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Backup Solution

I've been shocked at how cheap hard drives have become recently and with the cost so low, how could I resist the urge to expand on my my almost full 250GB drive with a new 500GB sata solution for just 0 AUD. Something that I don't do enough of is backing up, so since I (currently) have an excess of space I've decided to put it to use backing up my files. In this article I'll quickly run through the process specific to my setup which may or may not be useful to others.

The Hard Drive

I got my Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA drive from a lovely little shop called MSY in Ultimo, Sydney. My housemate, Josh, kindly introduced me to them and their ridiculously cheap prices - check em out. That aside, the first problem I had was actually installing the thing. I have a Gigabyte K8T890 Triton motherboard, which would be coming into its second year as my main PCs motherboard and is apparently showing its age. When I connected the drive and booted the PC, it did not display any devices under SATA, nor would the drive show up when I tried to initialise it in Windows. It turns out that the WD SE16 is a Sata II drive and my motherboard is only capable of Sata I. My understanding is the difference is purely speed, so fortunately fixing it is no big thing (but WD didn't make it easy by not explaining the pins on the label). In order to enable legacy Sata I mode on my drive (and I would assume most WD Sata II drives) you simply need to connect pins 5 and 6 with a spare jumper as pictured below:

Luckily for me I have a collection of absolutely useless PC bits, which have dozens of spare connectors stuck on them so I just used one of those. You can easily pick one up from an electronics retailer or a computer store (perhaps even for free if you're lucky) if you don't happen to have any lying around. So that's the hard drive working, on to the actual backing up...

Working Out What to Back Up

The main drive I'm interested in backing up is some 250GB in size, so I could theoretically just image it and keep the image on a partition the 500GB disk, but that solution only works until I start needing more space. A better way to do it is obviously to only back up specific things, but it can be hard to work out where you're going to actually save space. This is where a great tool that I've used for a year or so comes in: WinDirStat. WinDirStat will scan any drives or folders you chose and show you a list and graphical representation of the largest and smallest files. Using this, its easy to work out what you do and don't need. For example, I convert a lot of videos to Quicktime format so I can play them on my iPod Touch, so space-wise my "My Documents" folder is dominated mainly by that - even though its totally useless to me in the event of needing a backup:

WinDirStat will easily help you determine what you can leave out, which can often be a lot safer and easier than working out what to leave in.

Automating the Backup

Humans are terrible at automation; we don't have built in clocks and rarely remember to make backups until its way too late. But why rely on you when the computer can do it more accurately and quickly. The credit for this find comes from LifeHacker but their search mechanism is a little weak, so I couldn't find the story its from (sorry!). The solution they recommend for backing up is a piece of software called SyncBack. It's available in both freeware and a paid version, but I always prefer to go with the freeware first up to make sure I'm getting the right thing. I have yet to try it in the long term, but the guys at LifeHacker speak highly of it so I'm confident it will do the right thing. It's got a relatively friendly user interface, although if you want anything more complicated than automatically copying a folder from one place to another (Windows Task Scheduler and xcopy, anyone?) you need to delve into the advanced option. I will update my experience with this in the future.

Something to remember if you have Windows on a different partition is that its a stubborn beast which doesn't like to move its Application Settings (so conveniently configured per-user nowadays) to another drive. If you use Outlook (Express/Full), Firefox, Internet Explorer, Thunderbird or pretty much any multi-user application and you're not sure where the actual data it uses is, chances are its probably stored in C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data, where C is your Windows drive letter. You can get there easily by entering %AppData% into the Run dialog (Start > Run). Backing up that whole folder is a good idea, because its not huge and you can always sift through it after a hard drive failure if you ever need to.

Conclusion

And there you have it: I now have a working backup solution, which has been way to long coming. I've also got to automate the backing up of my Subversion repositories, which reside on a different server, not to mention my blog (believe it or not I'd hate to lose it) and web server configuration. I may cover that if anything exceptional or useful arises.

To anyone that managed to hold on through this: the price of hard drives is too low to let yourself lose data to a failed hard drive. Data recovery is expensive, hard drives are not. Drive failures are not a possibility, they're an eventuality and you're not going to be warned before they happen.

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Tags: Backup, Tip