Computer Back-Up, How To

After losing a hard drive a few months back, I learned a little bit about backups.  Fortunately, I didn't have to learn alone.  I'm fortunate to know really smart security professionals.  A couple of them were kind enough to help me get back up and running and to share their thoughts regarding an inexpensive and stronger back-up system than I previously had in place.

Back-up suggestions from Matt Parsons an information security consultant.

The hard drive on my computer just crashed yesterday and I was really glad that I did two things. The first thing I did was create a baseline image of my hard drive in July of 2009 with software called Acronis.  The software for home users cost $200 dollars. I am not a spoke person for any of these companies and I am not getting royalties for plugging their products.

This baseline hard drive was clean and had most of the software I use to conduct daily business. This was a full sector by sector backup. The 320 gig laptop hard drive that I bought cost me $200 dollars.

I then used an online incremental daily back up service for all of my data. This cost me around ten dollars a month for a 150 gigs of online encrypted space.

I was a little nervous about the recovery but it was successful and almost seamless. It only took approximately an hour to be back and running fully. All I had to do was remove the bad hard drive with a screw driver and replace it with the backup hard drive and turn the computer on and cross my fingers.

I then logged on with my user name and password to my backup account and recovered the files that I needed. No files where lost because the last full backup was the night before my hard drive crashed.

If any of you have had a hard drive crash and did not back it up how long would you be out of business? If I couldn’t recover this data this would have cost me a few thousand dollars and a pit at the bottom of my stomach. The spare hard drives that had ghost images of my computer on it, definitely had the right return on investment for this problem and situation. Hard drives crashing is not a matter of if, but rather when. I think the total cost of this backup solution was $600 dollars.

I recommend that anyone that does business have a ghost image of their baseline hard drive to hot swap in case of an emergency and an online incremental backup solution like Idrive or Carbonite.

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