Can someone please explain backups to me?

Question

This subject is so confusing to me, I know it shouldn't be, but here we are. First off, what types of backups are there? I hear different terms being used. Full backup, system image. Is there a difference? Currently my drive is partitioned with a boot drive and everything else is on c drive, including some Steam games, totalling about 250 gb. I don't need to back up the games. Is there a way to choose what to back up. Also, what do I use? Can this be done through Windows, or should I use something like Macrium Reflect? And this backup wouldn't be bootable, correct? That is something different? I've also heard of repair discs. What are those exactly? I guess the real question is, What should I be doing, and what should I be using to do it? Any help clarifying this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Terminology

• Full backup is a backup of everything on the system.
• Systemimage is a backup which, when restores will include the ability to start an operating system. It may or may not include a full backup. A system image produces a bootable image
• Repair / Rescue disks are bootable images - usually on USB or CDRom which can be used to repair a broken filesystem and/or help get data off it. Common tasks include doing filesystem checks, fixing corrupt boot configurations (ie bootloaders), making filesystems available etc. They run their own copy of an operating system, often different to the broken one.

Types of Backup

The main ways of doing backup are full and incremental.

• A full backup has everything. The advantage is it is easy to restore and complete. The disadvantages are that it can take a lot of time and disk space.
• An incremental ( partial ) backup only records changes since the last backup was done. This is faster and takes less space, but requires a full backup and more effort to restore.

Backup strategies and components

There are different ways to back up data, depending on the risk. Generally more then 1 strategy is deployed as part of a robust solution.

• RAID - I've added this for completeness, but in reality, RAID is not backup. It does, however protect data by providing continuity and reliability if a drive fails. RAID 1 or higher is used to reduce the impact of hardware failure by distributing the data over multiple disks, so that it can be pieced back together. It does not generally protect against software failures or user error.

• Onsite vs Offsite backups - ideally backups should be kept both on your premises for speed of restore, and sent offsite in case the onsite backups are stolen or destroyed. One solution to this problem is backing up to the cloud. It is important that backups are not kept attached to the running system to avoid things like Cryptolocker compromising your backups as well.

• Versioning - A common solution to backing up, normally associated with incremental backups - is versioning, where only changed files are updated. Copies of older files are kept, in case good data was overwritten with bad. Most cloud services offer this, as do programs like rsnapshot (which is for Linux). This can be difficult to do when your backups are rotated depending on your software.

• File vs partition/disk backups. Its generally faster to back up files on the computer, which will typically allow for restoration of user generated content, but will require a lot of work to rebuild the system. If you back up partititions or filesystems this generally requires the computer to be offline/partly offline for the duration of the backup, but will allow an easier, faster restore of the data. It would be considered more complete. In general a disk backup would be preferred over a partition backup.