In honor of World Backup Day: How to protect your data

Happy World Backup Day, an occasion dedicated to encouraging you to make sure all your digital data is kept safe and secure. If you’ve procrastinated on implementing a backup strategy for your PC, why not mark the occasion by making backup copies of all your documents, digital photos, music, videos, and other invaluable files? We’ll help you get started.

The main things to consider when shopping for a backup drive are capacity and connection options. If your computer has a 1TB hard drive bursting at its seams, don’t purchase a 500GB model for a back-up. I’d suggest a drive with at least twice the capacity of the volume you’re backing up. This will allow you to store copies of all of your data, and it will leave room for the new pictures, movies, and files you’ll continue to add to your computer.

In terms of connections, USB 3.0 is speedy, inexpensive, and pervasive. Even if your PC doesn’t support that newish standard, the USB 3.0 port on the back-up drive is backward compatible to the ubiquitous USB 2.0. Data transfers from a USB 2.0 PC will occur at pokey USB 2.0 speeds, but when you do upgrade your system, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the drive’s intrinsic performance. Thunderbolt is even faster, but that interface is relatively rare—at least on Windows PCs.

You might also consider moving up to a storage device that connects to your data network, instead of a USB or Thunderbolt port. A network-attached storage (NAS) box can support one or more client PCs, and some offer storage redundancy in the form of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). RAID 1 creates a mirror image of your backups, so that your data will be preserved if one of the drives fails. A RAID 5 array requires a minimum of three hard drives, but if any one of them fails, your data can be recovered from the remaining drives, and the array can be rebuilt after you replace that drive.

The downside to RAID 1 and RAID 5 is that the capacity equivalent to one drive is not available for storage. RAID 1 built from two 2TB drives, for instance, gives you 2TB of storage, not 4TB. RAID 5 built from three 2TB drives gives you 4TB of storage, not 6TB.

If you want to protect your data further, you might want to look at having a couple of backups that you rotate through, keeping one offsite. If your backup drive is attached to your PC during a fire or robbery, it may be of no help in retrieving your lost data.

If you’re ready to take that first step in protecting your valuable data, here’s a list of PCWorld’s favorite drives reviewed over the past 12 months.

Western Digital WD My Passport 2TB

Western Digital WD My Passport 2TB: You’d be hard pressed to find a better portable drive than the My Passport. It comes with a good software bundle, has plenty of capacity, and is a top-notch performer. (Read our full review of the Western Digital WD My Passport 2TB.)

Rocstor Lancer LX 500

Rocstor Lancer LX 500: With both USB 3.0 and FireWire interfaces, the Lancer LX works equally well on Windows PCs and Macs. It’s large but rugged, and a good, if not great performer. (Read our full review of the Rocstor Lancer LX 500.)

Lenovo ThinkPad USB3 Secure Drive

Lenovo ThinkPad USB3 Secure Drive: This secure hard drive’s high-flying USB 3.0 performance makes it a good choice for those who need to protect their backups. (Read our full review of the Lenovo ThinkPad USB3 Secure Drive.)

QNAP TS-269 Pro

QNAP TS-269 Pro: While it’s pricey, The QNAP’s excellent performance, copious software features, and state-of-the-art connectivity render this two-bay NAS box a good deal for small offices and work groups. (Read our full review of the QNAP TS-269 Pro.)

QNAP TS-879 Pro

QNAP TS-879 Pro: If you need to back up your important business data, the TS-879 Pro’s eight drive bays and lightning speed highlight this NAS. By far, it’s the fastest—and most expensive—box we’ve tested to date. (Read our full review of the QNAP TS-879 Pro.)

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Handy Backup is plain, powerful, and easy to use

Handy Backup is utilitarian in the best sense; it's a backup program with a no-nonsense interface and a boatload of features. Despite its plain countenance, one of its iterations is sure to appeal to IT types and smart consumers. I looked at Handy Backup Free, which is... free.

1. There's not a lot to look at, but there's power behind the Handy Backup grille.

Handy Backup Free is easy to use and lets you select files as well as repositories for backing up. Repositories are folders or accounts such as My Documents, an FTP, WebDav, Amazon S3, etc. It's a little odd to see the latter items listed under a backup list, but it's also nice. You can back up to and restore data from local drives, CD/DVD/BD, FTP, and across a network.

You create a backup, restore, or synch task in Handy Backup Home using step-by-step wizards. These are easy to use, and once a task has been defined you can edit all the options directly from a multiple-paned dialog. To skip the wizard, you can simply duplicate a task and edit the pertinent options. Said options include full, incremental, differential backups; compressing the backup to encrypted zip files; scheduling; and running tasks before or after a job.

