Personal Data Backup Strategy

19 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I know it is not one of the coolest thing to do on an ongoing basis but as we are becoming more and more dependent on data, whether it is entering personal finance information, blackberry data sync, outlook data, word documents etc taking regular data backups plays a very critical part in our digital lives. In the event of a hard drive crash if you cannot afford to be dead in water because you lost your personal data you need to have a data backup strategy which is efficient yet simple.

It does not need to very complicated but you need to take care of the following aspects.

- Data should be stored off site.
- Data should be secured.
- It should be easy to get to in the event of a hard drive failure or for whatever reason.

I will handle the security aspect first. Before taking a backup of your data make sure it is encrypted. There are lot of utilities available. I personally like AxCrypt. I have been using this utility for at least 18 months if not more and never have had a problem. It uses 128-bit AES encryption which is more than enough encryption for small people like me. This utility provides you with a capability of generating a pass phrase to encrypt the file. I strongly recommend using this feature as using a random key as a pass phrase just makes life for a thief next to living in hell to decrypt your files. You can store the pass phrase wherever you want. Just make sure that you don’t try to memorize it, because chances you won’t be able to memorize it. Axcrypt has other cool features too but for the curious, supplying with the axcrypt link is all what is needed.

To store data offsite, I use Mozy.com, this is a great utility to take offsite backups. You can schedule your backups and the mozy agent will do the rest for you. It is a free service if your data is less than 2GB. I almost started taking backups using Norton 360, as it does allow you to take off site backups but the next requirement of mine ruled it out.

Mozy.com has a web interface (Norton 360 does not) which allows you to download any/all your files from anywhere. Thus in the event of total loss of your computer, all you have to do is logon to mozy.com and download your files on a different computer and you should be ready to go. Remember you will still have to install axcrypt on that computer to actually start using the data. Also, you should be able to retrieve your pass phrase. Hint : Best place to store your pass phrase is in an email with a proper subject on it.

If you have lots of media/images to be backed up, I would not bother encrypting and storing it off site, the good ‘ol CD burning process works just fine. I give more emphasis to actual data then media/images, so I am sure you may have a better backup strategy for those type of files.

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