I do it this way for a number of reasons:

1) Since I do sometimes move a lot of data, I’d rather let the desktop machine stay on for all of the time that’s required to upload the data to the online backup server. My laptop is great and reliable, but why put more burn on the laptop than needed.

2) While I do trust the zero-knowledge policy of SpiderOak (I refuse to use any online backup service that has direct access to my data), I don’t necessarily trust their synchronization feature. To be fair to SpiderOak, I haven’t found a backup service whose sync feature I do trust.

Most of these services seems to store versions of your data, but I’ve yet to see on that lets you do a true left/right synchronization check with approval. One of the big criticisms I have of some online backup services (other than the privacy part which I’ve covered at length in previous posts), is the functionality such that if I delete a file on my desktop, then the backup software will automatically delete the file on my backup. My problem here is that I don’t want anything on my backup account being deleted unless I explicitly allow it to be deleted. Furthermore, I don’t want to go hunting for versions of files that may or may not exist.

With my two-step system, I have 100% control of my synchronization and true certainty that my desktop files are exactly mirrored on my online backup. So for those of you who are using an online backup service — any online backup service — how do you handle synchronization and know for SURE that your data is being mirrored properly and that the service’s algorithm isn’t making decisions for you?

As long as your data is less that 4.7GB (the size of a standard DVD) then backing up to a DVD isn’t really a problem. The problem arises when you have more than 4.7GB of data, as windows can’t necessarily take a 10GB folder (or folder with subfolders) and break it up into the three DVDs that would be needed to make a backup. Now you could — by hand — simply look at the folders and note their size, and then copy appropriately sized sets of data to DVD; with 3 or 4 folders in a directory this is a workable technique. But what happens when you have a directory (say you are backing up MyPictures to DVD), then you could have tens of folders, and going through them by hand and trying to sort it into DVD sized groups becomes burdensome.  So spanning DVDs by hand is a pretty annoying project to undertake (unless you like that kind of stuff).

After much searching I came across a program called DVD Span that can take a directory (with or without multiple directories) and arrange the files in these folders so that they fit nicely on DVDs. The problem gives you the option to make the “best fit” or to be a little less strict with space and make sure that the files go in order. You can even create .iso images of your data and then burn the .iso disk images to DVD at your leisure (that’s what I do — I have no patience to sit around and burn 3 or 4 dvds full of files — it’s must faster for me to “set it and forget it” to have the .iso images ready, so I can burn the .iso’s to dvd when I have more time).

Generally speaking I had success with DVD Span except when I had to backup to .iso a directory that had multiple folders and files with very long names. The program gives you two .iso options, and while I was able to backup a lot of data, the program returned errors when I tried to burn the aforementioned “packed” directory with long folder and file names. However, for backing up my pictures and my audio files (which are not really in that deep a directory tree structure), the program did a great job.

At the $12.50 sticker price, DVD Span is a bargain.

Because I wasn’t able to get everything I needed done with DVD Span, I’d recommend you get a trial copy first and make sure the program can handle what you would like it to do.  And other than SyncBack Pro (see my reviews here and here), I haven’t found another program that can split directories to span DVDs.

As a general rule, you should try to keep all of your data in one place — or in multiple manageable places (see my article on windows partitioning for more details).   For the basic user, the best plan is to keep all of your data in the MyDocuments folder.  MyDocuments is designed to organize your data, your pictures, your videos, etc.   I like to add folders to My Documents in addition to the default ones to help organize my files a little better.  You can add folders for what you need — for example, financial, work, home, etc — it’s up to you and how detailed you want to make it.

The Checklist

(Windows 7 caveat – almost all user data is stored in the C:\Users\[username] folder so you may have an easier time putting a backup together vs. your Windows XP friends — but check this list to make sure you do get everything as the \Users directory is not foolproof – see #’s 5 and 6 to see what I mean).

1. MyDocuments – this folder should include all of your data files (word, powerpoint, excel, etc) as well as your pictures, videos and music. So if you are actively using MyDocuments, backing up this folder will cover most of what you need to backup.

2. Pictures (if you are not using MyDocuments).

3. Videos and eBooks (if you are not using MyDocuments).

4. Music (if you are not using MyDocuments).

5. Bookmarks and (optionally) passwords from your web browser. And if you are using more than one web browser, make sure you backup this information from each browser individually.

