Backups and cloning remove the risks of cyber attacks and computer crashes – The Australian Financial Review

Whether it be cyber attack or a good old crash, having a backup of your crucial systems and files in hugely important.

If there's an upside to data devouring malware like WannaCry, it's the way it concentrates our minds on back up strategies.

Predictably, after a few hundred thousand computers were held to ransom by hackers last month, attention has turned to safety nets, and rock solid back up is an essential element of a solution.

Cloud-based file storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive are great for protecting data files, not just because they keep a copy in cyberspace but also because they allow you to replicate data on multiple machines.

Our own data lives in Dropbox, with copies synchronised on a USB hard drive directly attached to our office desktop, and a networked Drobo file server in the same building, and an external drive at home that's only powered up once a day. That's deliberate.

Any data visible to the internet is at some risk, so we like to have an offline copy.

But there's more to tech life than data files, as a recent hard drive failure on our iMac reminded us. Faced with a defunct machine, you just want it to work again. That's where drive cloning software is a godsend.

Broadly, there are two approaches to recovering from a hashed up hard drive. Some solutions back up to a special kind of file that isn't itself a duplicate of the drive, but can be used to generate one.

That's a standard back up and restore approach, and most products that work like that also let you peer into the back up file and fish out copies of individual files and folders. But they don't get your machine back on the road in a hurry. For that, you need a cloner.

On a Mac, our cloner of choice is Carbon Copy. We love the clean, intuitive interface that presents a list of all the drives that are within sight, letting you choose what gets backed up to where and how.

Of course, back up tasks can be automated, so you could decide to run an update every day and make an entire fresh copy once a week, as hard drive space allows.

A full Carbon Copy clone of a two terabyte hard drive might take a few hours, but updates after that rarely require more thanminutes as the software intelligently identifies the files that have changed and only copies those.

One trap for cloning software is that it risks overwriting good data with bad. If a file on the source drive is damaged, it will be replicated in its defective state to the back up drive. Carbon Copy insures against that with a Safety Net feature, a kind of trash can that holds old versions rather than deleting them.

Best of all, the program can turn most external USB drives into a bootable replacement for your main hard drive. It starts up and runs more slowly than an internal drive, but if you absolutely, definitely need to have your Mac running right away, it's ideal.

Windows users have plenty of choices for cloning, but we've never strayed from Casper, an inexpensive offering that has displayed bulletproof reliability for nearly fifteen years.

Casper's name is a play on Norton Ghost, once the big name in desktop backup solutions. It's the friendly Ghost, get it?

Well, like Carbon Copy on the Mac, Casper is delightfully approachable. Many cloners share a common failing. They are unclear about which drive holds all your data and which is blank. It's nerve wracking to be less than certain that you're not about to overwrite good data with empty space.

Casper's friendly interface makes it crystal clear which way the data needs to flow.

Casper doesn't only clone. It can also create disk images that update incrementally, allowing drive restoration to a selected point in time. But again, we mainly rely on it to ensure that a bootable replacement hard drive is on hand at all times.

One advantage of cloning is that you can easily test your safety net. As good as disk images can be, almost nobody carries out trial restores to check that they actually work. But regularly we set our Mac to boot up from a Carbon Copy external drive and we spend a few minutes running applications to get comfort that we aren't just imagining we're insured against drive failure or data corruption.

It's nice to know that the safety net will hold.

Peter Moon is a technology lawyer with Cooper Mills.peter.moon@coopermills.com.au

Visit link:

Backups and cloning remove the risks of cyber attacks and computer crashes - The Australian Financial Review