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A backup is an important step toward preventing data loss. There are several applications and serveral accessories in the market today to help you with this task. In this post I explain the different types of backup options you will be confronted with when deciding where to save your information. This article is aimed at home users and small businesses. large scale backup systems like those required by large servers are not discussed in this post.

The first thing you have to select is the type of media you want to use for your backup. The options are hard drive, optical (i.e. cds, dvds), solid state (i.e. thumb drives), and remote backup (i.e. internet backup).

• Hard Drive – Pros: Large capacity Cons: Physical size, as big as a small dictionary
• Optical – Pros: Cheap if you have a CD/DVD/Blueray burners Cons: Physical lifetime may only be a couple of years
• Solid State – Pros: Very portable Cons: Constly when compared to the capacity and price of other media
• Remote Backup – Pros: Highest survival Cons: Very slow for people who modify large amounts of data. Security is in the hand of a third party

The second thing you have to select is the type of backup. The options are full backup, incremental, and differential.

• Full Backup – Pros: Saves all your data in one file Cons: With this process all your data is save to a file every time you want to make a backup, this makes the process very time consuming and space inefficient
• Incremental – Pros: Saves all your data created or modified since the last full backup, therefore saving space Cons: When restoring your data, the full backup and all incremental backups are required
• Differential – Pros: Saves all your data to one file, subsequent backups save data that was created or modiefied, this saves space and time needed to make a backup and restore a backup. Cons: Cannot restore data from an earlier backup than the last backup made.

Some closing advise notes:

• Learn the backup process aswell as the restore process
• An automated backup will reduce human error
• Keep the backup and the originals in separate locations as far as possible to make sure they don’t experience the same catastrophic event, such as the building burned down, flooded, etc.
• Save you backups in a standard format so that different software may be used to restore the information in case the original software used to meke the backup became obsolete