6. Other Application Data — certain programs do not use MyDocuments unless you tell them. Quickbooks, for example, stores its data in the program directory. So look through your Programs (C:/Program Files) and see if there are any programs that you use that don’t use MyDocuments to store the backups. If you are unsure, open up the program and try to save a file and see where it defaults you to when you try to save (unless you’ve told it otherwise, Quickbooks often likes to backup to C:\Program Files\Quickbooks, so if you just backed up MyDocuments you’d lose this data!

7. Desktop Items. Strangely enough, desktop items are not stored in the MyDocuments folder and many of us (myself included) like to use the desktop as a temporary holding area (that becomes less and less temporary as time goes on). The easiest thing to do here is to find the desktop folder and copy its contents. It can usually be found (in Windows XP) under C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Desktop.

8. Email data. Depending upon which email client you use, you will likely have a data file. If you have online email (Hotmail, Gmail) then this won’t be a problem as your email is stored on the web. But if you are using a program like Microsoft Outlook, you will want to backup that data file. With this data file you can easily move to a new machine and get all of your emails back.

This is a pretty exhaustive list but once you’ve setup your backup plan and have it in place, daily backups (or backups at whatever interval works for you) will be easy. And if you plan to move to a new machine, you will already have most of the work done. If you are moving to a new machine, you can check out this post which is a checklist for moving to a new computer — which I will put out in the near future.

Disk Images

A disk image is basically one big file that copies the exact state of your computer to an external hard drive or another source (the Mac’s Time Machine is a great example of a disk imaging program), so that if you have a catastrophic hardware failure or a severe data loss, you can reinstall your operating system and then reload the image to restore your system to the way it was — prior to the problem that necessitated the restore.  There are many programs out there that create and restore disk images, and because these programs do capture your entire drive, you don’t need to worry that something will be missed. There are two major disadvantages of disk imaging systems, however.

1. Disk imaging systems don’t always allow you to restore individual files.  Say you are writing an essay and you make a mistake and want to go back to last week’s version.  Because most disk imaging programs won’t allow you to restore the single file, in order to get the old version of the essay back, you’d need to restore your entire system to the state is was in when you last made an image.

2. Disk imaging is often non-transferrable.  Say you have an old computer and you want to get a new machine.  Disk images are generally tied to the original machine, so if you have an image of your old computer, you will probably not be able to restore it to the new one.

File-Level Backups

A file-level backup is a backup where you backup the individual files that you need for your day-to-day use. For example, in a file level backup you’d backup your My Documents folder.  So if you are working on the essay in the example above, and you want to go back to a version that’s a week old, then you can go back to your file-level backup and pull out the individual file that you need.  Now of course it would depend upon when you last backed up the essay, and if you saved individual versions, but the concept here is that file-level backups allow you to pull out individual files where disk images often do not.

The main concern about file-level backups is that they do not backup the state of your computer and they do not backup your applications.  The reason for this is that even if you did backup your program files, programs need to be installed on individual computers and therefore cannot be moved.  You cannot copy your Microsoft Office folder from your old computer and place it on your new computer and expect Office to run.  Instead, you’d need to get the new machine and use the Microsoft Office install DVD to reinstall the program on your new machine.  As a guide for file backups,  I have created a helpful checklist that will answer the question, “What files should I backup?”.

What’s the Best Method?
The best method combines a disk image backup with a file-level backup. A good rule of thumb is to make weekly images of your machine, and daily backups of your frequently used data. This way, if you do have a problem where Windows won’t start or the system becomes unusable, you can first restore your disk image – which will bring your system to the functioning state is was in when you made the backup. Then, you can restore yesterday’s data to bring everything back as close to the way it was before you had the problem.

Also note that if you are planning on moving to a new machine, you must make some kind of file-level backup so you can easily move your data from the old machine to the new machine.

What’s the Best Strategy?
That’s simple. NEVER rely on one device to store data which for which you only have one copy. Put another way, always keep TWO copies of any important data. For most people, this should be straight forward. If you have a computer with a 250GB drive, make sure you have a 250GB backup drive. This way, if your computer hard drive fails, or the external drive fails, you always have a good copy. People run into the most trouble when they have a 250GB computer hard drive, and offload some files (usually videos and other multimedia) on to the external drive to save space on the computer hard drive so they can download more multimedia onto the computer. What happens in this situation is that you now have files on the computer that aren’t backed-up on to the external drive, and vice versa. Thus, if you now lose a drive, you will not have a backup because you only had individual copies of the data you need.

