With so many backup software choices on the market, you may be wondering which solution is right for you and which type of backup technology would be best to serve your business. It's true, losing your data can cause a lot of headaches. If you recently had a computer failure or a virus attack that caused a data loss, you know how difficult and expensive it can get to bring your computer back to normal. In fact, as the sizes of hard drives increase, the risk of breakdown also increases dramatically. In addition, Trojans and other malware from the Internet are an ongoing threat for your data that you need to prepare for.
If you don't run a backup of your files you risk losing money and time restoring your system in case of a computer failure or virus attack. Setting up your system from scratch will take quite some time and potentially cost you a lot, particularly if you use your PC for business or work. Imagine all the hours you spent setting up your computer, installing all the software, and working on your files.
Can you afford losing all your digital camera photos, or losing all records needed for your tax records? Can you afford losing all your main files and do you have the time to re-invest multiple days setting up Windows on your PC?
But which solution is right for my unique needs, you might want to know. Backup technologies can be broadly categorized into two sets: drive imaging and data file backup.
Data file backup is the perfect product for people who spend a lot of time and money creating documents of all sorts. Writers, sales experts, sales people, accountants, and designers invest a lot of time working on files and this investment makes these documents costly to recreate. Data file backup programs will ensure each document is stored in another location, such as an external drive, network share, another computer, or even an online server. If the worst happens, you can selectively restore each particular file as necessary.
Disk Replication systems, on the other hand, take a full copy of the entire hard drive of your computer. The plus here is that every single file, even those that you are unaware of, is stored in a so-called image file. Similar to file backups, image files can be stored on a USB drive, a second drive in your PC, on another server or PC, or far away on a FTP server on the Internet. Drive images offer you the good thing of backing up the entire hard disk, so you do not need to worry about specifying what file you want backed up.
Data backups offer the gain of a specialized, targeted backup; you can select precisely what you want backed up and how you want it backed up. This is especially important when you have many files to work with. For example, you might have stored several gigabytes of digital pictures on your machine for a photography project. But maybe you are just experimenting with them and you do not want to fill your USB backup drive with redundant files that you will never need to restore. With file backup-based utilities, you can easily omit these pictures from your backup to avoid filling up your backup media with documents you do not care about. In addition, you can accelerate your backup process by configuring your file backup software to not compress your MPEGs and JPEGs at all since media files generally do not compress that well.
Disk imaging adds one more benefit and that is it cuts down restore time when rebuilding your PC. Because the disk is rewritten is in a continuous bit stream, the restore operation is much more effective than with file backups. For small systems where you don't worry about file versions, this can be a great plus.
To sum up, disk imaging is well suited for small PCs with little data and little requirement for backup configuration. File backups are good when you have many files and need backups to finish quickly or when you need continuous backups. Naturally, each approach has its own pros and cons so you need to consider your own setup and choose what is best for you.
Paul Reed is a writer and backup utility specialist.
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