The Art of Backing Up Computer Files Without Backing Up

In this first article I'm going to discuss how to live with your data and make it portable and physically secure. A couple of weeks ago, here in San Diego, thousands of us were faced with the possibility, and some, the reality of having to desert our homes in order to save our lives from the wild fires. Many of us were not given much time to gather our things. It was literally minutes between the reverse 911 call in the middle of the night ordering us to evacuate to the mad rush out the door to escape the fires. So we gathered up clothes, food, important documents and mementos and got out as fast as we could.

OK, so what about our computers? What can we do to protect what is one of our prized investments? Well, we have to decide to make a change in what is really important which is, of course, our data. To do that we are going to make it portable. If we set things up so our data is ultra portable, we will never have to make the choice to abandon it.

Let's start with the basic layout of the information on our hard disks. We are living in an age of tens, hundreds, even thousands of gigabytes worth of hard disk space on our personal computers. We are going to revisit an idea that has been shunned with the advent of advanced hardware and operating systems: Partitioning. Now, this is a dirty word for a number of reasons:

1) New operating systems are capable of addressing large amounts of disk space, reducing the need for partitioning.

2) These operating systems are also more stable than past operating systems. They are "self-healing."

3) Disk drives are more reliable than ever before.

4) Partitioning complicates your configuration.

This is all true. I would argue that that the first three statements give us a good case for partitioning. The last is just the cost of doing business. Your configuration will be a bit more complicated but once you wrap your head around where to store your precious data, it will be well worth the effort.
Hard disk sizes and prices being what they are, you should not be running anything smaller than a 40Gig hard drive. If you are, upgrade NOW or if that is impossible for whatever reason, buy an external drive. The external drive and its use will be discussed in another article. So, what we're going to do is split our information into two. In our main/boot partition will be our operating system and programs. Our second partition will hold all of our documents, music, pictures, videos, basically any and everything that is important to us.

I'm going to assume here that you have the hard case: an existing install on a single partition. You're going to have to use partitioning software capable of dynamically resizing with out destroying your data. On the PC side, the obvious choice is Partition Magic. This has been the defacto standard for years so if you want something that comes in a nice shrink wrapped box, Partition Magic is it. There are also freeware alternatives out there that do the job just as well as Partition Magic. Partition Logic comes to mind as well as gparted. Mac users have a built-in disk utility that can partition but it is destructive. Better to use something like iPartition or VolumeWorks.

Each one of these programs has its own interface for repartitioning. You can demo them and decide for yourself which one you prefer. Just remember to be extra careful before you dive in to the repartitioning.

The bare minimum size for operating system and programs should be 20 Gigabytes for a Windows box. You could get by with even less than this on a Mac but that may be risking it. The rest of the hard drive is for your data. If it's big enough, you could even make multiple partitions for videos, pictures, music etc... The idea here is that you will now know where all your data is. No more choosing the defaults and wondering where in the documents/mypictures/mywhatever-flipping-folder your family photos are. You are now prepared for the next step: External and/or extra hard drives. We'll look at these in detail in the next article and find out how to make the most of this new/old configuration.