How to Backup is a free online mini-book explaining basic ideas about how to backup your network, backup technologies, and backup strategies to keep your systems online, and your data available.

If you have a laptop that you travel with, consider getting a dock for your office desk. If your laptop isn't dockable (because it's a "home" laptop computer), then, get a universal dock.

Websites are archives. A website that isn't an archive is one that displays a lot of "404 errors" - file not found.

In a typical office, several people have to read a document - the writers, the editors, a manager, the signatory to the document, and possibly some artists.

The file naming convention I use starts the name with a date: YYMMDD-file-name.ext

An archive is an organizational strategy for data.

A simple, transparent way to backup a personal computer is with an external hard drive or USB flash drive.

You don't need special software to do this - just copy the files.

The correct way to backup a database is to use a "mirror" or "replica" of the database.

If you're programming (or managing programmers), you can use Subversion or any other revision control system as a backup.

It's a good idea to run two sets of backups. For one, it's possible that the backup software can fail, leaving some data unsaved.

A full backup is a backup of all the files. It's used in contrast to the incremental backup, which is a backup of files changed since the last backup.

An incremental backup is a backup of all the files that have changed since the last backup. Typically, you perform a full backup, then a series of incremental backups.

Backing data up to floppy went out with the 1990s. Hardly any computers have floppy disk drives anymore.

Backup to CD shares a lot of problems that backup to DVD has, with some interesting differences.

Creating backups on DVD-R or DVD-RW allows you to store up to 4.8 gigabytes of data (or 2.4 if you use single layder DVDs).

The main advantages:

• low cost
• archival, by default