs or re download my purchases, or worst case re purchase the songs if I really miss them.

I do backup anything I have created, this is mainly photographs and videos, but also documents, code etc.

Mirror this data

Once you know what you are backing up you need a secondary local drive as a destination. For my this is another internal hard drive. But it could be a USB flash drive, a NAS box, etc.


The local mirror is performed with a batch file running robocopy. Its simple, its basic, its easy to understand and debug. Also I don't need any software to access the mirrored files as they are not converted into some proprietary format.

Get if off site

The destination for the above is where I set Microsoft OneDrive to sync, I also disable this during the day so If I add 4GB of photos my internet connection isn't swamped until around midnight.

Protect yourself from yourself i.e. accidental modification/deletion.

Local incremental are provided by crashplan (http://www.code42.com/crashplan/). Please note I also store a copy of the current executable with the backups not inside the backups. Should I loose the machine I might need to reinstall the software to get to the backups, its not good relying on re-downloading as it might not be there anymore or be a different version.

Its also worth looking at http://www.duplicati.com/ to perform the same job, or get your incremental backups to an offsite provider. However those files offsite wont be the separate images, just some really big files, that may day days or weeks to download so you can test your restore process.

Test your restore process

Get a blank machine, not yours. Be that a friends laptop or something from a car boot, it doesn't really matter for now. It will matter when the time comes though, so don't skip this step. Next time you try it will be because your data is gone, so either your PC is toast, or worse your whole house, this would not be a good time to find out all the pictures of your family are also now gone.

Take a copy of your backup to this machine, now try and access your files. Whats that, your files use a program thats not installed on this machine so now you can open <that random house plan done in an old CAD program.poo> file anymore! better revisit step one Identify whats important to you.