For the longest time, I chose not to backup my computer because I thought it would be expensive. Backup systems cost money, and I just didn’t want to spend money on it. I figured if I was going to spend money on storage, I would just buy another hard drive and start sticking more of my stuff on it.
My Background
I used to work in the MIS department of the corporate office of a medium size company. One of my jobs was to switch out the backup tape for the file server every day, and carry it to the fire-proof safe for storage. Every week, I would take a box of tapes to one of our other buildings for off-site storage. The backup tapes contained Everything on the file server, and if the file server crashed, we could rebuild it from the backup tapes within a few hours. The tape drive was expensive, the tapes were expensive, and the process of doing the backups was a daily chore that could not be forgotten.
In our home environments, this level of backup perfection may not be necessary. The truth is that home computers have different backup needs than corporate offices. Let’s take a look at the differences.
Business vs. Home Use
In business, the most important factor is that the business remains running. Businesses cannot afford to have employees stop working because computers are down. Customers won’t tolerate having to wait, so they leave. In business, every minute that a computer is down costs money, and can cause irreparable damage to tbe business.
At home, if your computer goes down, you are inconvenienced. You won’t be able to mess around on Facebook or watch a YouTube video or play a video game until you fix your computer. You’re not going to loose any money, but it is less fun to fix your computer than it is to enjoy using it (for most people, anyway /wink)
Business owners need to know that if a computer goes down, they can get that computer fixed or replaced and back up and running as fast as possible. they will spend whatever it takes to have the equipment, manpower, and processes in place to ensure this. They will have extra hard drives and other parts on hand, in case a computer breaks. They will hire people to ensure that the physical process of doing backups every day is getting done. Some businesses even go so far as to have complete replacement systems fully built, tested, and standing by so that if a computer breaks, they can swap out an entire computer, restore a backup, and be back up and running as fast as possible. They will even periodically hold “fire drills” where they deliberately pretend a machine fails, then replace it, just to test that the process itself is flawless.
At home, you don’t want to spend an hour or more of every day dealing with swapping out backup tapes, checking logs, and even pre-testing the backups to make sure they would work when needed. You would be perfectly happy just knowing that if your computer breaks, that you COULD get your data back, if you HAD to, no matter how long it would take. This is the prevailing philosophy of almost every home user I’ve ever spoken to who isn’t running a business out of their home.
So, what does that mean?
The lesson here is that Home and Business each have completely different needs for backup. Business prioritizes the speed of recovery over all else. Much time and money is spent BEFORE the failure to ensure that recovery takes as little time as possible. Most home users are the opposite – They want to spend as little time as possible actually DOING the backups, and are willing to spend as much time as it takes to recover, AS LONG AS THEY KNOW THEY COULD.
Leo Laporte has said in his show that: for home use, you really only need to back up your documents, and you really don’t need to do anything more than just copy them to an external hard drive. I agree with this, to a point… It depends on your ability and willingness to rebuild your system. I would expect that most of MY readers could probably handle rebuilding a computer.
Seriously, what really needs to be backed up?
Your computer is made up of many different kinds of data. Let’s take a look at them.
Documents and Settings
First, the most important stuff to back up is obvious. your documents are clearly the highest priority thing to back up. Photos, home videos, audio recordings can never be replaced. they represent a moment in time captured, and those moments can never be recreated if they are lost. Your resume and other typed documents can be recreated, but the initial investment of your time 
and mental energy consumed to create those documents can never be replaced. Even if you are willing to retype entire documents, you’ll never get them exactly the same as they were before.
Next you have your settings and other customizations. These are things like your wallpaper and the options you have selected in your programs to make them work the way you want them to. These are things that CAN be recreated, if you wanted to spend the time to do it (and if you can remember them).
Most NEW computer systems are now storing your applications settings WITH your documents (thus the “Documents and Settings” folders seen in Windows XP). This makes it easy to back up by hand because all you would have to do is just copy the entire Documents and Settings (or “Users”) folder to an external hard drive.
The best designed applications are made so that you could actually restore your documents and settings even before the application is reinstalled, and then install the application, and it will find and use the settings you had the first time without any extra effort. Reinstalling an application SHOULD BE as easy as changing a spark plug.
Sadly, not all programs are properly designed to store their settings with your documents. Even many brand new and current programs still store application data with the program files instead of with the documents. This makes it much more tricky to backup those settings, and even MORE tricky to restore them from backup if you had to.
