A friend of mine recently had an issue with his computer that sparked a panic at the possibility of losing years of irreplaceable personal and business data. Lucky for him, I was able to rescue the data and get him back on his feet in the course of a few hours. The experience left him with a renewed respect for the need to make backups standard operating procedure, not to be relegated solely to the enterprise environment.

We should all be making regular backups of our more important data. I’ll be honest: I used to be as guilty as most in that I gave nary a thought to the survival of my data in the event of a disaster. A few years in the enterprise environment working on Big Business infrastructure changed that. I’ve seen more than my fair share of data disasters, and in speaking with many storage consultants on the subject I have gained a smidge of knowledge on the subject, enough to realize I was playing a Damoclean game with MTBF stats.

Taking the time to start a backup regimen doesn’t have to be a painful or costly project. There are plenty of tools out there that will do the dirty deed, and do it quietly without any user interaction beyond initial setup.

There is a myriad of solutions available for Windows desktops, but here are a few that I recommend:

Mozy is a free, automatic, and secure web backup service. You get 2GB of storage without paying a cent – perfect for documents and other smaller sets of data – and the data is available for recovery from any Internet-accessible location via a web interface. Availability and security are guaranteed, and you can add up to three computers per account. What’s the catch? By signing up, you’re agreeing to let them email you with offers from their sponsors (but they promise not to sell your personal information to any third parties). Wary of their intentions? Sign up with a pseudonym and a throwaway email address.

Got tiny pipes or want to backup more than a few documents? Then you’ll need to turn to a more full-featured solution. Don’t want to shell out any of your hard-earned greenbacks? Check out WinBackup, which was recently released as 100% unlimited and unrestricted freeware. The interface is intuitive and simple to use, and the software supports many useful features that can save your behind in a bad situation.

WinBackup is very good software for most, but I don’t see two features I use on a regular basis: differential (not incremental) backups and the option to create a bootable rescue CD/DVD for when the poop really hits the fan. For those of you (like me) who don’t mind paying for a little bit for this extra functionality, I recommend Acronis True Image. I’ve been using True Image for a few years, after being a loyal Norton/Symantec Ghost user for years. It’s less than 1/2 the price of Ghost and many more features to boot! As with Ghost, the key feature is the ability to create whole disk/partition images to quickly roll out standard install images or keep handy for quick system restores.

Ah, Linux. The other side of the fence has always been a place of greener pastures. Backups have always been a breeze in the open-source OS, if not for the utilities, for the ease of which to write and schedule quick and dirty backup scripts. For the minimalist, I suggest nothing more than Old Faithful: tar. Just wrap ‘em up, gzip or bzip2 to your heart’s delight, and fire the sucker off to your removable media of choice. There’s also a simple way to migrate the files to a remote host via ssh:

tar cf – DIRECTORY | gzip -c | ssh REMOTEHOST “cat > BACKUP.tar.gz”

The selected files/directory is compressed locally and piped directly to the remote host over the encrypted SSH tunnel to a destination file on the target system. The advantage to this method is that it doesn’t require the creation of a temporary archive on the source system, if storage space is a luxury. Restoration directly from the backup host is just as simple:

ssh REMOTEHOST cat BACKUP.tar.gz | gunzip -c | tar xv

If you are going to schedule backups through this method, I suggest the use of SSH public/private key pairs for non-interactive authentication.

For a more elegant solution with file versioning support, use rdiff-backup. I’d write up a guide, but the folks at Ars have done us a favor already. If shell scripts and cron jobs give you the willies (say it ain’t so!), pyBackPack is a nice GUI for rdiff-backup that makes the job just that much easier.

Remember, this may be a great list of software, but a backup isn’t worth its salt unless other factors are taken into consideration. Will the media last for the length of time you require? Are you verifying the backups are indeed taking place on a regular basis? Are those backups intact, readable and the contents verifiable? Are you storing the backups in the same physical location as the source systems, ready for the next disaster to take them both out in one fell swoop? It’s a difficult process to weight the cost and effort required to implement these measures, but if the data’s worth it to you, it’ll pay for itself the first time something goes boink. Also, keep in mind that backup strategies aren’t necessarily one-size-fits-all solutions; what works for me might not be worth it for you. Data storage, in the form of hard disks and optical media, is so reasonably priced that I’m certain everyone will be able to come up with a system that fits their own particular needs without breaking the bank.

Now go schedule a backup before you get distracted.