esponjasoft

Everybody knows that every hard drive will eventually fails. And everybody also knows that having a backup strategy is the right thing to do. However, few people have one. Why? I guess "it's to hard to do it" may be the reason behind this. A wrong reason, but a reason lots of people use anyways.

Several products exist targeting this particular market, such as Apple's Time Capsule or Microsoft's Windows Home Server, among others. This products work great when you have several equipments at home. But they cost money ($500 dollars for Microsoft's product), and are focused to households with 3+ computers. But what about if we only have 1 computer? (or if we are cheap?).

I, for instance, only have one computer, so having a dedicated server for my backups seems a bit of an overkill (plus spending $500 for just a backup server doesn't sound right to me :P). So instead of that, I created my own backup strategy, based on an external hard drive and Windows Vista's command line. It's the world famous RSSb (Real Simple Strategy for Backups).

The first thing to do is to buy two new external hard drive (I bought a 160 Gb maxtor drive at Fry's for $80). I recommend having two drives, one for your local backup, and the other for your offiste backup (just in case your first drive breaks, or your house burns down or something).

After plugin in the hard drive, we just have to take notice of the letter it was mounted on.  In order to do the actual backup, we will use a real nifty tool that comes with Vista: Robocopy. Robocopy is a way more sophisticated (and robust) variant of XCopy, which main quality if the capacity to copy lots of directories really fast. If you don't have a Vista machine don't worry, you can download it for  for Windows Server 2003 and XP.

The actual command is use for my backups is:

The first and second parameters are mandatory - they indicate the source destination directories. All the switches are optional:

• /s: Indicates robocopy to copy non-empty subdirectories
• /r:3 Indicates that every file that fails to be copied will be retried 3 times (default is 1 million times)
• /w:3 Indicates the wait time between retries, in seconds (default is 30 seconds)

There are tons of useful switches included with robocopy. Run robocopy /? to get a list of all of them.

Once we have the script we want to run, we create a .bat file with the script in it. With the bat file all we have to do to have a complete backup strategy is to click on it every once in a while (I do it once a day), or to add it to the task scheduler, so it will run automatically. My backup it's about 70 Gb, and it takes about 30 minutes to complete, it's a really fast task.

Now, you may remember that I mentioned the need for 2 disks. Well, what can we do with the other disk? Well, the other disk should be stored safely away from your house. I could be in your office, at your parent's, it really doesn't matter. The idea is to have it way from home. Just be sure to bring it home every couple of weeks, run a backup (with the same script) and then take it away. Remember, this is your disaster recovery disk, so keep it safe and away from home.

This is a real simple backup strategy, so, if you plan to use it, take into consideration the following weaknesses:

• Files are not encrypted, so if anyone stole your backup disk they would get access to potentially all of your data.
• Hard Drives will file (remember the first line of this post?), so you have to check the health of the disks often, to replace it as soon as it starts to show any failure symptoms.

This strategy works for me, and has actually saved me from a disaster or two. If you don't like it ,  or it isn't safe or thorough enough for you, just please, please, have a backup strategy of your own, and follow it.

And no matter what, learn how to use Robocopy. It's a really useful tool. You won't regret it.