You think you can survive a hard disk crash?

If you think about it, its kinda like the subject of death.

Everybody knows that it is bound to happen. Its just a matter of time, some say. Yet, people would rather not think about it... and hope that its something that happens only to 'other people'. And even if you do prepare for it, or think you are for such an event, it is never pleasant and the results, often devastating!

Ouch!

But life goes on!! Really. Unless you're resigned to good 'ole paper letters, listening to music from vinyl or CDs, watching in VHS of DVD movies and storing all your photos in reams of hardcopy albums, you're bound to have emails, MP3s, AVIs and JPGs which you need to store in the hard disk in your PC.

The obvious answer, to protect yourself from losing data in a crash, is of course to backup. And there are loads of backup solutions our there which you can use. Just Google for "freeware backup software" or some derivative of that and you'll find more solutions than you need. Or, if you're too lazy, you can find a few useful ones here.

However, I have a problem with the way most backup software works. Typically they take a complete backup of whatever it is you need to protect. And then, you'll need to do periodic backs to ensure the latest data get saved as well.

The simplest way is to do a fresh backup every time. That means you backup an entire copy of everything you have (both old and new files) into a new backup image. Its simple, it has everything in one image. But doing full backups take a lot of time and a lot of storage space. You'd have to be super kiasu, super kiasi, and super rich to afford the storage for such a solution.

The alternative is to do a one-time full backup of what you have at that time. And for the newer files, you do incremental backs. The software cleverly figures out what is it that has changed since your last backup and stores only those.

That cuts down on the massive storage you need. But now, if you need to restore the data, you'll need the original image plus all the incremental backups to be able to restore things completely.

Oh and depending on the software, you may not be able to access the individual files from your backup unless you restore the full image. Which is a major drag if what you need is just to get one single item from your years of backup!

Having fun yet?

Someone forgot to backup?

Honestly, I have never bothered with this kind of backup!

What I really need is to be able to have a copy of the same thing onto another hard disk; and be able to access that backup the same way I would access my main data. In other words, what I need is a 'mirror'.

This is where I introduce to what is likely the BEST MICROSOFT TOOL for this kind of needs. This tool is very simple to use... small and lightweight... fast... its been around and has been running reliably for me... and best of all, its FREE.

Friends, if you don't already know what I'm talking about... its the one of MS' best kept secret, the MS SyncToy.

What it allows you to do is to create 'folder pairs'. And you have a choice of using 5 different relationships between the pair of folders to achieve what you need to do.

• Synchronize - Whatever you do on each side of the folder pair is replicated to the other side. Useful when you need to work on both folders and want all your changes to be reflected to the other side.

• Echo - Like the above but synchronization only happens one way. (MS describes it as from the 'left' or source folder to the 'right' or target folder)
  

• Subscribe - Like Echo, but this time it is from 'right' to 'left'
  

• Contribute - Like Echo, but if you delete a file from 'left', the same file on the 'right' is left untouched
  

• Combine - Like Synchronize except renames and deletes are not replicated over

Simple-to-use interface

It just take a minute to set up your folder to be backed up. And running it requires just another click. The initial run for a new folder pair will make an exact copy of whatever is it you have on your souce folder. For subsequent refreshes, SyncToy intelligently and very quickly scans through and only picks out the updated files to act upon.

A couple of pre-requisites though.... Firstly, you need to have the MS .NET Framework for SyncToy to work. (yeah, groan!) Secondly, get yourself a second hard disk. It wouldn't be much of a backup if you copied your data back onto the *same* hard disk, right?


Still wondering if you can survive a hard disk crash?

If you already have a backup solution, PLEASE continue and be diligent in backing up!

If you don't have one, then give MS SyncToy a try -- you'd stand to lose more by not doing anything!

This tool isn't perfect though!

After a while of using it -- especially if you're not careful with configuring your folder pairs -- you'd end up with the potential problem of having too many duplicate files in your target folder. Its not life-threatening or anything!! Just an annoyance.

But fret not, in my next post, I'll talk to you about another nifty tool to fix this problem!