To solve this problem, simply purchase two external hard drives. It may sound like a lot of work (it’s cheap $75-$100 each — a small price to pay not to lose data), but it’s not. Here’s what you do: (and you can use a program like SyncBack [freeware version] to do it).

1. Copy all of your needed data from your computer hard drive to the External Drive 1.
2. Copy all of the data from External Drive 1 to External Drive 2.
3. When you want to move “overflow” data off your computer hard drive to make space for new data (e.g. movies you haven’t watched in a year) — no problem. Just copy the data onto External Drive 1 (you may want to create a new folder on the drive to keep the data organized (e.g. /oldMovies), and then mirror (copy the data onto External Drive 2).

In this manner you now have a copy of everything that’s current from your computer on External Drive 1, and you also have the “overflow” data (e.g. the /oldMovies folder) you copied to make space for more data) there, too. With only one External Drive, you will now have only ONE copy of the /oldMovies folder and its data. With the second external drive, you now have a copy of the oldMovies data on External Drive 2.

In summary, no one manufacturer of External Hard Drive will guarantee not losing data. The key concept here is to make sure that all important data is backed up in at least TWO places (or more depending upon how important your data is). The system above is one basic approach to use to mirror (copy) your data. I’d be interested to see what methodologies others use to mirror their data. Let me know.

1. What is the level of security that is being offered?  Is it possible for the company to recover your password if you lose the password?  Recall that if the company can recover a password for you, then they can probably access your data.  Clearly no honest employee at a company would compromise client data, but what is your protection from a rogue employee or from an attack on your backup company’s servers?

2. Encryption.  Practically every online backup software provides some level of encryption.  You need to find out what level of encryption is appropriate for your data (family pictures vs financial data and medical records).

3. Accessibility.  Is it possible to restore a single file and not just the entire backup.  There are many times where you just need to access a few items, and some providers in the past did not allow individual files to be restored from a backup.

4. Do you  mind having software running in the background all the time?  Most backup software that connects you online prefers that you keep the software running at all times so that the backup can stay current.  Personally I understand why the companies want the software running, but I don’t like programs running all the time.  I also use an external hard drive backup, and I generally run my online backup software once per week (or before that if major changes are made)

5. Pricing,  Is the pricing built for expansion?  Some companies charge a flat rate, while others charge per GB (usually you get 2GB free and then you are charged in 5, 10, 50, 100GB increments depending upon the company).  Also, because many companies do offer a flat rate unlimited backup (for personal use only), what other features are you getting by paying more, and are these features you will actually use.

6. I’ll leave the most important question for last.  What level of support do you get?  Is there a phone number or is there only email support?  How quick is tech support’s response time?  Because if you are in a situation on a Saturday afternoon where you need to restore a file and for some reason are having a problem, do you need to wait until Monday before someone can help.

Selecting an online backup provider is one of the most important decisions you’ll make when in comes to protecting your data.  Hopefully these questions will give you food for thought in selecting a provider.

Let’s assume you have a 100GB physical hard drive.  Most of you have drives that are 250GB or more (drives this large usually come with new machines) — and I’ve been partitioning drives as small as 5GB for a long time – so 100GB is a good round number to work with.

First I create an operating system partition. A C: drive that has around 20GB of space.  This partition serves to hold the operating system (Windows) only, as wells as the files that are associated with Windows.   There will be some exceptions — for example, Internet Explorer cannot be moved from the C: drive so there’s no point trying.  Also, certain program are happier running from C: (e.g. I let my WAMP server run off the C: drive), but for the most part I only leave the OS on the C: drive. By creating this C: drive as a 20GB partition, you are leaving plenty of space of the OS to run (hopefully you have plenty of RAM so you won’t need the hard drive space for performance), as well as room for the OS to grow with all of the updates and patches that are needed for a healthy Windows installation.

The next partition I create is the D: drive.  This is the drive that will contain all of your program files.  I usually create a 20GB partition for this drive though your individual size depends on what software you install. Adobe Creative Suite takes up a ton of space — Firefox doesn’t.

