Everybody says backups are a good idea, but for a long time I didn’t have any. Eventually, I decided I needed a redundant system that would allow me to recover quickly from a crash, system compromise, drive failure, etc.

Many people comfortable with sending their data away will find an online backup service to be quick and easy to use. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people, and so I prefer to do backups on my own.

I currently have two types of backups. My daily backups are relatively quick duplication of my documents and working files onto an external USB hard drive that I keep separate from my computer. My quarterly backups are a copy of my entire system onto a second laptop hard drive.

A combination of these two backups makes it easy to recover from many serious incidents (except for system hardware failure). I turn off my system, remove the hard drive, replace it with the copy from several months ago (usually nothing system-wise has changed), and then restore yesterday’s files off the external drive. At most, I lose a day’s worth of work, but I can always back up more often if I am working on something really important.

Daily Backups with Areca

I used to use Cobian Backup on my Windows computer. It’s a really nice program since all it really does is copy files to other places, which makes getting to your backups really easy. Unfortunately, it started crashing my system after I had been using it successfully for several months. Additionally, it’s Windows only and closed source (though free), so I decided to look for a replacement.

Areca is a open source backup utility. Its backups aren’t quite as clean as Cobian, but it uses standard file operations, so restoring manually is a possibility. Additionally, there is a restore function that should make getting files back fairly painless (though I have yet to need my backup).

I use one backup task which contains all the important folders in my Windows user directory. The backup is stored on a USB external hard drive inside a TrueCrypt partition.

Unfortunately, Areca alone does not support the Volume Shadow Copy service in Windows (as Cobian Backup does). This service allows one process to access files even if another process is using them. Thus Cobian Backup could copy open documents or running virtual machines, but Areca cannot.

For those who need it, there is a plugin that adds this functionality. However, it is not open source (the developers want €4 for it), and VSC isn’t that important to me, so I haven’t tried it.

Quarterly Backups with Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a live CD that does a ton of various disk imaging tasks. I use it to clone my current system drive onto a backup drive. Clonezilla is awesome because it works at a low enough level that you can clone TrueCrypt encrypted drives. It works great, but just make sure you don’t overwrite the more recent drive!

I attach the old drive with a USB SATA adapter, and place the drive I will be writing to (my old backup) inside the computer. This prevents having to do a lot of write operations over USB, which is likely to be slower than the systems internal SATA adapter.

Another warning: don’t boot a Windows drive with another Windows drive connected. If you want to read files off another system’s hard drive, wait until the first system has booted before you connect the second drive. Windows seems to do weird things when it detects other system drives, and that may prevent the second system from booting correctly (even if the drives are TrueCrypt encrypted).

Backup Schedule

Before I shut my system down each night, I do an incremental backup using Areca.

Each week, I do a full backup using Areca, and remove old backups if my backup drive is running out of space.

Finally, every several months, I use Clonezilla to clone the entirety of my system drive onto a second disk. I then make this new disk my working system and put the other in storage.