What is a backup? Exiland Backup - backup files

The computer has long been our faithful companion and assistant in all areas of human activity. The more offensive it can be to find out that all the data from the hard disk was destroyed due to the tricks of the malicious program, software or hardware failure, or simply a voltage jump that occurs in our regions even in large cities.

Unfortunately, people rarely think about the future, and therefore almost all such cases end sadly. Only after that comes the understanding that only backup can prevent the loss of important documents or family archives with photos and video files.

We think that it is not necessary to talk about deciphering this term, since it is already obvious. However, a couple of words still say. So, backup is the process of saving the most important data (or the entire contents of the hard disk) to another physical medium. The latter is very important: if you think that when you copy a file from drive C to disk D, which is located on the same physical volume, you protect your data, then you have to disappoint.

But if you copied the information you need to an external hard drive, which was then disconnected and put in a desk drawer, then this is really a backup, which can really prevent the loss of nerves, time and money. The same can be said about the use of a flash drive, an optical disc or even a RAID array.

In order for this event to be effective and help in the event of a hard disk crash or the action of malicious programs, we recommend that you use some important principles that will be described below.

Frequency, regularity of execution

When planning the staffing schedule , imagine that you are taking vital pills, and the reception skip may end sadly. So in the case of backup - of course, the archive of the year-old prescription can be of historical value, but it will not be easier for you, you lose an important course project, which worked for a couple of months. What can we say about large companies in which the loss of the results of a couple of working days can lead to severe financial and reputational losses.

How to determine the reasonable frequency of this important operation? It's simple - determine for yourself how often you change your important data. For example, an old archive of grandfather's front-line photographs can be digitized and saved once, periodically monitoring the safety of a physical medium, but with a regularly updated base of wedding photographs (if you are a photographer, for example) this static will not pass in any case.

Most often, experienced users prefer to save the results of their work once or twice a week. Can be used as a special program for data backup (NortonGhost, Acronis), and the usual command to copy / paste.

Do not put all the eggs in one basket

In principle, we already talked about this at the very beginning of the article, but we will reveal this issue in more detail. We strongly recommend that you save the information only to an external hard drive so that it is stored separately from the main data set. This is especially important if the main hard drive of your computer is no longer young and can go to the "land of eternal hunting" at any time. In this case, only the correct configuration of the backup with adequate distribution of the stored data can help.

Here it is necessary to make a small digression. Do not confuse a normal hard drive with a flash drive. The latter type of drive is just a modern version of the floppy. In the old days, when this type of floppy disk was still used, no normal user in his right mind would have kept an important report or something like that there. Do you think the flash drive is more reliable? Alas, but it is not.

Why refuse flash drives?

Experts who work in the field of computer repair, can lead hundreds of cases when a brand new flash drive burned when inserted into a faulty USB port. And anyone can become such, since no one is immune to problems with the power supply unit, breakage of the tracks on the motherboard and other troubles. In addition, flash drives (especially large capacity) tend to be degraded. Their cells are gradually depleted, they stop holding the charge, as a result of which the carrier spoils.

Alas, but it is almost impossible to predict this event. And therefore never and in any case do not store any important data on such a medium. Bring films from a friend - please, but keep there (in a single copy - in general, "clinic") a painstakingly created diploma, no normal person will. In addition, flash drives due to their size are often lost, which is also worth considering.

Ideally, every important copy should be duplicated at least twice. Suppose the main backup is stored on an external hard drive, the second copy is in the "cloud", and the third one can be burned even to the same flash drive, even to a DVD disc if your computer still has a drive for it.

Important! If you are a passionate film lover, photographer or designer working with large media files, then for you the optimal output will be professional backup systems made on the basis of home NAS-servers. As a rule, they implement the principle of RAID-1, constantly making a backup. The volume of such storage is limited only by your financial capabilities.

Check and recheck !!!

As soon as you make a copy, immediately (best of all - on another computer), check its performance! And do not be content only with the fact that the files in the archive are just visible: it does not say anything yet. Unpack several of them to choose from, run, open ... In a word, make sure that they are completely safe. It is strongly recommended that you carry out such inspections at least once a month: so you will safely insure yourself against unpleasant surprises.

Not every file is valuable

Be sure to distinguish the stored data by the criterion of "importance". To determine this, you can use both the necessary frequency of conservation (the more often - the more important), and your personal value. This is very convenient, because backups are usually performed using special programs. They store information in one image, so making several categories for you is easy.

Why all these difficulties? Everything is simple - different information requires different treatment. For example, the results of scientific work will surely be kept much more carefully than a collection of films (of course, apart from some rare newsreels). If you divide this data by the copy frequency, you can save both the resource of the hard disk used for backup, and reduce the time required for this.

Divide and rule

Some types of data are strongly discouraged from "cramming" into the same archive. For example, on the computer average users have a lot of movies, music, unimportant text documents and photos. Do not forget about bookmarks and plug-ins in the browser, mail correspondence, etc.

However, about browsers ... Today, there is practically no reason to worry about them. The fact is that all normal programs of this class have the ability to synchronize with the servers of the manufacturer. At the same time, the history, the list of installed extensions and so on are saved. You only need to create an account by entering your email address and having come up with a strong password.

