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Backup your Hard Drive - How to Avoid a Disaster
Creating backups of important files on a regular basis is probably one of the
easiest and cheapest ways to protect hours of work and personal files from all
sorts of technical disasters. Still, billions of dollars are lost every year
because of technical problems and loss of data. WinBackup is a new backup
solution from LI Utilities that makes it easier for home users and small
companies to create secure and well-organized data backups.
Organizing Backups by Priority
When running backups on a daily
basis it is very important that the backup process does not interfere with the
normal tasks performed on your computer. Running a large harddrive backup of all
files on your pc can take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour depending
on how fast your computer is and the number of files that need to be copied.
Since a backup operation will slow down your system considerably while in
progress it is often necessary to split your backups into several backup jobs.
By running more important jobs more often and by backing up static files less
often you can easily reduce interference caused by backup operations by 90% or
more. Not only will splitting and prioritising backups make your system run much
smoother, but you will also be able to update important backups of emails and
other data much more often.
Scheduling Backups
In order to keep
you pc backups up to date you will probably want to schedule backups to run
automatically. WinBackup uses a built-in scheduler that makes this task very
easy. Since WinBackup also supports any number of Backup Jobs with separate
scheduling settings you can make more important jobs, like emails, run more
often while large, infrequently updated, files are backed up only every other
week or so. Using WinBackup you can even combine-scheduled backups with manual
backups to ensure that important changes gets backed up immediately. Since you
use the same Backup Jobs for scheduled and manual file backups, running a manual
file backup can be done with a single mouse click.
Compressing Data
Backups
In most cases, compressing backups can be a very good idea since
many files that are commonly included in backups (emails, text documents or
images) can often be compressed to 50% of their original size or less. If you
are using WinBackup, compression is enabled by default. In WinBackup you can
also find out how large the compressed file will be before running the backup by
looking at the estimated compressed size value. This value is updated in
real-time while you add or remove files to the backup and can be very helpful
when determining if the backup will fit on the target harddrive or cd.
Secure Online Backups
After creating a computer backup you will
probably store the backup on a CD, a shared file server or maybe even on the
Internet. In order to protect you files it is often recommended that you use a
password, or if the backup contains sensitive information, you should use some
form of encryption. WinBackup supports both password protection and strong
encryption using the AES 128 or 256-bit encryption standard. Encrypted backup
files will be nearly impossible to open without the correct password can safely
be stored on CDs and public servers. If you want to run online backups
encryption is often critical to protect your data from unauthorized accesses.
A Network Backup System
Corporate users as well as home users with
local networks will often want to backup several computers to a server and then
backup the server to a CD, CDRW or DVD. This can be achieved by scheduling the
workstations to backup their files to the server first, and then, after waiting
for an hour or two, a scheduled backup job on the server stores all the
workstation backups to a CD Writer installed in the server. By layering backups
this way you can easily backup entire networks and data can be restored by
workstation users at any time since the backup files for individual systems
remain on the server. This technique can be very efficient and can save a lot of
time for end users as well as IT departments.
Windows Backups and File
Sharing Problems
If you have ever tried to delete or rename an exe file
that being executed, you probably know that locked files can sometimes cause
serious problems. This is even more true when creating backups since many of the
files that you backup will probably be locked by other programs when the backup
operation is started. If you, for example, are using outlook when a scheduled
backup operation starts, the whole operation could fail if the backup software
attempts to lock the email database. WinBackup never tries to lock files and
will continue a backup operation even if a file could not be read. Any missing
files will be added to the log and will be backed up the next time the backup
job is executed. Since WinBackup doesn't lock files it will not prevent you from
using your computer for other tasks while a backup operation is in progress.
This is very important if you want to run scheduled operations in the background
while you are working.
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