Computer Safety - Backing up your computer

Regular backups of the data on your computer is a vital part of any safe computing plan. Your data is probably the most important aspect of your computer, and no matter how carefully you protect your system, it can run into problems that cause data loss.

Backing up your data simply means saving copies of your necessary files and folders such as word processing documents, email folders, pictures and other information. The operating system and programs on your computer are typically not included, since you should have copies of the original installation files (usually on CD) from having purchased the computer, OS and/or programs.

There are a number of ways to do a backup, but the simplest for the average computer user is to run a backup feature that is part of the computer's operating system. For information on using Windows or Macintosh backups, please see CUIT Security's Backing Up page.

Backup Media

It's important to consider what's availble to you for storing your backups. The most common options are:

• Network Drives
  If you use a CUMC department-owned computer, you most likely have a network drive you can use for backups. Network drives managed by the CUMC IT Server Support group are regularly backed up by our server technicians, so recent copies of data you save on the drive will be available for emergencies. Make sure this is the case with any network drive before relying on it for your primary backup storage space.
• Removable media - CDs, USB Keys, zip and floppy disks
  When running a scheduled backup or simply saving copies of files, you can specify that you'd like to save data or files to removable storage such as a CD or USB key (also called Memory Stick or Flash/Thumb Drive). Rewritable media such as USB keys are not the best option for permanent storage, since there is a chance of overwriting older files that you may still want. It's also a good idea to store your important backups that are on removable media at a different location than your computer, so that any disaster in one location will not be a permanent loss of your files.
• Hard drive partitions
  Operating system backups often give you the option to save to a different partition on the hard drive, if your drive has more than one partition. This can be useful if the OS on the main partition crashes and you have to reformat (overwrite and reinstall everything) that part of the drive, but means you lose that backup if the entire hard drive is damaged, lost or stolen.

Backup Options
Most backup programs offer the three different options listed below. When manually copying files and folders, you can also create these options by keeping track of the date of your backups, and then searching for changes to the files and folders that were made after the latest backup. It's also important to keep in mind how much space you have to store backups, and how long or involved restoring data from the different types of backups may take.

• Full backup
  A full backup copies all of your necessary data, due to this it can require a lot of storage space and a long time to both save and restore if need be. Once the first full backup is done, it's generally better to run differential and incremental backups at regular intervals.
• Differential backup
  A differential backup saves files which have been changed or added since the last full backup.
• Incremental backup
  An incremental backup saves files which have been changed or added since the last backup, whether full or differential.

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