Backup Your Computer!!!

 

Backups are a critical part of today’s society. Yet so few people backup on a regular basis. Ask yourself this: “If my computer crashed today, what would I miss?” If you have financial data (such as quicken) or digital photos, or e-mail addresses that are not easily replaced, you should be backing up your computer on a regular basis, such as weekly. Some of the reasons you should backup your data include:

1. Hard drives do crash, especially on laptops.

2. Your digital pictures are not replaceable if your Hard Drive crashes.

3. Other data such as Address books and e-mail are not easily replaced.

4. Even just bringing your computer in for technical support, there is a chance that they may wipe out your hard drive.

5. If your computer crashes and won’t boot up, you may need to reformat your drive to bring it back to factory settings. This process may delete all your data.

6. Lightening strikes can take out computers. Even surge protection may not be good enough.

 

There are several methods to backup your critical data on your computer. All of them have their plusses and minuses. But the most important key is to actually do it.  Here’s a list of a few ways to backup:

1. Copy data from one computer to another computer.

This method is the method that I personally use for two reasons. First, it’s very quick copying data over the network. Secondly, I can have access to a much larger storage medium than CD’s or DVD’s. I backup my laptop to a desktop at home that has 400GB of hard drive space. The downside is that I don’t have redundancy if there were a fire, or if the backup drive crashes.

 

2. Burn CDs or DVDs of your data. This is by far the cheapest method, especially if you use CD-RW or DVD-RW of some format. You can make multiple copies and keep several sets at work, and at home. But, if your data is larger than what fits on one disk, you’ll need to spend time swapping disks when backing up.

 

3. Use an external USB or Firewire backup drive. These external drives run under $100 nowadays, and have plenty of space for most people. They usually come with backup software as well and can be as easy as pressing 1 button to do backups. This is probably the best solution for most people.

 

4. Use an Online storage service. With this method, you can copy your data to some computer backup service over the internet. They house the storage and keep controls over their backup systems. Good for redundancy, but there are downsides. One, they charge a monthly fee. That can get expensive quick, especially if you consider that you can buy an external 100GB drive (#3) for under $100. Secondly, someone else has access to your data. Not that anything would happen, but it could.

 

5. Have multiple hard drives in one computer. This method requires mounting a second internal drive inside your existing desktop computer. (it won’t work on laptops as there is no space for a second drive) Then just copy one hard drive to the other hard drive at extremely high speeds. The main drawback is if that computer fails, both drives could be lost. It would be good for fending off certain types of failures such as 1 hard drive crash, or Windows XP failing to load, but if lightening strikes and blows through the power supply, you could lose both drives. But, it’s still better than no backup at all.

 

Factors to consider when putting together a backup plan:

1. You should have at least 2 sets of backups. With 2 sets, if your computer fails while you are running a backup, then hopefully the other backup set is usuable.

2. You should have at least 1 backup set off-site. This could mean rotating a set of backup disks to the office, or a friends house.

3. You should consider how often you should backup your data. If you can lose a week of changes, then a weekly backup would work. If every day is very important, then daily backups is key.

 

 

My take on this would be:

 

I tend to lean toward the USB backup devices such as Maxtor OneTouch. These can also have an automatic scheduled backup, or configured so that you just press the button on the device. Since they run only about $100 for a 100gb drive, they're inexpensive. And you can backup multiple computers, or carry it from location to location.

 

I also tend to recommend that people do a backup by copying files, rather than creating a backup image. That way, you can read the files from ANY computer without installing the software. Sure it takes a bit more space, but since space is sooo cheap nowadays...

 

 

Getting more performance out of your computer:

 

Most CPU speeds are more than ample to keep up with the software apps. It's other bottlenecks in systems that slow things down. Lack of available memory is the biggest culprit, along with hard drive transfer rate, and shared video memory. Knowing where your bottlenecks are allows you to manage the problem, or at least understand why things may be slow.

 

Nowadays, one should have at least 512MB of ram for Windows XP. I would go higher, either 768MB or 1GB. RAM is very inexpensive. I run 1.2GB of ram on my laptop.

 

7200RPM drives have faster transfer rates than 5400RPM or 4200RPM drives. That’s because the drive is spinning faster, and therefore reading data faster. Simple choice.

 

Separate video memory has been a huge factor in computing speed, but is lesser so now (if your machine is a core duo). I always use a freeway analogy:

 

Let's say you have a 4-lane freeway and you are moving data between the RAM and the CPU. That'll be just fine. There may be a bit of congestion now and then, but for the most part it's fine. But now, let's add the traffic between the graphics card and the CPU on the same 4-lane freeway. Now, any time you are doing graphics (any change to the display such as switching windows, or even typing), that data has to compete on the same freeway.

 

So, if you get a machine that has it's own dedicated video memory, it's like adding a separate 4-lane freeway just for the graphics card. You can see that this would have a huge impact on overall system performance with this seemingly small change. This is true on both desktops and laptops. Unfortunately not many laptops have dedicated video memory.

 

That being said, nowadays, with core duo processors, the bus speeds have increased enough so that there isn't as much of a performance hit. It's like the freeways are now 8-lane freeways. It still does help to have 2 separate 8 lane freeways, but not as much as before.