Backup Basics and Strategies

Backup Basics and Strategies

What is a Data Backup?

A WinZip Pro or WinZip Enterprise license is required to use WinZip Backups

This article may be useful to anyone considering any type of data backup. The included information, however, is specific to WinZip Backups.

A data backup is the result of copying or archiving files and folders for the purpose of being able to restore them in case of data loss.

Data loss can be caused by many things ranging from computer viruses to hardware failures to file corruption to fire, flood, or theft (etc). If you are responsible for business data, a loss may involve critical financial, customer, and company data. If the data is on a personal computer, you could lose financial data and other key files, pictures, music, etc that would be hard to replace.

As part of a data backup plan, you should consider the following:

What data (files and folders) to backup
What compression method to use
How often to run your backups
What type of backups to run*
What kind of media on which to store the backups
Where to store the backup data for safekeeping

*For information about types of backups to consider, along with examples of possible data backup strategies, see Backup types and strategy examples. You may also want to see the scenarios listed in Restoring Data from Backups.

What data should I back up?

In general, you should back up any work or data that can't be replaced easily. Some examples are word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases (for financial data), customer data, and personal files such as pictures, music files, emails, etc.

As a rule of thumb, do not backup programs or system folders. Programs will need to be reinstalled before you can run them and system folders can be restored from your operating system install disc. Be sure to save program installation discs, operating system discs, and registration information in a safe place. If you have downloaded any of your applications, you should save the install files whenever possible.

What compression method should I use?

You can use Best method compression with any or your backups. This will insure that your Zip files will be as small as possible. If you have a preferred compression method or if you would like the Zip files to be created more quickly, you have the option to choose a different method.

Please keep in mind that some files won't compress very much. For backups that include highly compressed files, such as music files, video files, and many install files, you may want to choose a compression method of Super fast or even No compression. These will be much quicker at creating your Zip file backups.

How often should I run my backups?

The frequency to run your backups depends on how often the data changes.

Business data that changes frequently may need daily or hourly backups
Data that changes every few days might use a weekly or even monthly backup
For some data, you might run your backup whenever you make a change

WinZip Backups allow you to schedule your backups to run automatically at specified times, so that you don't have to remember to run them manually. However, you may want to get in the habit of running certain backups, like a backup of your pictures, manually right after you add new files.

What kind of media should I use and where should I store my backups?

We won't fully address these two questions since they are beyond the scope of WinZip. However, you can store your backup Zip files on any file storage media you have available. The most common examples for a home user would be an additional local hard drive, an external hard drive, optical discs (CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs), or flash drives. Keep in mind that you should not store backups on the same hard drive as the files that you're backing up. If you do and anything happens to that hard drive, you will have lost both the originals and the backups. The wizard used for WinZip Backups makes it easy to create archives on another hard drive, a network folder, a cloud service, or on optical discs.

A best practice for storing backups is to keep a copy of the backup files on-site (in your home or office) for easy access and a copy off-site in case of fire, flood, or other damage to your location which could damage or destroy the on-site backup copy.

If you have any questions about this information, please submit a Technical Support ticket.

Data Backup Strategies

As part of a data backup plan, you should consider the following:

Which files to backup
How often to backup
What kind of backups to run
What kind of media on which to store the backups
Where to store the backup data for safekeeping

Which files to back up

In general, you should back up any work or data that can't be replaced easily. Some examples are word processing documents, databases for financial data, customer data, and personal files such as pictures, music files, emails, etc.

How often to backup

The frequency to run the backups depends on how often the data changes. Businesses where data changes frequently may run daily or hourly backups. If your data only changes every few days, you might not need to run backups as often. The WinZip® Job Wizard in WinZip Pro and Enterprise allows you to schedule your backups to run at a specified time automatically so that you don't have to remember to run it manually.

What kind of backups to run

You can run the following kinds of backups: Full Data Backup, Incremental, or Differential. In WinZip's Job Wizard, in addition to Full Data, Incremental, and Differential backups, you also have the option to run a Normal backup and an Update backup. For a more complete description of the different job types, please view the topic Choose Job Types in the Job Wizard help.

Things to keep in mind:

You should create new backup archives or rotate through multiple archives whenever you run the backup instead of continually overwriting or updating only one file. The reason is that in case the backup process goes wrong or the file becomes corrupt, you have not overwritten or corrupted a good copy of the archives. See the examples at the end of the article for possible backup strategies.
A Full Data Backup will require the most storage space of the different types.
An Incremental Backup will only back up the files that have changed since the last Full Backup or Incremental Backup; therefore the storage requirements for these archives are usually the smallest.
A Differential Backup will back up all of the files that have changed since the last Full or Incremental Backup; however, because it does not reset the archive attribute of the files, storage requirements for differential backup archives may be greater than for incremental backup archives. For example, if a Full Backup is run on Sunday, and then a Differential Archive is run on Monday, the Monday differential archive will contain any files that have changed from Sunday (after the full backup) to Monday. If another Differential Backup is run on Tuesday, then Tuesday's differential archive will include all of the files that have changed between Sunday and Tuesday. You can see that the differential archive files may grow quite large depending on how often that a full or incremental backup is run and how many files change during that time period.

For more information on data backup strategies, please refer to Backup types and strategy examples using WinZip in the WinZip Support Knowledgebase.