Episode: 701
Title: HPR0701: Backing Up Your Data Introduction
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0701/hpr0701.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:08:10

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Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. I am your host, Ken Simian, aka Skrip Monkey,
and one thing I do apologize about the road noise I was driving home and I just wanted
to make sure I got a podcast together for Ken. I'm here to talk to you about a series
that I've been thinking about doing and the series is called backing up your data. So in
this series, I'm going to talk to you about the different solutions and problems I've
faced in the backup scenario of making sure all my data is backed up, backed up between
my work data, my personal data, my wife's data, my kids' computer data, and you know,
there's so much data that everybody has and information that everybody has and everybody
really needs to figure out a way that they can organize it and keep it safe and keep a
historical record. And, you know, just make sure that they have a good piece of mind about
having their data safe. So in this process of talking about backing up, I'm not just going
to look at the situation of backing up your computer. You know, everybody thinks about backing
up their computer, either their Linux machine, their Mac machine, or their Windows machine.
I'm also been talking about backing up your mobile phones and maybe even your general mobile
devices, like a tablet or something of that nature. So I really want to cover the gamut of
different areas where backing up your data is important. I'm also going to cover situations
of where should you backup your data, how you should possibly back it up. Looking at, should I
use external hard drives, should I create my own radar A, should I store in a Amazon cloud?
You know, these are all the questions that I've had for myself and research that I've been
doing trying to figure it all out. And so in this series, I'm going to kind of lay out the
information that I've gathered, solutions I've tried, problems I've faced, and we'll see how far
we can take this. So to kick it off, I want to talk to everybody about what are the first steps
about backing up your data. Most people think, oh, I need to run out and get a hard drive,
and I need to backup all my data. That usually is probably about the second step.
In my opinion, the first step is you got to get organized. What I mean by getting organized is
where do you store all your important information? Do you keep everything in your user directory folder?
If you're on Linux, you most likely do. If you're on Mac OSX, you most likely have everything in
your home directory under your username. But is it really organized well? I know for people that
are on Windows, a lot of times they are heavily unorganized. And when I mean by unorganized,
I've had people that I've worked with trying to help them with their computer problems,
and they have things stored in the root of C. I've found things stored down in C. Windows,
you know, they are using their TEMP directory folder as their main data directory for storing
documents and all this other stuff. Things are just all over the place. And you really want to
take some time when you're thinking about backing up of how is my data organized and structured so
I can get to my information easily. So I can backup my information easily. Everybody that's using
a modern operating system right now has a user directory. And then those user directories,
they do supply a baseline of folders that help you keep organized, you know, all platforms,
Linux, Mac, Windows. They supply documents folder. Guess what you should probably keep in there?
Things related to the documents, spreadsheets, financial records, anything that, you know,
you would classify as an important document like you want to follow away. Then you have your
other categories of folders that they provide for you. Yeah, music, video, you know, it goes on
and on and on. But there's a good baseline. And you should really consider using that baseline
of folder structures to organize your important information. Other things that people need to think
about and is, you know, a lot of people, they have all their bookmarks and their email will come
into, you know, an email application. But most users, except for people under Linux, you know,
they really don't know where that information is stored. So, you know, if you're on Windows,
would you really know where Outlook, Outlook Express, or a live mail, where they actually keep
your email that you download to your local machine? Not really. Or how do I get all my bookmarks
out of Internet Explorer? Where are they actually stored? Where are they stored with Firefox?
You know, this is the information that you really need to kind of consider and think about
when you're looking at backing up. Because backing up is just not about backing up, you know,
your personal information or your work information. But it's about backing up the important things
that you use every day. Your book, your email, your, you know, account information that you
actually let your browser store. You know, how would you ever get that back? And so those are
the things I want to cover and I'm going to talk about. So, I think I've covered the idea of
organization. First step, you got to look into it. You got to see how am I organized? Is it
am I consistent? And then say you got to back up your entire, you know, land. You got to back
up your wife's computer and your kids' computer. Are they organized? You might have to do some
training of the people that are in your household in order to have them be consistent in the way that
they hold their documents together, how they hold their important information. So, when you go
to their machine, you're saying, I need to back up your machine. You know where it is. You have a
consistent idea where they keep all their stuff. So, you don't get the mishap of saying, oh, no,
my hard drive died. Oh, I had a backup of everything yesterday. Did you get everything off my desktop?
