Backup, Part 2

What to back up?

If you were a System Administrator responsible for maintaining Network Servers, the answer would be quite obvious: EVERYTHING!

Many home users assume that this answer applies to them as well, but I would argue that this is not at all true. Furthermore, trying to backup everything is the sort of monumental task that leads most home users to postpone doing a backup at all. On my main computer at home, I have 16GB of hard drive space, and probably 8-9 GB of that is used right now. And when I ran my anti-virus sweep Friday night (I always do a complete sweep every Friday), I noticed I had 102,000 files on this computer. Trying to do a complete backup of all of this would take a lot of time, effort, and money. But it doesn't have to be that way. Complete backups can be handy if your computer is stolen or destroyed, and it is neat if you can run a restore program and get everything back exactly the way you left it. But there are two major problems with this:

Many times a complete backup fails to restore. The world is full of folks who thought they had everything under control, but when they needed to do a restore, it failed. So your protection is bit chancier than you may have thought.
Because a complete backup is so much work, it is easy to find excuses for not doing it. There are even more people in the world who have a tape drive but have never actually done a backup. I will argue later that psychology being what it is, a smart strategy is one that minimizes the effort, ideally automating the whole thing.

Instead of backing up everything, I advocate backing up only those things that are irreplaceable, and that usually means data and personal files. Other things can usually be replaced if worst comes to worst. Lets take each component in order:

Operating System - If your hard drive fails, you will need to buy a new one and start over. Step one is installing the Operating System. You will need two things to do this, the installation media (usually a CD-ROM), and some type of Registration Code. Microsoft uses a Certificate of Authenticity, usually a greenish document with a hologram, frequently on the cover of a booklet. Make sure you know where the CD is, and where the Certificate of Authenticity is.
Shrink-wrapped software - Again, this will come with a CD-ROM (usually), and probably some kind of registration code. Make sure you know where they are when it comes time to reinstall.
Downloadable software - Chances are you have a lot of stuff you downloaded. If you cannot bear to live without it, go to the Web site, and print out the Home page, and store the print out. If you need to reinstall, this will tell you where to go.
Shareware - A lot of this is downloadable stuff as well, but in this case you paid good money to register it. Print out the registration code, along with the Web home page (if applicable) and store it.

Now, if you do an analysis of your hard drive, I bet you will find that at least 90%, and probably more, of what is on your hard drive falls in one of the above categories. With just a little preparation, you can reinstall all of this stuff if you need to do so. You would only do this if forced, of course, but I have done so enough times that in a weekend I can pretty much rebuild all of my stuff starting from a virgin hard drive. Now, if you don't exactly know where all those CDs, registration codes, etc. are located right now, you just might want to do a little organizing. Go to your Office supply store, and you can buy a CD storage box for $10. For another $10, buy a file box to put all of those important computer registration codes, printouts, etc. so you will have them when you need them. Taking care of this will let you focus on what is really important in a backup, which is surprisingly small if you plan carefully.

Documents - I am a college professor, and I create documents all the time in my job that I know I will refer to later, copy, reuse, etc. So my Documents directory is full of things that cannot be replaced. These need to be backed up. To make it easy, I have one directory that I use for all documents. In the directory I create subdirectories as needed to organize my stuff, but every document is somewhere in this one directory. This makes it a snap to do a backup.
Address book - Whatever e-mail client you use, you have undoubtedly created an address book. That is something you would want to back up as well. Find out which file(s) hold your addresses.
Bookmarks/Favorites - You have saved the addresses of all of these Web sites, so back it up. Netscape saves them as a single file, IE uses a directory full of individual links to each site.
E-mail files - All those messages you saved that say "ILOVEYOU" are priceless. Back them up.
Other - You may have something else that can not be replaced easily. In my case, I have a database of 120 witty and intelligent quotes that get randomly inserted into the signature of my e-mail messages. It took me some time to accumulate these, so I back it up.

With a little thought, you can come up with your own list of things that can not simply be reinstalled from the CD-ROM, and therefore need to be backed up. I bet it looks a lot like mine above. But when you analyze it, you are probably looking at less than 100MB of data in most cases. This can easily be backed up to a Zip disk, and I will show you how you can set it up to do this backup automatically! You won't even need to tie a string around your finger to remember.