"Procrastination is the bad habit of putting of until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday "
Napoleon Hill
You may think that the answer is obvious. You backup everything everyday, right?
While that would certainly work, it may become rather time consuming and that could lead you to begin skipping backups because you have other things to do with your time.
Don't get me wrong. You do want to have a complete backup of your hard drive. The key question here is "how often do you need to back up certain files to keep them current?"
Operating systems and software have become progressively larger over the years. These files will require a significant amount of space to store them. Fortunately, these files probably won't change very often. Usually, they only change when you change your system or program settings or perform an upgrade. Since they do not change as often, you don't need to back them up as often. I do a monthly backup of my system and software files and that has worked well for me. If I make a significant change to my system or software, then I do a special backup in order to backup the changes I made.
Data files are a different story. These files tend to change often, as you access them to add, subtract, and change the information they contain. These active data files should be backed up every day.
There are data files that you may not need to include in your daily backups. These are files that you have archived on your computer for record keeping purposes. For example: let's say you store your monthly sales reports in a separate file for each month. As you work in the current month, the data in those files will change on a daily basis. But once the month is over and you closed your sales for the month, those figures won't change anymore. Backing up these files on a daily basis isn't really necessary, as long as you do have them backed up.
If you are performing full backups on a daily basis, backing up these archived files could become very time consuming for no good reason. One thing I do is to move these files out of the active directory and store them in an archive directory. This way, I don't have to sift through files when selecting those for my daily backups. Then, I backup the archive directories on a monthly basis. If you are using differential or sequential mode for your daily backups, these files won't be backed up anyway. But it still takes time for the backup program to check these files for changes, so I like to clear my archive files out of my daily backup directories.
We'll talk about differential and sequential backups in a later section. 
E-mail this article
All articles are owned and copyright of DarkStone Data. Reproduction in part or in whole is strictly forbidden without the expressed written permission of DarkStone Data
