SyncBack: Synchronize and Backup…

I’ve covered a number of posts about backing up your information (Twitter/Facebook/Gmail with Backupify and documents/spreadsheets with Dropbox), but I haven’t really touched on how to protect yourself from a catastrophic failure of your computer.

In a tweet by Eddie, a frequent commenter here, he posted another lecture on backing up your data, by Merlin Mann. A quote from that article says:

Assume that [your hard drives] are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

While in his article he talks about a schedule for backing things up, I am going to give you a tool that will help you get things backed up in a simple, quick, and scheduled fashion.

If you have important documents and want a completely automated system for backing them up for a cost of $250 (which includes setup, external hard drive, and USB thumbdrive), you can skip the rest of the article and instead contact me from the About The Digitante page.

First of all, you are going to need a place to put everything and placing all your important info on the same hard drive that it is on right now is a terrible idea. If your hard drive crashes, everything is gone, including both copies of your Barbie doll database you’ve been working so feverishly on compiling. What you need is to invest a few dollars, in an external hard drive (this Seagate can be had at less than $80).

Once you’ve hooked that up, you need to get a program called SyncBack Free (a paid version is also available, but probably unnecessary for our needs). You end up downloading a .zip file which you will have to extract. You can extract it wherever you like, but keep track of where it goes. Extracting it to your desktop is probably the best place for it.

Double click the file you extracted to start the installation. You can pretty much click your way through the Next > buttons. After you finish installing you are going need to set up a profile so answer ‘Yes’ to the dialog that pops up. Then we need to choose between the type of set up we want: Backup or synchronization.

Here are some usage cases for each of the options above:

• Backup – Used to keep a copy of a file or files elsewhere for safekeeping. These should be kept on a separate disk and should also be stored away in a safe place such as a safe deposit box.
• Synchronization – Used for organizational purposes such as making sure your music or picture files are the same in two different folders. If changes are made in one place (adding new photos on your living room computer), then changes are copied in the second location (a folder on your laptop).

We are going to choose Backup. The default settings should be fine, but you can certainly tweak them on the Advanced tab if you like. The only thing we need to add is the source and destination directories.

The source directory is going to be all the information that needs to be transferred. To backup 99.99% of the information you will need in the future, you can try backing up the directory ‘C:\Users\USERNAME’ where USERNAME is the name you use to sign on to your computer.

The destination directory is going to be a folder on your external hard drive. You can just call it Backup if you like so it will look like ‘X:\Backup’.

After this is complete you will see a plain English description of what will take place when you run the profile you just created. Mine says:

Next, you can do a test run which does not copy anything, but does generate a report telling what copied successfully and what failed to copy. This is optional if you know what is going to be copied.

Be sure to schedule the backup to run on a regular basis, say once a week or so.

The only thing left to do is run the job. It may take awhile, depending on how much information you have to copy. Be sure to review the report briefly after the job has completed running error-free.

Congratulations! You just backed up your data. Be sure to take Merlin Mann’s suggest and do complete backups on multiple hard drives and keep one at home, one at work, and one elsewhere. Additionally, keep your absolute must-have documents encrypted on a USB thumbdrive. If you have gotten this far, you are truly a pro!