TFW Members: Online Documentation - Backups: Four Backups for Four Disasters

Short version of a long page:

Backups are like banking, and TFW Data Vault is your safe deposit box in the bank vault, not your ATM machine on the street corner. One you visit every week, the other only on special occasions.

Similar services have advanced rapidly since we last offered Data Vault subscriptions in April 2006. We recommend XDrive from aol.com, for example.

FolderShare: Great for certain things (TFW Automatic Software Updates), but not for backup. It's the moving van, not the warehouse. You wouldn't store your family heirlooms on a van shuttling the Interstates at high speed.

FolderShare can magnify and multiply Human Error. Write a bum backup at one end, or accidentally kill off a good backup, and almost instantaneously FolderShare repeats the error at all your stations. Wow, will you feel sick at that moment. Make a backup before you hand anything over to FolderShare.

To learn more, here are four kinds of backup:

1. Backup against
Human Error (Major Sins)

Example: MegaSoftware sends you a data cleanup utility. They urge you to run it immediately, but urge you to backup your MegaSoftware database first. If the data cleanup utility makes things worse, you restore your backup.

Best Backup: The MegaSoftware data backup and restore utility comes from the same source, and may share family failings. So also make a Windows copy into the same folder with Windows Copy-to-Here: MegaSoftware.db and Copy of MegaSoftware.db. Compressed: No. Local: Yes.

2. Backup against
Human Error (Minor Sins)

Example: You run great ads and games and contests for your club. You have dozens of spreadsheets, graphics, documents, and notes. Some you made, some you asked for, and some you saved from who knows where. Sometimes in the dash to a deadline you chop up your only copy, or delegate it and never see it again.

Best Backup: A copy on a computer where you can't change it. You could chop up your second copy on a second computer at home. You want Internet space so you have to download it before you can change it. Compressed: No. Local: No.

MyDocsOnline.com and Streamload.com, for example. Unzipped, so you can read the titles easily, and pull them one at a time. Put lots of small files there in lots of folders, just as you do on your computer. Yeah, right. In all your hurry, how soon will you get to that?

3. Backup against
Machine Death at a Ripe Old Age

Example: One Monday morning your computer won't come all the way up. It makes ugly clicking and whining sounds. You replace the hard drive or the entire computer. Then you re-install your software and the files you made from that software.

Oops, though. Something isn't right. The software has forgotten all kinds of things it used to know. It doesn't know you, for instance.

Best Backup: Doubled hard drives in the computer, one mirroring the other. Everything you do goes to both at the same time. Compressed: No. Local: Yes.

But if fire or flood or thieves get the computer, you have nothing.

4. Backup against
Machine Death by Violence

Example: Fire, flood, break-in.

Best Backup: A copy of the files you've made, but not of the software you installed. Also, a copy of the settings your software wrote to the Windows Registry along the way, from your registration code on the first day, to dates and counts and lists on that last day.

Compressed and stored off-site. Automatic and scheduled (against Human Error again). Compressed: Yes. Local: No.

Examples: Many expensive commercial services. Or, the economical TFW Data Vault.