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Backup for mobiles: is it an issue, yet?

Some things in life are so predictable as to be boring. One certainty - far more certain than death or taxes - is that if you have a serious problem with your PC, some member of the professional support trade will tut-tut at you: "You do have a backup, don't you?"

Of course, when it comes to your PC, you probably don't. The technology to make it simple and cheap and reliable for sysadmin staff in corporate offices simply doesn't exist in the typical home installation, and there's no sign of anybody creating an environment where it could.

But when it comes to mobile phones, that criticism applies in spades. The only people who are at all likely to have backups of their cellphones, are either users of the Danger Hiptop (marketed as the Sidekick) or smartphone users who connect them regularly to their PCs to synch data.

And when you've synched to the PC, what then? Is the PC backed up?

Well, sadly, almost certainly not.

First off, "doing regular backups" is only a virtue if you know they work. Any sysadmin will tell you that a verify after backup is essential; but they'll probably go on to point out that "just having a verified backup is useless if it won't restore."

Good advice! - except how, exactly, do you test for a restore?

For a pro sysadmin, working in the IT department of Lucky Googlestar HQ, it's easy. You take an identical machine to the target, and do a test restore. You probably have dozens of identical machines, because corporate IT policy requires a common "disk image" which includes only mandatory software, and excludes prohibited programs, and enforces corporate acceptable use policy.  You set up the restore process, and go home for the weekend; on Monday, you'll find out if it worked. Bingo.

For the home/office user, your only way of testing the restore is to take your backup, and dump it only the machine you just backed up. Hello! - did you know it was a good backup? No? Then you've just taken the very stupid risk of wiping out your only known good copy of all the data on your hard disk, with a corrupt tape/disk storage image. And of course, did you actually wonder how long it would take? Oh, you have a 200 Gbyte disk? Do you actually know how long it takes to read and verify 100G of data...?

No; what most home users need isn't a backup as much, but an archive.

A backup keeps the state of your disk for you. Change the disk, and next time you backup, the changes are stored. Did you accidentally delete an important file? then it's gone for ever! Hands up anybody who accidentally picked "save as" when writing a Word or Excel file to disk... and forgot to change the name of the file? With an archive, that sort of silly error doesn't matter; with a backup, it's terminal, unless you spot it right away. Or maybe you deleted a folder, and didn't realise it was the folder on drive C: and not the data folder on drive D:? We've all done it!

The backup should be limited to your installed software, and your system setup. In theory, of course, that's not essential because you simply re-install the software... and it won't actually save you from a real disaster like, the system got corrupted last week, and you've been regularly backing up the corrupt system image every day since... a restore will simply give you the previous corruption, rather than the latest. But it will, if you do it properly, mean that all the updates are intact. You bought the PC with a disc supplied in 2005; since then, it' been updated a dozen times - and you don't (really!) want to go back to 2005.

My favourite sysadmin swears by Ghost... well, as he puts it: "twenty-five quids worth of Norton Save & Restore which is really Ghost done nicely" and a standalone USB disk. I pass that advice on unchecked: my own relationship with anything from Norton/Symantec is disastrous, but this chap knows his stuff, and swears it works. So while I can't tell you whether you can ask for a backup of "just the system files" or not, I'm guessing you can. And (hopefully) you can back up the program files too, but again, I am not risking it on my machine, not after Symantec Anti Virus.

The only problem with that system is that I know what you'll do with that USB drive.

You'll buy it when your new PC is new, and has only 30G of data on its 200 G store, and backup. And then you'll realise that you've got TONS of spare space on it. And so you'll start using it for pictures, MP3s, and stuff you downloaded from YouPorn and... one day it will crash, and you won't have an archive or a backup.

Oh, and a final warning. If you copy all your media files onto DVD, your friendly professional sysadmin won't be impressed. He'll say: "Where do you keep them? At home? And what happens when the office catches fire? Keep it off-site!"

He's right, of course. But I don't know a single home user who is going to do that, regularly every day. And until Microsoft gets its head straight about providing Windows on a DVD which you can install from after a crash, my bet is your PC wo't be backed up in any way that you can actually use. Never.

Which means your mobile isn't backed up, either.

[08:54] <jon> which takes an image of the machine?
[08:54] <jon> to an external usb hd or whatever?