Can I just copy everything to back up?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
That's a question I get actually fairly frequently.
It's not that uncommon for people to say,
can't I just copy everything on my hard disk somewhere else?
Well, the short answer is, well, yeah,
you can what you're really talking about is doing it manually,
in which case, yeah, you can if you actually can copy everything.
The spoiler to that solution, however,
is that there are things that you can't copy using regular copy tools.
That's why backup tools exist.
Let's walk through it and see what is and what isn't appropriate.
So what a lot of people ask me this.
They're usually referring to a scenario where they might use a batch file,
a command prompt file to run a command like copy or X copy to literally copy all
of the files on their C drive to a different drive and call that a backup.
That actually is appropriate "ish" in some situations.
And I'll talk about those.
The problem is that it misses things,
especially if what you're copying is your system drive.
Copying everything misses some really important files when you do it this way.
Important files are the files that are in use.
The important files that I care the most
about for backing up that we're talking about here, the registry.
All the files that are in use by windows
are probably not going to be files that can be backed up,
and yet it's exactly those files like the registry as an example
that you dearly want to have backed up a simple file copy will not do that.
This is true for other programs that happen to have files open as well,
depending on how they have them open and what they're doing with them.
The files may be inaccessible to your copy operation.
On top of that, many of the files on your
system actually have restricted permissions now.
Yes, you could run your copy as
administrator to get as many of the files as possible.
But there are still files that,
even when logged into an administrator account when running with administrative
privileges, aren't accessible to a simple copy operation.
A backup program really can copy everything.
The reason is that the backup program makes use of special APIs in Windows
that are specifically designed to solve this problem.
You've probably heard of volume shadows,
services or volume shadow copy, that kind of thing.
That's what we're talking about here.
These services are not meant for day to day use for copying files.
They're meant specifically for backing up your system.
And they are the techniques used by the backup programs.
They can backup absolutely everything.
They will back up the files that are in use.
They will back up your paging file,
your your hibernation file, your registry, all of that kind of stuff.
The other thing that will get backed up
by a good backup program are the hidden areas on your desk that you
don't even see, things like the boot sector,
recovery and repair partitions, other partitions that may or may not even
be visible to you when you are running your machine.
Let's say you want to do a manual, copy everything anyway.
Well, there's another scenario that very
likely will bite you in the butt, and that is this.
Let's say you create an important file.
I'll call it version one of this important file.
You dutifully back it up as part of your copy of everything.
The next day you do some work on that file and you back that up.
We'll call it version two.
Most of these copy operations that you use
for manual backups will actually overwrite that backed up
copy of version one with the newly backed up copy of version two.
Great. You've got the file backed up.
Good on you.
However, let's say on day three you come around
and you just weren't sure what you were drinking the day before.
Version two is a complete and utter mess.
What you really want to go back to is version one.
But you can't it's not backed. Up that backup was
overwritten by the backup version you did the day before,
again, backup programs use a technique called incremental backups
that actually save all the versions of the file for a certain amount of time.
So on day one, the backup program runs and backs up
the file version one the next day after you've done whatever it
was you did, diversion to the backup program comes along and saves that.
Also, in addition to what was backed up
the day before on day three, when you suddenly realized
day two was a horrible, horrible mistake, you now have the option of going into your
backup program and saying, get me the version from the day before,
the day before, so that you can actually get the version you care about.
This is a simple example, but this is the kind of thing
that dedicated backup programs are again designed for.
This is exactly why they exist.
Exactly some of the things that they can do to make your life easier.
So what does it look like when you use a backup program?
What does incremental look like in practice?
Well, it's actually pretty simple.
I've talked about it before.
Once a month, I do a full backup, it's a backup of absolutely everything,
and I don't mean one of these manual backups.
I mean using a backup program to create a backup image of everything that's
on my hard disk, whether I can see it or not, whether it's in use or not.
Then the next day, an incremental backup happens.
It only backs up the things that have changed.
So it's smaller and quicker.
But again, it pays attention to the things
I can't see, the things I can see and the things
that may have been in use at the time the backup happened
on day two. Same thing.
I run an incremental backup that backs up only those things that changed during day
two and adds them to the collection of things that have been backed up so far.
Repeat that through the month.
At the end of the month, I've got 30 incremental backups,
but I can go back to any file on any day in that month.
Then the next day I start over
with a brand new full image backup of my machine.
That's an image backup process in practice.
And in fact, it's what I recommend if you
don't know something else that you really want to do instead.
Now, I did say earlier that sometimes a copy everything strategy can work.
There are two things that need to be true
for a copy, everything strategy to actually work.
One is you need to know that you're
overwriting whatever you copy the day before and that needs to be OK.
If you need something to be incremental,
well, then this approach probably isn't the approach you want.
Yes, there are ways to make things work
with batch files and complicated whatevers.
It's not worth it when there are dedicated
programs designed to do exactly what you're looking to do.
The other thing that needs to be true is
you need to know that it's actually going to back up all the files.
So if you don't care about the system files, if you don't care about
the registry, if you only want to back up, say, your data files,
then maybe a copy everything operation is appropriate for you.
I do have a copy-everything operation running.
Also, in addition to my regular backups. What happens is on a non sys disk,
my drive D I think it is, I will in the middle of the night,
make sure that there's another copy of it on another machine on my network so it
doesn't copy of everything from my drive d to this network location.
Yep. I've made those two decisions right.
I don't need incremental backups for what this has and I know that it's going
to copy everything I care about on that drive.
That's what it takes.
It can work most of the time.
Most of the time it's not what you want.
Most of the time you really do want your full, incremental and whatever other tools
are available using a real honest to goodness backup program.
That's why I recommend it so strongly.
That's why I recommend it so often,
because it really is the right solution to backing up your system,
your data from all sorts of things that could possibly go wrong.
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For comments and more, visit askleo.com/3117.
I'm Leo Notenboom Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.