My plans for the holidays had never been all that exciting, just to knuckle down and put the finishing touches to my thesis, due in at the end of January, but the day before Christmas Eve it all changed.  I walked back to my desk, stumbled, and a cup of soup flew, in perfect obedience to sod’s law, straight at the laptop.  Of course, I turned it off, turned it upside down, applied the hairdryer and made impassioned offerings to the gods of silicone.  It may sometimes work, but it never has for me.

And that, dear reader, is how I got to spend Boxing Day restoring my files and getting myself set up on brand new laptop.  Fortunately, its all back, and no harm done.  My backup strategy is going to change a little, but it worked, and this post is to explain some of the things I do, and some of the things I learned.

If you’re a consultant, a student, or anyone else who relies on a computer, having good backups in place is absolutely essential.  It’s not hard to get a new laptop, but it is very very hard to recreate that important document you’ve slaved over for weeks, reconstruct data or get everyone to resend those emails.

What would you need to restore?

Any backup strategy needs to start with thinking about what you will need to restore.  Think about all the software you use, and how you would restore it if something went wrong.  Make a list.  I have Thunderbird email, all my references on Zotero (a Firefox plugin), Word and Excel files and some specialised software.  The documents are easy, but do you know how to backup and restore your emails, data in your browser, or that specialised software?  Which files will you need back first?  If it takes a day or two to get a new machine, do you have another you could use in the meantime, and if so, how will you get your files onto it?

Restoring from a complete failure or loss of a laptop will involve finding or buying a new machine, reinstalling software and then restoring your own custom data – files, emails, settings.

I back up everything in My Documents (and I’m careful to keep files in there), as well as my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.  Most  software can be downloaded from the internet, but if that’s not possible, make sure you have the CDs and the licences somewhere safe.

It is worthwhile creating a directory with all your software licences in it, and keeping that backed up as well.

Online backups are good, but can be slow to restore

I use a service called JungleDisk, which backs up everything I ask it to onto storage on the internet (at Rackspace). It sits quietly in the background, backing up files as I change them, and, so long as I’m online reasonably often, I can be sure I’m backed up.  It costs $3 per month, plus 15c/GB/month, which works out to about $7 a month for me.

This was my first port of call when I went to try to get my files back, but it was very slow.   Its first step is to download a ‘backup database’ file, which in my case was 300MB.  My broadband wasn’t having it’s best day, and this download took a couple of hours, and had to be restarted twice.    It’s a good reminder that ‘up to 9Mb’ is meaningless in a densely populated area.  In the end, I managed to get the disk out of the old laptop and connect it up to the new, which sped things up greatly, but if I’d had to rely on my JungleDisk backups, it would have been hours, possibly days to restore it all.

JungleDisk, and services like it, provide two forms of backup.  The one I’d been using is the Backup Vault, which is quicker to back up, but, as I found out, quite slow to restore and a little problematic.  The other is to have an online disk that is syncronised with the laptop, where files are automatically copied and appear as a mounted drive on the laptop.  I’m going to keep current files, particularly live projects on a syncronised disk as well as in a Backup Vault, so that if I need them in a hurry, I can get at them from any PC, and save myself  hours of nervousness as I wait for them to restore, or perhaps miss an important deadline.

Back up Music and Pictures

I am going to start backing up music and photos onto Jungledisk.  Very late to adopt a trend, I’ve started buying mp3 downloads lately, and  I would have lost them if I had lost the hard disk on my dead machine.  The bills will go up a bit, but that collection looks worth saving.

Restoring Thunderbird and Firefox is very simple

My biggest worry was whether I’d be able to restore Zotero, a Firefox plugin that allows you to index and make notes about copies of documents, and create bibliographic references.  This is vital for my thesis, but also important for lots of other work I’ve done, and recreating it would take days for my thesis alone.  Fortunately, everything in it is stored in my Firefox profile, and the nice people at Mozilla provide simple instructions for restoring it, which work for Thunderbird as well.

Having another computer helps

I have an old laptop, with a couple of keys missing and a nearly dead battery.  It’s not useful for anything much, but it can connect to the internet and run MS Word.  It was invaluable for checking my backups were safe (and for watching Dr Who on Christmas Day).

If you still have the hard disk, use it.

If a laptop dies, its often possible to extract the harddisk and put it into a caddy (from Maplins or similar) and then get at the files from a new machine.  Much, much faster than downloading off an internet backup.

If you rely on your computer, think carefully about how you would deal with losing it.   Think about it now, before the worst happens, and make sure that you’re backing up everything you need, and know how to restore it all.