No, I only backed up your document's folder. And so, you know, those are the things that you have to
consider when you're talking about backing up. And really, when you get to the point, we're talking
about automated backup. Everybody's machine is different. It's almost one of those things you're
going to have to teach the person that the computer system that they're using to use them a bit
different to say, if you want all your important information backed up, you have to keep it here.
They might not like it. But they'll like it at the point when their hard drive goes down,
or their laptop has to get shipped off or repair, but you have a backup of all their data so they
can use a kids computer and still, you know, access their information. The organization is very,
very important about backing up. The second half of the first steps after you get organized,
you got to find out how much data do I really have to backup. You will be overly amazed at how
much data you store over one year. They actually even over six months, especially if you're like
me and you have a couple kids. You have a couple kids. You are snapping photos with your digital
camera, with your smartphone, and everything. And every photo nowadays takes up like 1.5 megs.
I might be over exaggerating, but after a while taking all these photos and you download them off
your camera into your computer, and if you're using Linux and you're using photo management
application and you're importing all that data and then it's making its copies of your changes
because you wanted to make sure the hues were correct and all these other things. You're making
multiple copies and you're making a lot of data and you're making a lot of resource space
taking up. You got to really know how much space am I really using. So that's when you look at the
usually you're going to use your file system. You're going to do something quick if you're using
Nautilus, if you're going to right click on your home folder maybe and say you look at the properties
and say how much space am I taking up on this folder? You never know. It might be 80 gigs. But the
one thing you have to realize is when you look at your home directory and you say how much space
is my home directory taking up. We're also looking at any temp application files, the local,
all your hidden folders, all your configurations, all the revisions that Picasso or whatever photo
management application you use is doing. If you're on a map, you're in a world of hell with all the
backups and copies and just crap it produces. So you can't just rely on looking at your entire
home directory and saying this is how much space I need to back up. It's a good starting point.
But you really got to figure out what parts are important. I'm going to try to help you out,
help myself out to figure out all these aspects. Because in my personal household, I have
multiple Linux machines. I have one Mac for my wife. I have a Mac that I use for work and
luckily I know Windows machines but I have Windows Virtual machines which I'll do a lot of my
backup research for Windows on. So I got a really mixed environment and I got to really figure out
what are the important pieces because considering backing up a 80 dig home directory every week,
you know, that's a lot of data that I'm going to have to store some place. It's a lot of duplicate
data. I don't necessarily want to do that all the time. I don't want everything because you don't
necessarily have to recreate the entire home directory if you have to reinstall your operating system.
You know, configuration settings are nice and everything but are they really needed?
My opinion is possibly not. So in another episode I'm going to cover how would you go about finding
how much space do I have on my machine or how much space am I using up for my data?
You know, I'll try to cover that in a little bit depth for the three operating systems that are around
but right now, you know, most people can go through and then you get a ballpark idea of how much
data that they currently have on their home machine or on their work machine and really get a good idea
of how much space would I need to back this up? So let's see, after you have a ballpark idea of how
much space you're actually using on your hard drive, say you're using 80 gigs in your home directory.
You know, that's probably sitting about average. I know for my wife, she sits about maybe 80 to 90 gigs
for my own work laptop, you know, I said probably about 40. Let's, you know, I have a lot of development
stuff in there. A lot of source code sitting there, that's not necessary, that I need to back up.
So we're looking at saying, okay, I have 80 gigs of data that's really, really important to me and
I really need to back it up. Then you got to say, how much backup space do I need?
You know, ballpark, you could always say, I need two times the amount of space of my entire hard drive.
So if you have a hard drive that is 250 gigs, then you need some like, say, 500 gig hard drive.
You can go to prize if you have them around you, Wal-Mart, Costco,
Best Buy, order things off Amazon. And you can order yourself in an external USB hard drive.
And you know, you'll get by, you'll do okay, you'll have a backup, you'll have a potential copy.
But you're only talking about one machine there. But if you have multiple machines in your household,
you really got to say, okay, how much space is this machine taking up? How much space is this other
machine taking up? Will I be able to backup these machines every month or a year if I only have 500 gigs?
You know, that's going to be for you to determine. But once you get your idea of how much space your
backups will take, then you can restart out. I would definitely, you know, take the notion of going
to get an external hard drive. But let me give you warning, a lot of external hard drives,
one, they're made really cheap. Two, they don't use the highest quality hard drives in there.