So, do not confuse this information with the notion of "system backup". Simply put, a complete copy of the operating system must be done separately. This is due to the fact that the majority of users are ideally suited to a clean "snapshot" of the OS, made immediately after the installation of drivers, codecs and the necessary software package. Doing this operation daily is not necessary. But the same photos and documents, if you work with them every day, it is best to archive daily.

Full backup of the disc at home is generally silly, unless it's a local partition with the system.

Media

We have already discussed this issue a little, but we need to talk about it in more detail. So...

External hard drive

There are really external, originally hidden in the casing and connected via USB. There are a lot of models of adapters in the market, into which a standard hard drive is inserted, and to the computer it is connected through the same ubiquitous USB. In this case, for a relatively small amount of money you can get an impressive amount, which will fit almost any backup.

So, if an external drive costs about four-odd thousand rubles for a model of 750 GB or one terabyte, then for two or three thousand you can find a hard drive with a capacity of two terabytes. But there is a minus. External USB-drive is much more reliable in terms of protection from shocks and mechanical damage. However, if it is used exclusively at home, there are no real reasons to overpay for extra functionality.

Whatever it was, but any hard drive has a lot of advantages:

1. Relatively reliable and durable.
2. Relatively inexpensive, so that regular backup and recovery will not be a heavy burden on your budget.
3. If resources permit, you can constantly increase the amount of backup storage, simply by purchasing more capacious models.

However, there are also negative sides. Here are their main disadvantages:

1. First, they need to be connected every time, which is not always convenient with a lot of diverse data, when for each category you need a separate medium.
2. If this is a normal hard drive, connecting it is doubly inconvenient, since it is necessary to disassemble the case of the system unit for this purpose. With laptops it's still worse.

Flash Drives

Well, we've already said everything about this media, and now we just summarize the data stated then. Let's start with the positive features:

1. It is convenient to connect.
2. Very mobile: you can throw in your pocket, even a dozen flash drives do not take up much space.
3. In recent years, they are extremely reliable.

They also have important unpleasant properties, such as: they are extremely unstable and have a physically limited cycle of records, which can end at any time (under the condition of intensive exploitation). Important data on them should not be stored exactly.

"Clouds"

This topic in the past two or three years has been heard by all users, even those who do not have a particular experience. This refers to virtual "hard drives" located on the servers of many companies. Known Google Drive, Yandex-disk, Mail.ru-disk, Dropbox, MEGA and others. They are very convenient in that they offer (for a fee, of course) an almost unlimited amount of disk space. In addition, you do not have to worry about the technical component: this is the work of the engineers of these services.

Let's figure out the advantages that are especially appealing to users all over the world:

1. Access your backups from anywhere you have the Internet.
2. Your data is protected from various state of emergency, as these companies use a multi-level data sharing system, the backup copies of which can generally be stored on different continents.
3. There is no need to connect any additional equipment, since copying is done "on the fly", without your participation.

As usual, there are some negative aspects. Here is their list:

1. Firstly, it is extremely desirable to encrypt confidential data, as any thief can gain access to them when stealing your password.
2. This method is not suitable for owners of expensive and limited access to the Internet, since a large amount of traffic is wasted.
3. Free usually give no more than 15-20 GB of disk space (Dropbox generally only provides two gigabytes). Tariffs usually go in dollars, so with the current rate, backing up files can become too expensive.

Incremental or differential?

Very often, novice users can not understand what an incremental, full and differential backup is. Nothing complicated in this. So, full copying involves a copy of the entire hard disk (or directory), and the backup operation is performed each time you start the backup program. So, for example, a full backup of Windows is done.

Incremental backup is used in clients of cloud services. Whenever a file changes, an old copy of it is deleted and replaced with a fresh version. Thus, you constantly have at hand up-to-date information. Differential copying assumes the recording of several recent versions of the file, which are placed in a separate folder.

In general, with the main points figured out. By the way, how can I make a backup? For this purpose, a small and free program is fine (there is also a more functional paid version with advanced features), the work with which we will discuss below.

Exiland Backup

This utility allows you to quickly and easily configure an automatic backup that will be performed without your participation. This program for backup data can not only archive the information you need, but also synchronize copies between several of your computers (in the paid version).

When you first start the program will ask you about when, how and what to copy. It works in the background, so you can not remember about its configuration later. Once again we remind you that it is more reasonable to schedule automatic backups at night, when work with all files is already completed, in order to get the most up-to-date and up-to-date copy of the data at the output.

How to use it? Before you backup, carefully look at the main working window of the utility: in the upper left corner there is a button "Create". Click it. The window for creating a new task will be displayed. In general, everything is as simple as possible: specify a disk, a folder or a specific file, select the time and type of copying; It is possible to specify the option to copy only a certain type of file by mask (* exe, for example). After that press the "OK" button.

In the lower field for displaying data, information appears about the job that you created. If you right-click on it with the option "Options" in the pop-up menu , you can easily change the execution conditions, set new file types, change the start time, and so on.

Here's how to backup using this utility. If there is such a desire, you can buy a fully functional version, which costs about three thousand rubles. Its functionality includes the synchronization of data between computers, an unlimited number of tasks and other "buns".

We hope you learned how to make a backup. Take care of yourself and your valuable data!