Music, Movies, and TV
Next you have your Music, Movies, and Recorded TV shows. I mention these separately from home videos and audio recordings because odds are, you didn’t create them. Your music probably comes from a CD, or was downloaded from a Music Store. Movies were probably ripped from DVDs or Blu-Ray disks. The point is that those are already backed up on their original disks. You don’t need to back them up again.
You MIGHT need to back up music downloaded from a Music Store, if said service does not keep records of what you’ve purchased in case you need to download them again. Honestly, when you buy music from a service like that, you really should burn those files to a CD or DVD IMMEDIATELY and put store those with the rest of your real CD’s and DVD’s. You never know how long that service will be around.
Your recorded TV shows were probably recorded by a TiVo or Windows Media Center, so you probably don’t don’t have an original copy on a disk somewhere… However, most people watch TV shows, then delete them, so they also probably do not need to be backed up. If you REALLY want to keep a permanent copy of a recorded TV show, you should burn it to disk, and store it with the rest of your CD’s and DVD’s. Just remember – Once you delete it from your computer, it’s no longer “Backed Up” – the copy on your self is now your only copy.
Apps and the OS
Next you have your programs, or “Apps” (which seems to be the popular term these days). You probably don’t create these, you probably buy them or get them from the web. That makes them very easily replaceable, which also makes them much lower priority to back up. If you know how to reinstall a program then you probably don’t really NEED to back them up.
You probably have a bookshelf or drawer full of install disks for the programs you’ve purchased. Technically, these can be considered backups, since they contain what you need to get the program running again. If you download programs from the web, you should still have the Setup program that you downloaded. And even if you don’t chances are ESPECIALLY GOOD that you could find the setup program on the web again if you had to. Personally, i keep a library of every setup program I download, just in case (my backups!)
Sadly, there are MANY people who have programs installed without having the install disks or setup programs available. Maybe the programs were already installed when they got the computer, or maybe the disks just got lost (or stolen). If this is the case, and the program is irreplacable, then you should find a way to back up the program.
Worse yet, simply copying a program to an external hard drive usually won’t work. Commercial software programs are usually deliberately designed to be difficult, if not impossible to simply copy to another computer. If you don’t have the original install disks for a program, you really should seriously consider doing a FULL SYSTEM BACKUP just to protect your investment in those difficult or impossible to replace programs. (It doesn’t HAVE to be this way. World of Warcraft, a massive and complex program, can be easily copied to another computer by literally just dragging the WoW folder to the other computer. It works flawlessly on the new computer.)
Lastly, there’s the operating system such as Windows or Mac OS or Linux. This is the platform upon which everything else is built. It’s usually the very first thing you put onto a new hard drive as you build a new computer. And again, you probably have the Install Disks for your OS (or a special recovery DVD for the whole computer) sitting on your bookshelf. You really don’t need to back up the OS unless you just don’t want to rebuild your system.
However…
In an ironic twist of fate, even though the OS and Programs are the lowest priority things to back up, IF you should have to reinstall the OS, odds are you will have to reinstall all of your programs, and restore backups of all of your settings and documents as well. Software design can still use a few improvements, methinks…
If your skill level is lower, and you don’t feel comfortable with the idea of reinstalling your OS and programs on a new hard drive if your old one dies, there are always ways around dealing with that. For example: Best Buy’s Geek Squad, while expensive, is always an option for having someone else reinstall your OS and applications. Just remember that even Geek Squad can’t recreate your irreplaceable photos and documents out of thin air if you never backed them up.
What if I STILL want to backup everything?
There ARE options available for home users to make a COMPLETE backup of your computer that require as LITTLE effort from you as possible, if you’re willing to spend some money on it. Software to automate the process is available for free, as long as you provide the storage space. Windows has always included a backup program and the one included in Windows 7 is fantastic. If you give it a large enough external hard drive, you can literally set it and forget it until something breaks.
If you have multiple Windows based computers in your home you should seriously consider a Windows Home Server machine. WHS is designed so that it only keeps one backup copy of each identical file from each machine, which is VERY EFFICIENT compared to backing up each machine individually. WHS does FULL SYSTEM BACKUPS of EVERY machine in the home, EVERY night. Restoring a computer after a COMPLETE hard drive crash (i.e. go buy a new empty hard drive) is stupid easy – you just boot off an included CD, and it does the restore in a few hours automatically. It just doesn’t get any better than this.
Coming Soon: – What are my options?
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