Handy Backup also comes in $39 Home, $99 Professional, $199 Small Server, and $599 Server editions. Home is the latest 7.x version, while Pro adds disk imaging, backing up to SFTP servers, and ODBC database backup. The Small Server edition backs up numerous business and enterprise-level databases such as Microsoft Exchange data, Oracle, and more. The full Server version has all that plus the ability to back up multiple PCs to a central location.

Handy Backup's step-by-step wizard helps you through jobs.

About the only thing missing that I'd like to see in Handy Backup is support for Rsync, a backup and synchronization protocol used by many servers and NAS boxes. Aside from that, one or the other editions of the program should have all the features you need. I had an easy time with the program; it's lightweight it does the job, and it stays out of the way. What else could you ask for?

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page downloads the software from the vendor's site. The Handy Backup website can make downloading the proper version confusing. You need a serial to use the free version, which you can obtain from the developer. Also, the message to upgrade is for a trial of the home version. Ignore that message to continue using the free version.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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Free and Easy Backup With SyncToy

Most of us don't back up our files nearly often enough. I'm not sure I like living on the edge--after all, one wrong move with a coffee cup or one misstep at the airport security line could lead to a laptop disaster. I'm not sure why I don't back up as much as I probably need to, but at least some of the reason is the inconvenience and intrusiveness of backup software.

I recently bought a new computer and needed to move a lot of customizations, programs, and data files to the new machine from the old one, which I would then reformat and wipe clean. I needed something that was, most important, reliable, as the original copies of the backed up files would no longer exist when I finished. I wanted a tool that didn't just try to copy everything from point A to B, but checked to see whether the file at the destination was different from the origin before wasting all that time copying and overwriting the very same files. Finally, it needed to be easy to customize and quickly run on a regular basis, to eliminate that final inconvenience issue.

Where I landed was on Microsoft's supremely understated, free utility, SyncToy. Version 2.1 has been around since 2009, but still works perfectly in both the oldest and newest versions of Windows. It's a Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 application, so you'll need to install that prerequisite before SyncToy, but once you do, it takes only seconds to install.

Everything in SyncToy is organized around Folder Pairs, which is just a shorthand way to indicate an origin location (which SyncToy calls the Left Folder) and destination location (which SyncToy calls the Right Folder) for the files you want to move around. I know why you need an origin and destination; I have no idea why SyncToy names those folders Left and Right, and not after their roles. It's not a deal breaker, but the use of relative directions for the names of the folder pair elements is a major conceptual gaffe.

Best mode for backup or packrats: Contribute copies only new and changed folders or files, and deletes nothing.Once you set up your pair of folders, you have to choose one of three methods by which SyncToy will carry out your task: Synchronize copies changed files both ways and keeps the contents of a pair of folders identically matched; Echo copies new or updated files left to right and mirrors renames and deletions on the left to the right. Contribute copies new or updated files left to right, but unlike Echo, doesn't delete anything. You can further customize folder pair behavior by setting up custom exclusion lists, with or without wildcards, of file types and properties such as size, date, or name. Scheduled sync jobs run unattended, even if you're logged off at the time, so long as the destination drive is connected.

Creating Folder Pairs is the easy part; The hard part is knowing where the important data files are stored.Folder Pairs get the job done, but one thing that's missing is the intelligence a backup program would bring to the table. With SyncToy, I'm responsible for figuring out where my programs store the data files I might want to back up. I'll typically back up my user profile, which includes everything on the desktop, as well as documents, templates, photos, work files, downloaded programs, and other useful stuff I wouldn't want to lose. Once I do that, the backing up part is easy, but in order for me to back up my browser configurations, plug-ins, IM chat logs, and downloaded email and attachments, I needed to hunt down each origin folder first and generate a pair for each. That wasn't a problem for me, but it would have been a huge problem for, say, my mom.

The good thing about SyncToy is that the few files locked by other programs during a Sync run can easily be identified in the error logs and backed up later.Once the pairs are in place, you can run them individually, or all together in a batch. The most frequent error that crops up happens because one might be trying to copy a data file, like an IM chat log, while the log file is still open for writing by Pidgin. When that happens, the program increments a counter in the Failed column on the program's results window. The prominent link to a text error log usually leads to a successful resolution of the issue. In this case, you'd just have to quit out of Pidgin and the files then could be copied.

SyncToy isn't perfect, especially not for the novice user who may need a lot of guidance to find the multitude of locations on the file system where you'd want to back up stored files. But for power users who know what they want, SyncToy delivers powerful file management in a puny, less-than-1.5MB package. So stop making excuses and back that stuff up before it's too late.

--Andrew Brandt

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