There is always a big question of having a system backup for a security purpose.System Backups is the best way to have our data even in times of memory corruption, memory loss, auto format, system crash down.All condition may make a loss of billion dollars to any banking system or what if a data base of share market.Just think you have saved your very important data in machine and suddenly your machine got crash down.Sometimes virus in your system may lead to reboot your machine to save it from major damage in that cases too data backups helps a lot to restore your important data after rebooting. To avoid loss of our important data in such conditions data backup will help us to retrieve our important data.This is mainly done based on the importance of the data and the amount of data to be backed up.We also have to have a check for the available space to store.Some common ways to have a system backup are as follows- a) Tapes can be used as back up storage devices. b) Optical devices such as -i]DVD's ii]CD's can be used too as data storage devices. c) Flash memories (USB Drives, Portable Hard Drives) another device which can also be used for storage for the data that we need to have a backup. d) Online services, are one another effective and hitech way to have you data backups.These are paid services provide by some sites specially working and providing such services only.For example Xdrive, allow users to upload their files to a server for safe keeping. Although it may be convenient to have the data available wherever an internet connection is available, there are a few limitations. Tapes are now a days out dated so they can be used as a backup device but will give less space for storing.Optical devices like CD's and DVD's can also b used but they are useful when data is small amount even then there are chances of them getting corrupt by scratches. Flashes memories too have problem of less space in that case handy hard drives will prove helpful as well as they will allow us to store large amount of data too.
I don't understand why system backups are made into such a big deal. It's easy enough to have a network box somewhere and every so often overwrite the previous data with the new current situation. (which unix systems have been doing for more years than I care to think about) For OS and programs most peoples setups will go on a dvd or 2, which with a little thought with partitioning methods makes restore from backup very easy. Tapes still have a place. They are portable (can be locked in a safe) and are uncommon devices which these days have a mind numbing amount of storage. The safe system backup/restore policy needs planning and thought. It's pointless backing up a full 500gb drive every few days when all you will be doing is duplicating existing backups. It is a large subject which is not as simple as it at first looks. I use a system similar to this http://blogs.sun.com/chrisg/entry/rolling_incremental_backups. One thing I would advise is never use a proprietary program for backups which make backups that can only be restored with a specific application. There is no need for encryption of backups (and especially no need to copy protect) for your personal home use. Leave that for business users who can afford the time and software needed to run an encrypted secure data backup policy. It all sounds fine in principle, but what if, you need to run s decryption program when attempting a restore/recover on a completely crashed system, and the decryption program is on your encrypted backup disk? (sounds silly but I have seen it happen more than once) I would suggest always taking a system snapshot backup of system files on a clean installation.. once all programs and applications that you consider "stock" are loaded and working. That way you don't have to worry about re-registering or activating in the case of a hardware failure.. Just copy the files to the same place on the new drive and after a couple of little system things boot it up to where it was last time. I always set up windows machines in a rather unix-like way.. With separate partitions for system, data and volatile (temp) files. These can be cleared easily, and I think restricting the size of the windows partition is a good thing as it prevents malware running riot across everything. The rule with data backups..?? KISS and think what you actually would be really upset to lose, in matters of time and software/data.
