Last Backup Post was about where to store the precious information copies, this one will be about What! How to address different kind of information.
Every System has his own Backup needs & the solution for a small business might not fit a medium company with multiple servers & active directory. A business based scheme will not fit a private person or a one computer based professional. In this post I will began by targeting the kind of data we want to backup then the one different needs.
Any users be it one computer or multiple server need to assess the amount & location of information to be copied, and then separate the different kind of data in use on the computer system. The information will have to be very specifically arranged before you can back it up. This is a non debatable requirement. You cannot backup your data if you don’t know where it is!
Pictures
- Family Pictures can be found on personal computers in private hands & small businesses, they should not be clogging business servers. Personal media i.e. pictures & films stored on local computers should be dealt with separately from business related data. On my blog about pictures I am explaining exactly what to do to save your family memories.
- Business related pictures should be dealt exactly like the family pictures in order to be able to access them easily & to do a thorough backup, but they will be stored in the same containers as your business information. You can either use the “My picture” subdirectory, open a dedicated “Pictures” directory under your main document folder or for better retrieval, just store the pictures directly under the same Client/Project folders as the other related data. If the picture is date related it should be named accordingly to index the pictures for better retrieval. For better chronologic order the date format will be;
- “year–month–date”, space, then the event account, space, then a running counter with two or three digits depending on the number of pictures.
- Architect Example; 2011-11-04 Jaffa street 19 front building 01
- If you do not know how to batch rename your files or are too busy, you can store them in a folder under the same naming scheme without renaming the files themselves.
- If you are a professional photographer you should address your files the same way has videos. See explanations in the video section.
Audio
- Audio recordings & not songs! Any relevant recording should already be in the MP3 format or should be encoded right away. The need for quality is minimum & we sould get very small files. The same pictures rules should be applied.
Office data
- Office data is normally stored & addressed as Documents. Since I am blogging about backing your data & not accessing it, I will not address the kind of application used to generate said documents, but I will refer to Microsoft Office since it is the most wildly used office application in Israel.
- In Microsoft Office, letters are Documents shortened to docs. The file suffix is either .doc or .docx for latter Office versions.
- Spreadsheets are shortened to excel & the file suffix is either .xls or .xlsx for latter versions.
- Presentations are PowerPoint’s while the file suffix is .ppt for editable presentation & .pps for work alone ones.
- Adobe has the well known Reader format also called PDF files.
- Scanned documents can be either picture, PDFs, or OCR generated documents (OCR- Optical Character Recognition). They are normally quite small and you need different kind of software to access them but backup wise it should be addressed as a document.
- There are a lot of other files out there for all sorts of office related work, all of them are relatively small and consequently easy to backup. They just should be stored in the same containers has related data.
Graphics
- Medium graphics applications, like AutoCAD are used by architects, engineers & other technical businesses. The Files generated by those technical applications are bigger than office files but still small enough to be on the same order of magnitude. For example a CAD file is normally smaller than 100 MB & usually on the order of a few tens of Mega Bytes. Those file are in between & can either be treated like office file & stored under the same folders & eventually backed up to the cloud, or addressed as bigger graphic files.
- Photoshop & likes files are quite bigger. They need to be addressed a completely different mater. To backup this kind of files you need a lot of storage & this storage always cost more. If it’s local, you have the cost of the hardware storage & maintenance. If it’s offsite you need to add the networking cost & if the remote site is not yours you need to add the monthly fees that can be very expensive. Offsite backup can be either, your home, another business location or cloud storage services.
Videos
- Clip taken from smart phones are the smallest. They equate the big graphic files and
should be dealt with accordingly. - Videotaping from non professional & semi professional Camera, they are the one that fit most in my market brackets. Their file size should vary between hundreds of Mega Bytes to several Giga Bytes at the most. First they should be indexed exactly as the pictures i.e. the format will be; “year–month–date”, space, then the event account, space, then a running counter with two or three digits depending on the number of pictures. Then the videos should be stored in a dedicated folder, apart from your other administrative data. Once the data is separated from lighter information it will be easier to build a different scheme to back it up on a special locations, be it remote or local. To be able to view the video easily, I strongly recommend to encode it with an XVID like format. This will permit to shrink the video size to up to 10 time smaller than the original. Thus permitting normal storage with the related data & easy viewing with very little quality loss. I myself use the VirtualDub application, it is very light & permits batch encoding.
- Computer Generated video are video, and fall under the same rules.
- Video rushes (Rushes i.e. before editing video material). In professional post-production, the ratio between the rushes and the edited final product is about 10 to 1, in semi professional editing like weddings & other such events, it can be as low as 3 to 1, for example for three hours of shooting on location you will have about an hour of edited product. Video rushes are very heavy, we are talking about Giga Bytes of materials, and they are quite impossible to backup, depending on the production wishes they are either stored on non volatile media like tape or DVD, or in case of news and other short shelves lives materials, just discarded. Only the finished product is saved & backed up.
- Edited Videos fall under the same area has the second point in this section.
Emails & Databases are almost system data & I will address them in my next post
System backup schemes are even more complicated than data backup, I will address the needs & solutions in other dedicated posts about system redundancy, load balancing & the like. Code backup scheme, is another ballgame altogether & doesn’t necessarily interest my core reader, I might address this in my DIY SysAdmin Blog in the future.
