Hello world 👋🏻 my name is Francisco, fcoterroba on the Internet and today I’m going to bring you a very theoretical post, with a lot of text but to enrich even more, if possible, your computer knowledge.
Before we begin, although I’m going to explain what it is later, I recommend you visit a post I uploaded more than a month ago, where I explain many of the most used computer terms in our daily lives. (Yes, backup included.) 😁. You can read the post here.
I also want to remind you that a few weeks ago I uploaded a video to my YouTube channel, very interesting, focused on home automation. Specifically, we connected, configured, and installed a smart light bulb 💡 with which you can change its color, turn it off, turn it on, and much more simply by using your mobile phone and/or voice assistants like Google, Alexa, etc. 👇🏻
Now yes, let’s begin 👇🏻
Perhaps, if you’re not very close to computing, you’ve heard the term backup from your phone, whose WhatsApp makes a backup at two in the morning. It never fails.
Do you know where that backup is stored? 🤔
A backup, data backup in English, in information sciences and computing is a copy of the original data that is made in order to have a means to recover them in case of loss. Backups are useful for different events and uses: recover computer systems and data from a computer, natural or attack disaster; restore a small amount of files that may have been accidentally deleted, corrupted, infected by a computer virus or other causes; store historical information in a more economical way than hard drives and also allowing the transfer to locations different from the original data, etc.
Wikipedia explanations aside, a backup (or data backup, in Spanish) is the act of making a copy of various previously selected data. In order to be able to recover and/or restore them in case the main support, which maintained the information stored in the backup, has been deleted, corrupted, formatted, etc.
It’s very important that, both in companies and individuals, we maintain a periodic copy of our data, whether they’re important or not.
Among many others, some of the advantages of making backups are:
- Data is stored instantly according to the scheduled date and time.
- All stored information can be used immediately.
- When we make the backup on an external server to ours, preservation is even more guaranteed against any unexpected incident.
- Information can be encrypted, thus guaranteeing the privacy and security of data during transmission.
- Also, if we use servers different from the usual one, storage space on servers is considerably freed. Contributing to the platform being more efficient and faster.
As an interesting tip, I can also tell you that March 31st is celebrated as World Backup Day. A day with which it’s intended to teach users the importance of making backups of files. Below I leave you a YouTube video of a podcast created by the guys from Underc0de made this March 31st with the purpose of talking about that day. 👇🏻
There are many ways to make backups, different from each other and the most appropriate being the one that makes the process easiest for you.
For home users, those who are not companies or self-employed, it’s recommended to perform the famous 3-2-1 backup method.
This method consists of making 3 copies of your data, having them on 2 different media from each other, plus having 1 copy outside the usual place.
For example, suppose we’re indie video game developers. And we’re making a video game that to date weighs 12GB. The correct way to make a backup of our game would be:
Make three copies of the video game, copy those three copies on a USB drive and an external hard drive. And pass those three copies again on a storage cloud like Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud.
I leave you below a video from the Xataka colleagues, where they explain why this methodology 👇🏻
Although they also work for home users and small projects, in large companies different methodologies are usually used, somewhat more advanced. According to their traffic.
Mainly, there are three types of backups:
- Full backup → Really, it’s the backup that everyone does, the basic one. Copies the entirety of all the data we want on another set of media. The main advantage is the ease of encompassing all data. The disadvantage is that this process usually takes quite a bit of time, even more so when the total files increase notably in size.
- Incremental backup → Also called progressive, it only copies the data that has varied since the last save process. That is, it only saves the data that the system notices has been modified since the last backup. It requires more attention to processes but is notably faster than the previous one.
- Differential backup → This backup methodology can be placed as an intermediate step between the two previous ones. Its operation is like the incremental one, with the difference that, from the third backup, all data that has changed since the first full backup will be copied. It has the advantage of being safer, by saving “the same full copy” several times but it’s somewhat heavier than the incremental backup.
As I understand it can be somewhat complicated to understand, I leave you this video below to finish understanding it. (it helped me pass the exam on the topic) 😂👇🏻
BACKUP TOOLS
Although the simplest is the typical one of copying and pasting your files on an external hard drive, USB drive or cloud. There are programs especially programmed for that purpose. Among many, I recommend:
Bvckup 2 → It’s paid. It costs about 30€ but offers, in a very simple way, to make backups exclusively on Windows. Its main focus is file synchronization and backups.
Acronis → It’s the most expensive I recommend. It costs 50€ but it’s very powerful, complete in functionality and easy to use. The copy is made in the background, without the computer in question being affected in the least.
EaseUS Todo Backup → It’s free without limitation beyond the impossibility of uploading the backup to a cloud. This program allows making incremental and differential ones, without much problem.
Paragon → It’s another paid program that’s around 45€ that’s especially programmed to make individual or complete file copies. It also allows filtering by file type, date, user, etc.
Uranium → It’s a free program to make backups on Windows. Among its functions it has avoiding duplicate data and its friendly interface. It’s very simple.
Duplicati → It’s an open source and free program that allows making backups with the advantage of being able to have web access from anywhere in the world. It’s the one I personally use.
FBackup → Finally, I recommend this free tool with an Office design. It’s very simple and easy to understand. Also, with its friendly assistant, we’ll be able to make completely full backups without being computer technicians!
And little more to add, guys! I hope you liked this post so… theoretical 😅 and that you’ve learned a lot. We’ll see each other very soon here and you already know you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. 🤟🏻