Do I need to have a separate data backup if I backup my system regularly?

It sounds like there’s some confusion here about the types of backups and when you may want to use them.

No, you don’t necessarily have to do an additional backup of your data. Ultimately, it depends on what you’re working on and what you can withstand to lose.

Backing up with image and incremental backups

Let’s start by reviewing two types of backups that you are (and everyone should be) doing regularly.

An image backup is a back up of your entire system (and that really does mean your entire system). This contains the operating system, all the installed programs, and of course all of your data at at the time the backup is created.

Incremental backups happen periodically after the image backup. They happen more frequently to capture any and all of the files on the machine that have changed since the immediately preceding backup.

With those in place and happening regularly then in a very real sense you’re done. You’re backed up and, quite honestly, you’re better off than 90% of the people that are out there.

An image backup is a complete copy of a hard disk or other media being backed up. The copy is complete in that it can be restored to a completely empty hard drive – as in a replacement hard drive after a failure – and the result is a hard drive that contains everything that the original did. There are, of course, nuances to the term.

Adding another layer of protection

Let’s say you’re not backing up very often or, dare I say it, at all. Or perhaps you want a level of backup that is more frequent than the nightly backups you have configured for the data you work on throughout the day. You may then want to consider adding an additional layer of backup protection.

As an example here’s what I do.

• Once a month, I do a full image backup of my machine.
• Every night, I do an incremental backup.
• I store my work in Dropbox.

That last step – storing my work in Dropbox – is an example of an additional layer of backup. All of my working files (Word documents, text files and other things) are all stored in Dropbox. That way, whenever I make a change they automatically get backed up to Dropbox’s servers.

How does this help? Let’s say my machine crashes in the middle of the day. If I was working on a file in the morning my latest work would not have been included in the incremental backup that happened the preceding night. However, it would have been backed up by Dropbox, as long as I’d been saving it to disk periodically.

Should I need to recover the file then all I need to do is go to another machine, sign in to my Dropbox account, and there it is. The version will have all of the changes that were made as of the last time Dropbox snagged copy of it, which means as of the last time I saved the file.

Another layer of protection… it’s up to you

If losing a morning’s worth of work could be painful to you, then using Dropbox or something similar is something that you might consider.

Ultimately, that level of additional protection isn’t typically necessary. What you’re doing with your full backups and your incremental backups (as long as they are full system backups) is great. But if you want to minimize the impact of something disastrous happening to you during the day, then the next step is creating another layer of backup to protect your data.