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Posts tagged backup
Backup
9 years
A lot of people around me have been talking about backups, asking about backups and loosing data because they didn’t have sufficient backups. For example, I know a with a guy who is a sale rep. He’s a great guy but took up a role in sales after his freelance graphics design career was cut short because his computer including his entire portfolio of work was stolen.
Another friend of mine is an amateur photographer. She backed up all her photos to an external hard drive. Her laptop was stolen and the thief simply stole the removable hard drive right along with it. Along with a huge chunk of her portfolio she also lost several years worth of family photos.
I recently rebuilt a laptop for a client with a failing hard drive. While I managed to recover some data off the drive before it died completely, there was some data lost.
In all of these cases data was lost due to not having sufficient backups and not understanding good backup processes.
“What do a computer hard disk and a gerbil have in common? Their average lifespan is about 3-5 years.”
T.E. Ronneberg
In other words – stuff on hard drives seems permanent but this is a mistake. Drives are physical devices and all hard drives – even SSDs deteriorate with age. Some will last much longer than others but it is never safe to have only one copy important data in a single location – be that hard drive or otherwise.
Backup Principles:
Back up everything:
Often that sort of information on your computer or electronic device is more valuable to you than the device itself. The amount of information that goes through our computers these days increasing and so is the importance of not loosing that information.
What should I back up? If possible, back up everything. You never know precisely what you will lose, how you will lose it or the impact it might have on your life if you lose it.
Sometimes the amount of data involved makes this difficult. Depending on your level of IT skill, you can sometimes get away with not backing up your operating system files and program files if you don’t mind re installing these and you keep the licences and keys and installations safe and handy. But you need to consider the downtime involved in needing to re-install this software and configure it.
Automate the process:
People are generally not good at repeated mundane tasks. You will forget, life will get in the way and it will become less and less important to you over time unless you automate the process.
Software is great for this purpose. A package that I recommend constantly is Crashplan – www.crashplan.com The basic software is free and allows you to back up to external hard drives and a friend’s computer. Most importantly it automates the process so once you have this set up, you can forget about it.
The 3 2 1 Rule. 3 copies, 2 locations, for every 1 bit of data.
A good rule of thumb for good backups is to have 3 copies of the data in at least 2 locations. This covers for the majority of scenarios.
Why do I need 3 copies in 2 locations? Say you are working on some photos on your computer and as a backup, you copy those to an external hard drive. Great. If anything fails on your computer, you have a backup. But what if the building with the hard drive and the computer burns down or both pieces of equipment get stolen simultaneously? Where is you backup now. This is why you need 3 copies in 2 locations. If you had an additional backup at a friend or family member’s residence or the files backed up to the cloud, then you have resiliency even if your first 2 copies and 1 location are lost.
Confirm the backups work.
Backups are useless unless you can recover information from them when you need it. Test your backups to make sure you can access them and copy files off your backup. Remember that you may not have access to your current computer or if you do, it may not have any of its current information on it. You need to confirm that the backups will do what you are hoping that they will do.
And test them regularly. Backup media can deteriorate over time just like the hard drives you are backing up.
Protect your backups
You need to keep your backups at least as secure as you do the main data – if not more so. If you are backing up to an external hard drive, and not encrypting or pro.
If you need help or advise with your backups – Get in touch!
Transfer files from Android to Computer
12 years
Contacts:
The main instructions to get contacts from your phone to a sim card, memory card or usb device are here:
https://support.google.com/android/answer/168477?hl=en
If you want to backup the contacts database they should be in this folder on your phone or something similar to it depending on customisations made by the device manufacturer:
/data/data/android.providers.contacts/databases
You could just copy these files to your computer to backup the contacts database.
The easiest way going forward would be to add your contacts as Google contacts and these would sync between your phone and Google account automatically as long as you have your account sync turned on (settings -> Accounts and sync -> Your Google account).
Files:
For most files, the easiest way I’ve found is to sign up for Dropbox account and load the app on your phone. Photos you take can be automatically uploaded to your Dropbox and then the’re accessible on your computer like a regular folder.
If you do sign up for DropBox, do me a favour and use this link – http://db.tt/lpDpafmj I get 250mb extra storage for the referral and it costs you nothing.
You can copy files off your phone by simply plugging the phone into the computer using the usb cable for your phone and copy the files off as an Android Phone will show up in Windows as an extra drive. Mac users will need to download Android File Transfer – http://www.android.com/filetransfer/.
Or if you want to do it over wifi and not need to plug your phone in, check out Airdroid or ES File Explorer from the app store. Both of these apps make it easy to transfer files off your phone to your computer over Wifi. Although ES File Explorer is more complex and aimed more at users who would know how to set up shared folders on their computer.
Paid Apps:
There are plenty of other apps in the Android Play store that will back up your data for you. 2 paid apps that I highly recommend are Lookup Pro which adds antivirus and security features as well as photo and contacts backup and Titanium backup for a more comprehensive backup of your entire phone although it requires your android phone to have root access.