So the likelihood of an external hard drive plugged in all the time, all the time running,
consistently available to backup your data, I wouldn't count on it completely.
I know I just added a layer of complexity saying, you just told me to go get an external hard drive.
And that is true. You should at least start there. I do want to say that if you are going to get an
external hard drive, be aware that a lot of times they are, they can be fragile on the cheaper side.
In my experience, I've had external hard drive enclosures, everything's working great, backing up
all the data. Next day, I know I go plug in a system to backup some data and I can't access the
thing. The entire enclosure will not work. So at that point, you're like, oh man, my backup situation
is, you know, on dire strengths. What do I do? You crack up in the US, be external case,
you know, and take that hard drive out and plug into another machine and make sure your data is okay.
That's great. But then you're stuck with, okay, I don't have an external hard drive. That's when
you got to look at your warranty of the device. You might have to send it back in. But just be
aware that a backup solution is only one step in the process. And depending on what you're backing
up to, you have to look at what are the potential failures for that backup system to fail.
Those are all the things that you have to consider. All right, let's stop here. I'm out the store.
I will continue this podcast section when I come back already. I'm back for my stop at the store.
And so I was talking about what do you really need to consider in your backup solution
and other avenues and potential areas of failure? So I was mentioning that your external hard drive,
there's potential failure in those. They have, you know, I've seen number of reliability issues
with them, but you should not fully discount those out. So if you're not going to go about the
route of external hard drive backup, then you have your online options. With online options,
you have options that come for free. You drop out. You get two gigabytes of free space.
Who doesn't want that? Then, you know, there's a lot of other online solution. There's spider oak.
There's, who knows, I can't even think of all the solutions. But there's a lot of free
offered solutions. I give you a couple gigs. One thing that recently came up that could be
an outstanding way to backup your data is Amazon and their new cloud service music scenario.
I can't think of the name of it. But overall, if you can purchase music from Amazon and you buy
a complete album, besides giving you, you know, the ability to download your music, they're also
going to give you online data storage. Initially, I think when it first came out, they're going to give
you like 20 gigs of free data storage for the first year. After that, then, you know, you got to pay
after the year. But for one year of having 20 gigabytes of free online data storage, that is
actually pretty cool. Overall, is it really free? Kind of. You have to still buy the music. But then,
you do have a repository to push all your data up into the cloud and you have one year to figure out
if you really like that solution. So when you're considering backing up, you have a lot of different
options. And so, you know, I'm going to close this podcast up for HPR by saying, I'm going to look
into what are your solutions, what are the options, what are the possibilities. In our next episode,
I'm going to go into more of our first steps of organizing and finding out how much data do I really
have to back up? And where is my data? I'm going to cover those in the next series that I'm going to
release to Hacker Public Radio. I want to really think Ken following for all the work that he's put
into Hacker Public Radio. And then there's the other administrators like Pokey and a few other
ones that Ken has mentioned that, you know, I appreciate them doing their work and Ken really put
out the plea recently for content for Hacker Public Radio. So with that plea, I, you know, I'm trying
to do my part. So if you have anything to talk about, please, please record it and send it to Ken.
I believe the email address is admin at Hacker Public Radio and they will, you know,
match together everything that's needed. They'll put the bumpers on, put it in the RSSV for Hacker Public
Radio and then you can share your knowledge or even your questions to the Hacker Public Radio
off, you know, community. Maybe that's the way to go. If you have questions that you need help on,
maybe you should post as an HPR segment and get other people to respond to your question.
Don't necessarily want to make it a full tech support scenario, but if you have ideas and
things that you want to hear people talk about, post a question, maybe somebody will answer it for you.
I want to thank you for listening to this episode of backing up your data. My name is Ken Simian,
aka ScriptMonkey. You can find me on Identica at ScriptMonkey at SCRIPT, M-U-N-K-E-E.
I'm also on Twitter. You can also email me at scriptMonkey at gmail.com. Leave your comments in
the comments section for this Hacker Public Radio episode. Thank you very much for listening
to Hacker Public Radio and please contribute. Have a good one.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
She'll head on over to C-A-R-O dot nc for all of her community.
Thank you for listening to this episode of backing up your data.
