Necessary Tools for Backup and Recovery

I’m not paranoid nor deathly afraid of another hard disk crash.  As I mentioned, I’m just being pragmatic about the whole thing.  Computer hard disks will crash.  The question is will you be using the computer when the hard disk crashes? Worse question: where’s your data?  Bottom line is you don’t have a clue when you’ll be able to recover with all your data intact.

I got stuck in that thought because of some of the IT projects I have been involved in.  One project was for an off-site backup and recovery center of a major government financial institution.  Another was for a telco disaster recovery site.  In both instances, the question was not about the data but about the downtime:  how long till all operations get back online?

In the same instance a home PC has the same problems.  But with less preparation for a crash and no idea when and if the data will be recovered. And since this is a home-based problem, the solution has to be very simple and easy to follow.  It should be mainenance free, and with no technical experience needed.

I have a backup software which copies the primary drive to the secondary (and larger) physical hard disk, as a single backup file.  The backup software also has a recovery boot CD, of course.  With regards the data on the secondary disk, all important data are copied to DVDs on a regular basis.  If the data is not needed on the hard disk, or it is rarely accessed, it is copied to DVD and deleted from the hard disk.

The recovery CD is used to boot the computer in case the partition gets destroyed or deleted.  From there the data recovery is straight forward, as the software asks where the backup file is located (on a directory in the second hard disk).  And then you wait for the backup and recovery program to finish reconstructing the boot disk.

Now just in case the hard disk has to be fixed for any reason at all, I also have a set of tools  called the “Ultimate Boot CD for Windows,” also called “UBCD-Win.” This set of tools allow me to fix most problems on the hard disk, including undeleting files, recovering partitions, anti-virus and other related problems.

Every so often, I boot up using the UBCD disk and run maintenance work on the Windows XP machine.  Not really paranoid, but just making sure that no hardware related problem would surprise me.