This week’s “How to” article is on setting up your own automatic backup. It’s something that’s long been a bit of a thorn in the side of many Windows users (and we’ll be focussing on Windows in this piece for reasons I’ll outline in a moment), but the fact is that it isn’t actually all that difficult to set up an automatic backup if you’re willing to spend a little time getting it all together.

The problem with hard drives is that, eventually, they fail...

The fact is that most of us know that keeping an up-to-date backup is, in this day and age, not really optional; it’s a “must do.” The problem is that keeping an up-to-date backup can also seem like bit of a headache to set up, and since it never seems important until just after a drive has failed, at which point you’re left with nothing to back up, it tends for far too many people to be something that never gets done.

The reason we’re focussing on automatic backups in this piece is because of the fact that it seems as though a majority of users set up a backup and intend to keep it as up to the minute as possible before gradually sinking back into data-safety complacence.

We’ve given a few bits and pieces a bash, but there’s one application that managed automatic backups well enough that we thought it deserved a recommendation…

Acronis True Image:

Acronis True Image is something that I was originally pointed to by Ryan, from our RMA department, a man whose obsession with keeping everything backed up seems only to be matched with his insistence that everyone should be able to do a comprehensive wipe of their data before they sell a PC.

Anyway, Ryan’s obsession with security aside, Acronis is a relatively easy to use package that should keep everyone well looked after. Acronis can be set to work as often as you decide you’d like it to, depending on how you arrange its calendar. The down side is that you won’t be able to say, “Backup every Wednesday and Friday” with any degree of ease, since it will want you to work with dates, but it’s still not a massive headache to set up a fairly regular automated backup.

Acronis makes the whole process as simple as possible while offering solid functionality

There’d be an awful lot more to this description, except that True Image really does take the sting out of setting up a reliable backup… there’s not too much to be done other than sit down and name your backup, at which point it’ll work away on the rest itself. It’s fairly straight-forward once you actually sit down with the software.

The other big plus, apart from automatic backups, is something that Acronis will allow you to do a backup directly to a network drive. While this might not seem as though it applies to everyone, it’s so easy to setup, and the cost so low, we’d consider it a practically essential part of setting up a completely automatic backup.

Acronis is also visual enough that you shouldn't need to spend too much time boring through menus

The fact is that as soon as you have to start plugging things in, you’re adding effort. While you can run your backups straight to an external hard drive, the fact is that for those of us who work primarily from notebooks and netbooks, that necessitates sitting down at a desk and letting it get itself together for a backup. The option to backup straight to a network drive removes an awful lot of the fuss.

Network Attached Storage:

As we said above, plugging something in is just one more step between you and your automatic backup, and it’s a step that can be removed if you’re willing to spend a little on some network attached storage [NAS] kit to keep you well looked after.

You can pick up a very well reviewed D-Link NAS for less than €150

Before we continue, we should point out that there are all kinds of uses for a decent NAS setup, keeping a backup being just one of them. Moreover, you won’t need to use your NAS as a backup machine exclusively; you’ll be equally able to set it up as a media server or whatever else you’d like, and it should house your automatic backups without any more prompting from you… as long as you keep on eye on your free space and how much you let both backups and media consume.

Anyway, before we get entirely ahead of ourselves, a NAS setup will essentially just present itself as a drive (or a series of drives, depending on how you set it up) on your network. If you plug it into a wireless router then the various different machines around your household network should pick it all up just fine. From there, it’s just a question of setting up True Image (or any other backup software you’ve opted to go with) so that it’ll point towards those network drives…

The real bonus here is that a NAS setup will let you backup over your wireless network, meaning that all you really have to do to let your notebook automatically update your backup is remember to keep it charging overnight and schedule your backups accordingly.

It’s a relatively simple thing to arrange and get working, but it can be a little time consuming. Still, the ability to rest assured that your backups will look after themselves as long as you leave your machine within shouting distance of your house is a fairly welcome one.

If you’re suitably impressed then you might want to check out D-Link’s DNS323 NAS box, which comes very highly recommended by those of our customers who’ve bought it and comes in at around the €147 mark.

In the coming week or two we’ll be posting another How To on building your own NAS box… so these two should talk to each other nicely.

Mac Users:

For Mac users, things are both a little simpler and a little more complicated. Setting your machine up to manage a backup automatically is relatively simple, and Mac OS (from 10.5 upwards) will allow you to do so via the Time Machine function.

Still, you’ll find that Time Machine is generally unhappy when it comes to talking to external devices, because it prefers everything to be in its own format (HFS, unless we’re very much mistaken). While it’s not too hard a thing to do to reformat a drive into HFS (simply plug in the drive, open Disk Utility and select “Erase” click “format” and then select “Mac OS Extended (journaled)” and it’ll sort that out for you), it does wipe the contents of that drive, so you’ll have to be working with an empty drive to begin with.

Disk Utility will let you format to Mac OS Extended (journaled) as necessary

From there though, you can back up to that drive as part of a NAS if you’re so inclined. While Apple will advocate the use of a Time Capsule, the fact is that that’s essentially what the Time Capsule amounts to, an admittedly very good looking NAS setup.

Still, Time Machine itself is relatively easy to use, though we’d advise against using its “Hourly Backups” option, since it just seems to be a little bit over the top.

Keeping it Elsewhere:

One of the things that people tend not to really think about once they’ve got their backup is that you really shouldn’t be keeping your backup and your original too close together. While it might seem as though a home backup could probably afford to be a little less secure than one you’d use for business, the fact remains that you’d do well to store your home backup somewhere offsite.

Even Google's cloud storage options favour the 'Post us a HDD' option

There are a few ways to do it, and they range from the online to the offline, but the fact is that online backups are a topic all their own. Indeed, if you’re at all interested you’d do well to take a look at Cian McMahon’s piece on online backups; it gives a decent and well rounded impression of what’s available at the moment as well as just how well you can expect them to perform.

The other, exceedingly simple, piece of advice comes to us through an engineer who’s no stranger to the Komplett office whose stock piece of advice whenever anyone is considering a large scale data transfer is:

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a car boot full of tapes.”

Admittedly, in most cases this is going to be translated into something along the lines of,

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a hard drive in a coat pocket,”

but the point still stands. The easiest, and often cheapest, way to keep an off-site backup is to just physically copy your backup to another disc or an external drive and bring it somewhere else

Closing:

So, when all’s said and done, what have we learned? Well, fundamentally that once you’ve set it up, an automated backup is a pretty much vital utility that should essentially run itself, without any real interference from you.

Disks will still fail, nothing is foolproof, but having a backup is safer

Of course, how secure your backup is will always, to some extent, come down to where it is. If your house is prone to flooding, then you’re always going to be better off keeping your drive elsewhere once you’ve done your weekly backup. Nothing is ever going to be entirely fail-proof, but the odds are against multiple drives in multiple locations failing all at once.

Will making all of your backups automatic mean you’ll always have an up to date backup just as something goes wrong? Likely not, but it will ensure you have a recoverable backup up to the point of your most recent update, whether that’s a week or a month ago. No system is perfect, but it’s infinitely better to have something in place that takes a little while to set up and has relatively little upkeep than to just hope that nothing goes wrong.

If all of this seems overkill, well, maybe it is, but it’s essentially the setup that I’m running at the moment, and for the most part it means I simply don’t have to worry about data loss. Should a drive fail, I’m never further from a complete restore than the delivery time for a new drive.