So at this point you have a C: drive that is reserved for the OS only (for the most part) and a D: drive that’s reserved for Program Files.  The first two benefits you will see at this point are that (1) your OS is separate from your program files so things will feel more organized and (2) you’ve saved yourself a ton of backup space.  And in case you are wondering, you’ve saved backup space because you don”t generally need to backup your OS (C) or your Program Files (D) because if you reinstall your operating system you will need to use the Windows disk to reinstall Windows, and you will need to reinstall all of your program files to this new install of Windows.  You’ll appreciate this more as we talk about your data drive(s) next.

The next partition I have is an E: drive that I use for MyDocuments and iTunes.  This is generally the largest partition that I have.  In our 100GB example here, let’s take the remaining 60GB and make it into our E: data drive.  On this data drive I will store the contents of MyDocuments (which as you will recall includes MyMusic, MyVideos, and MyPictures and more).    By having this E: drive setup as to be holding all of your data, you can easily backup this E: drive only to make sure you have a copy of all of your important files.  At this point, however, you must get into the habit of saving your data on the E: drive and make sure your all of your programs store the data on this E: drive.  The only exception to this setup on my machine is the /www directory that’s there as a part of wampserver, which is happiest having everything on the C:  drive.  So I know that when I run my backups that I include C:/…/www.

Note now that if you did need to reinstall windows, you’d be able to reinstall it on the C: drive, (you’d still have to reformat the D: drive to reinstall all of your programs) but your E: data drive would remain intact.  Note that depending upon your installation of Windows and your media, you may NOT be able to install Windows without reformatting the entire drive.  For example, many recovery DVDs that come with a new computer will reformat your entire drive and also DESTROY and partitions you had previously made.  So if you do reinstall the OS, make sure that you backup your data first — just in case your reinstall process truly reverts to factory settings.  But now backing up your data is easy because it’s all on the E: drive.

Advanced Partitioning

Now while the basic scheme above works well  for many people, you can break things down more as you need.  In my case, I split the E: drive even further.  On the E: (data) partition I store the MyDocuments folder that includes MyPictures and the rest of my regular data.  But because my iTunes library is huge, I have a separate partition, an F: drive that I use for media.  One of the reasons for this separation is that I don’t need to backup my music library as often as I backup my everyday data.  Also, note that the more data and files that you backup in a backup (or a mirror or a sync operation) the longer the process will take.  So if I’m just backing up my E: data drive, there’s no reason for my mirroring program (syncback) to have to copy over (and check the sync status of) thousands and thousands of music files.  So it makes sense to separate out data partitions based on the frequency of your backups.  And as it were, I personally keep an additional partition solely for virtual machines.  Because VM files are gigantic, it makes no sense to have to include them in a sync process unless you need to.

Planning Partitions

The best way to setup partitions is with a clean install, but as you may not always have a clean install in front of you, you may elect to partition an existing system.  When you partition an existing system — before you do anything else — make sure you backup your data.   I usually will install the OS first, load the partitioning software, and then create my partitions.  But if you are partitioning an existing setup, MAKE SURE you leave the OS drive (e.g. the C: drive in the above example) with plenty of room.  In fact — OVERESTIMATE.  You do not want to be in a situation where you have a partitioned drive/system and you run out of space on the OS drive.  You can get out of this mess but it’s better not to be there in the first place.

Partitioning Software

For many, many years I was a big fan of Symantec (Norton) Partition Magic.  The software was (is) reasonably priced and (unlike much of Norton’s newer products) has never failed me.   In my travels, however, I came across a free partitioning utility that I really like.  The program is the EASUS Partition Master Home Edition, and I’ve found it to be a worth replacement for Partition Magic (sorry Symantec).   I’ve used the program with Windows Vista and Windows 7 and I have had success.

In this article I introduced you to the world of partitioning and reviewed some of the advantages of having a partitioned system.   Remember that whenever you partition a drive, however, you may lose data.  So be sure to BACKUP you system prior to performing partition operatiosn.

In my search to find such a solution to my backup problems, I came across SpiderOak.  SpiderOak is a backup company that touts what they call a “zero-knowledge environment”.   One of their major selling points (which is the selling point for me) is that while they store your data, they don’t know what data of yours they are storing.  Their proprietary system is quite complex, but the gist of it is the company sees your data as block on their servers, as opposed to actual folder and file names.  So in theory, if one of their servers were compromised, all you’d be able to get out of it would be gobbledygook.

