BACK UP LIKE CLOCKWORK!

Jonni Bidwell has a plan – several plans, in fact – to keep his ever-growing repository of data ticking over nicely.

There are two types of people in this world: those who back up their files and those who have never experienced data loss. In a world that’s becoming increasingly cloudy, backing up files might seem like an old-fashioned sort of a habit. Much like wearing a watch or writing cheques (…that your body can’t cash? – Ed).

If your Android phone dies (and you opted in to connecting everything to your Google Account) then you can restore your contacts, messages and apps effortlessly on a new device. If you work in a corporate environment, then your IT team can (with a little more work) probably do a similar thing if your work machine dies. You might lose a few hours’ work (depending on when and where you last saved) or some tiny configuration details, but starting from a base image applications can be re-installed and your user account connected in a matter of minutes, not days. But if your home PC fails, or even if you accidentally delete some files, recovery can prove much more complicated.

Unless, that is, you have a solid backup regime, which hopefully this feature will inspire. Through automated, incremental backups we’ll aim to make backups less chore-like. We’ll cover snapshots so that your OS can be restored in a few clicks. We’ll look at using multiple drives (RAID) to protect against hardware failure, paving the way for illconsidered jokes about redundancy. We’ll look at the excellent Duplicati tool, which can integrate with cloud storage services as well as a VPS, or indeed a real server, under your control. If you prefer to do things manually, then we’ll also look at the command line program Duplicity, which uses Rsync to send encrypted tar archives to the clouds. And because we like choice (and alliteration) we’ll look at making this easy with the Déjà Dup frontend.