Listen to this episode of Moms Gone Geek.

A is for Archive

Archives are what you make them. You don’t have to use any fancy software to archive your files. Your operating system’s file browser is all you really need. (i.e., Explorer in Windows and Finder in Mac OS) When you archive something, you’re either moving or copying an original file and storing it for later in a different place other than your local hard drive. When storing digital archives, it’s best to have more than one copy stored on different devices or media in case one archiving method fails. For example, you might keep one archive set on an external hard drive and another on a series of DVDs or an additional external drive.

The organizing method I like to use consists of one parent folder named for the relevant year and then subfolders such as Photos, Movies, Documents and then further subdivided by month or some other description. This nomenclature can be whatever makes sense to you. You have to ask yourself this question: “If I name this file or folder ‘xyz’ am I still going to know what that means five years from now? Or will someone else know what it means without question when they do a search for something?”

You also want to consider how long you are going to keep your archives on any one method of storage. CDs and DVDs can degrade over time. External Hard Drives have moveable parts that can break down or malfunction. Devices and their associated technologies advance and become more available to consumers. Yesterday’s tape drives are being replaced by tomorrow’s terrabyte drives. To maximize the logevity of your data, it’s important to interact with your storage methods on a regular basis and “check up” on your files every so often to make sure everything still works as planned. Also consider the type of data you’re storing and the file extensions associated with it. .JPG, .PDF, .DOC, or .HTML files are probably going to be around for a long, long time and most software developed in the future will most likely still support those file types. If you’re using a piece of software that creates a particular file type you’ve never heard of, do your homework on it before comitting to it long term.

B is for Backup

When you back up your computer, you’re making a copy of the local hard drive’s contents exactly as is for safe keeping. There is automated software you can use that will perform recurring backups either manually or on a set schedule determined by you. When selecting software to do this job for you, you’ll want to consider the recovery method and how long it will take to get your data back when selecting one or more methods such as differential and incremental. Since I’m trying to keep this simple, I’ll post links in the show notes that go into more detail about the different types as well as some software for you to consider.

When configuring the software, you can choose whether or not you’d like to include programs or applications along with your documents, music, photos, movies, etc. Backing up can take long amounts of time and needs to be scheduled appropriately. What you need to consider most is the how well the software fits the purpose of your backup strategy which is to protect you from loss of data. Next, you need to decide which of that data, if any, you’re willing to saccrifice and how this saccrifice will impact the time required for recovery. Lastly, you need to consider how you’d like your backup strategy to deal with changed or purged data.

C is for Clone

A clone is an exact replica of your entire hard drive including the operating system and all of its files. If your internal drive ever fails or your computer is ever stolen and you need to replace it, you could just image the new drive with a clone and be back to where you left off since your last clone was created. Using a clone to recover your drive saves you the time and hassle of reinstalling all of the software that did not come with your computer. Software installation is one of the biggest benefits to having this backup method in addition to a standard backup because the recovery time is much more efficient. You can use a clone to image your machine versus having to wait for the amount of time it would take to recover files from a standard backup. This recovery method takes minutes as opposed to hours.

The disadvantage of using only a clone is that you lose anything that was not cloned before the failure or loss occured. You can significantly reduce that disadvantage if you clone in addition to using a standard backup method on a more regular basis. If you ever had to re-image your machine using the clone you could then also recover files the clone didn’t include by retrieving them from the backup. The idea is to minimize the loss of data as much as possible by utilizing redudancy. Basically, a backup is good for when you might need to recover one or a few individual files but a clone is much more efficient for if you ever need to recover an entire drive quickly. Cloning combined with a standard backup procedure is a good choice for people who use their computer to manage a business.

Storage Methods

Now that we’ve reviewed ways to backup your data, where are you going to put it all? I recommend getting a large external hard drive and paritioning it into 3 volumes: Achive, Backup and Clone. Briefly, partitioning a drive means to create segments called volumes. Think of it like having 3 different hard drives inside of one. When you connect the drive to your computer, 3 different volumes will mount each with their own icon and name. Picture a boxed set of Harry Potter books. There is one story but the boxed set contains 3 volumes or individual books. I’ll put a link in the show notes that will explain partitioning in greater detail.

Now, if you’d like to go a step further in protecting your data, get two external hard drives and call the partitioned volumes on Drive 1: Archive01, Backup01, and Clone01 and on Drive 2: Archive02, Backup02, and Clone02. When partitioning the drive, you’ll want to first consider the space you alot to each of these partitions. For the Backup volume, you want to make it double your hard drive space to be on the safe side. For the Clone volume, you can make it about 75 to 100 percent of the total size of your hard drive’s capacity. It’s generally a good rule of thumb to keep your hard drive only about half full if you can help it. Once your hard drive is over half full of data, you might start to notice some speed issues. If you make your Clone partition 75 percent of the size, knowing that it can only clone that much might help you to keep your used disk space down. Once you get past half full, it’s time to consider archiving or deleting unnecessary files so that your cloning software will still function without alerting you to a failed session due to not enough space. After you’ve designated a partition size to the Backup and Clone volumes, you can make the Archive volume size the difference that is left over. If you haven’t yet purchased your external hard drive, you might want to consider this and do the math as it relates to your hard drive before you buy.

When it comes to drives in particular, I would recommend getting different drives from different manufacturers. This way if one drive fails due to some kind of manufacturing glitch, the other drive will likely not be affected by the same problem. To protect yourself from a catastrophic failure like a fire or flood, it’s best if you can buddy up with a friend or family member you trust to store your second drive at their place and then swap the drives regularly.

I personally have yet to review any remote or off-site storage, also called “cloud” storage but it’s definitely something you should also consider. If you have any specific recommendations, please drop us a line at MomsGoneGeek@gmail.com.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this segment and most of all that it got you thinking about some ways in which you can prepare and protect your precious memories and important data. You’ve spent a lot of time generating this data and all these memories, so why not invest a little bit of time in keeping it all safe. Future generations will thank you!

Web definitions for Incremental Backup
	A backup procedure that backs up only those files that have been changed or modified since the previous backup.

Web definitions for Differential backup
	Copies of all files modified since the last full backup.

Links that explain different types of backups

http://www.acronis.com/resource/solutions/backup/2005/incremental-backups.html

http://www.backup4all.com/incremental-backup.php

How to partition a drive using Mac OS Disk Utility

http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/diskutilitypart.htm

Automated Backup software for the Mac

Time Machine (FREE) comes built in with OS X 10.5x Leopard

SmartBackup ($22.00 US) is a great if you’re still using Tiger or would like an additional layer of security across networked drives

Carbon Copy Cloner (FREE) (But please consider a donation to Mike for all the great stuff he does.)

SuperDuper ($27.95 US) always gets good reviews