Which brings me to my next feature of SpiderOak’s service: because they don’t store your password, if you lose it you are on your own — e.g. you won’t be able to access your data and neither will they.  Now many computer users promise themselves (and others) that they won’t forget their passwords, and do rely on companies to provide them an easy way to reset their passwords.  But if you want the level of privacy and security that SpiderOak provides, you are going to need to understand this fact right from the start.  That being said, it makes sense:  if they don’t have your password then they can’t email it back to you, but they also can’t access your data.

In terms of the backup interface, SpiderOak can’t be simpler.  There are only a few tabs which are quite intuitive to use, and you are presented with a familiar windows explorer style interface to select the files and directories you wish to backup.   The main screen of the software gives you a nice overview of the current operation  – if you are backing up it shows you the status of the backup, and there is also a progress bar-type indicator at the bottom to let you know where you are in terms of your storage space.

Another feature that the software adds  is the ability to schedule a time to backup.  You can select a day and time so the software can automatically check your files and run the backup for you.  Because I’m paranoid about cpu usage, I don’t like to have many programs running in the background.  And as a power user I don’t need a program to remind or prompt me to run a backup, as my backup schedule is ingrained in my daily schedule. So for my purposes (at this time I run local backups daily and I archive online once per week). I can turn on SpiderOak once per week, push the refresh button in the lower left part of the interface and then let it do it’s thing (by the way the sofware will tell you the last time it refreshed which I think is pretty cool).  Now I’m sure the folks on SpiderOak customer service team will tell you that their program has a tiny footprint and will stay out of your way and won’t use up your precious CPU cycles; and from what I’ve seen this is true.  But for someone like me, facts don’t always matter when it comes the way I manage my machine — but the important point here is that SpiderOak gives me, the power user, the ability to run the program the way I want to run it, when I want to run it.

And on that note, I’ve been quite impressed with SpiderOak’s customer support team.  I’ve been speaking with one member of the support team throughout my review period of the software and service and he’s been nothing but helpful and professional the entire way.   Because of my specific needs, I peppered him with questions about the program and his answers were prompt and informative.

The pricing schedule for SpiderOak is reasonable, as well.  At first glance you may wonder why it costs $10/100GB where other companies give you unlimited storage for less.  I suggest two major reasons that make this service worth the price.  First, I know of no other service that provides the privacy and flexibility that SpiderOak offers (the service also allows you to have synchronization and sharing services for no additional cost) and the privacy alone makes it worth it.  Secondly, SpiderOak puts no restrictions on the number of computers that you can use with their service under your account.   If you compare this pricing structure to other companies out there, you will find many other companies will charge you if you use more than one computer with their service (though some companies do allow you to have two computers under one account).  The number of computers included in the backup price becomes an even bigger issue when you look into specific online backup business plans. as their fees get higher and higer as more machines are added.  Obviously you will need to look and do some simple math to figure out your savings, but with the number of machines I have, a flat rate fee per account works for me.  And then add to the calculated price the value of your privacy and you’ll see that you will come out on top.

Now when using SpiderOak it’s important to understand that the service is for the most part a backup service (though there is a very neat sync feature that will allow you to share data across all of the computers on your account), and not a comprehensive synchronization program.  SpiderOak does not have the advanced comparison features that a program like SyncBack has, but remember that SpiderOak isn’t designed to do that.  If you are using only  one machine and backing up directly to an external hard drive (which you already do, right?), then you can go right to SpiderOak to backup online at your preferred interval.   However, if you are like me and have multiple machines,  you can use first use SyncBack to synchronize the data between your laptop and your desktop, and then upload this synchronized data from your desktop to SpiderOak.  Again, the program gives you flexibility so you can find the backup procedures that work best for your home or business.

In the interest of keeping this review at a manageable length, I won’t get into the features I glossed over above: namely the ability to sync data across all of the machines on your account, as  well as the ability for you to share your data to users over the web (only if you choose).

In summary, SpiderOak is a secure online backup company that provides top-notch service and support at a very reasonable price. Their  number one priority is privacy — and privacy is the magic word for me when it comes to selecting an online backup provider.

Disclosure. I originally approached SpiderOak about writing a review of their online backup service, and I was given some complimentary storage space.  I like the service so much that I am continuing to use it and I encourage you to check it out.  Here is our affiliate link so you can try out the service: