Craig Paterson Windows Backup Guide

Craig Paterson has written a succinct, two-part introduction to the basic issues of backing up Windows computers. He identifies a very good starting point: identifying what really needs to be backed up. This is tied to a great quote worth repeating here: "the less you have to back up, the more flexible the options."

You can find both Part 1 and Part 2 over at www.computing.co.uk.

One nit I would pick with his exposition is when he talks about the importance of picking a storage technology that will be available on the system you expect to be restoring to. I understand his overall point, but in making it, he says "You should have no trouble finding a system that can read a CD-R [...]" While strictly true, I think it's worth noting that many people will use CD-RW rather than CD-R for backups, and you may indeed have trouble finding a system that can read a CD-RW. In fact, an entire section of our Data Recovery Guide is devoted to what is essentially the problem of reading a CD-RW disc on a system other than the one that created it.

The problem is simply that people want to use recordable CDs "like a floppy", which leads to the use of recording formats that, while they theoretically conform to a standard filesystem (UDF), in practice end up being unreadable by some software. You can read all about it in our UDF Reader section.

August 03, 2004August