Most people may think that having two layers of backup is going to be expensive or not necessary. That is not true. Services and software are much cheaper than they were in the past. As far as being necessary just wait until you have a single hard drive crash or a operating system go south on you and the only solution is to have the Geek Squad indiscriminately wipe your hard drive clean without even asking. All of those MP3's that you legally downloaded or resume that took three hours to build are now gone.
Ok. On two the good stuff. For a home user I would recommend a two fold backup system as follows:
- Acronis True Image Home Edition $49.99 - http://www.acronis.com/
- External USB 500 gb Hard drive to store your image backups. $139 - http://www.tigerdirect.com
- Mozy Home $4.99 per month unlimited data backup - http://mozy.com/
- Install Acronis on your computer to make an exact copy of your computer as it sits. Create the Acronis boot disk. (Done from Acronis in the start menu) Acronis can schedule or manually backup the computer while it is running. You want to let it do it's job while you are not in the middle of yours. Why would you want to run an image backup? Let's say you have a hard drive failure. You would go out and buy a replacement hard drive put the new hard drive in your computer. Boot the Acronis boot disk and restore the image of your old hard drive back on to your computer. Now you are back online. Acronis is also useful to recover a single file. If you overwrite or delete a file that you needed you can browse the backup drive, look for the last backup that had that file and restore it. For a single file it take about 30 seconds. You need to check your backups from time to time to make sure the disk isn't full or that backups aren't occurring because of some error.
- With Acronis covering your assets why would one need another backup? Sometimes we assume a backup has been running and we have not just taken a look to make sure backups are happening successfully. We have a failure, lo and behold the last successful backup was 18 months ago. In some cases a computer and hard drive could be water, fire,virus or child damaged. Now you are looking for your Mozy Backup. Once you purchase Mozy you download the small Mozy client and install it on your computer. Choose the folders you wish to backup. Since Mozy allows you unlimited storage you can backup everything. Mozy does not allow you to backup the operating system. The inital backup can take days to complete depending on the amount of data you have on your hard drive. Once the initial backup is complete the daily backups will happen quickly. Mozy is web based. Now you can restore files and folder from anywhere.
Don't let your recovery be a disaster!
