Slate To Silicon

I have always been mistrustful of backup software and my mistrust has always boiled down to my not being able to see my files as is, not in some big compressed file in some proprietary format. Yeah, I know that good backup software will do this and that for you and makes the size of the backups smaller and recovering a whacked computer easier but i don’t care, I want to see a copy of my (data) files as is. I have finally found a piece of software that gives me what i want in a backup. No, it doesn’t cost a fortune yes it has quirks here and there but it does what i want. The software is called NTI Shadow.

Rather than go through a lot of technical mumbo jumbo let me describe how I use it.

I have a PC (Iron) that sits in a locked closet, no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse, it does have a USB wireless adaptor. This PC is actually off most of the time. I turn it on when i want to mirror the files on my main PC or if I’m working on a project, so that my work is mirrored as I go. If I need to talk to Iron while it’s on or shut it down I use remote access software (UltraVNC) and I talk to it across the wireless. Iron is what I call a hard disk at the end of a wire (wirelessly). It’s sole purpose in life is to hold an exact and up to date copy of my important files as they appear on my main PC.

When I set NTI Shadow up I “told it” to mirror my data, project, photos and music files to Iron, I also told it how many mirrors of my “stuff” to keep (if you overwrite good mirrored data with bad it’s still gone so you make more than one copy. As newer copies are made older ones are overwritten). I don’t care about programs or having a “full backup” of my PC, when and if it ever crashes it’s time to replace it anyway.

The Shadow program runs in the background on Main whether Iron is on or off and notes any changed, added or deleted files or folders. If Iron is on, anything that changes is mirrored within a short time. If Iron is off and I turn it on I usually manually start the mirroring process rather than wait for the Shadow program to notice that Iron is available.

I do still make occasional DVD backups of certain information for off site storage in case of fire but that’s the top of the heap doomsday scenario stuff. If I wanted to I could make Shadow mirror my files to DVD but past a certain point (and I’m past that point) it becomes impractical to even use DVD’s for backup because of the amount of data that needs to be saved.

All in all NTI Shadow gives me what I want, a backup where I can see (several) exact copies of my “stuff”.

Notes:

You can set up Shadow to mirror your files continuously or on a schedule and you can create any number of “backup jobs”. For example, I have two backup jobs, one for outlook that is set up to mirror the outlook “pst” file on a fixed schedule, and one for everything else that is set to continuous mirroring.

Certain programs lock their data files in such a way that the Shadow program cannot mirror that programs data file while the program is running. For example, if you want to back up Outlook’s data (mailbox.pst, outlook.pst or whatever.pst) you must shut down Outlook (this is the reason i have a separate backup job for Outlook).

A good strategy for backing up important data such as administrative office or line of business information is to setup separate backup jobs to mirror the data to different computers on different days (keep security in mind, for example, you do not want to mirror administrative files to a student workstation).

Mirroring your files to a folder on the same computer as the originals is only a good strategy when the files are also being mirrored to another computer somewhere else.