I’ve heard it said that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who appreciate the value of backups, and those who will.

It’s a maxim that’s been particularly on my mind lately, after I spent last month testing 21 external hard disks – almost all of which came with some sort of backup software – and then, this week, looked at two standalone backup applications as well. Right now, if there’s anyone who’s apprised of his backup options, it’s me.

But do you know which backup package I’ve chosen for my own use? None.

Keeping work files safe

Now, before you all bombard me with contemptuous comments, let me be clear. I’m not saying I don’t keep copies of important files. PC Pro is produced to a tight and immovable schedule, so none of us can afford to be blasé about the prospect of losing work. (Ask David Bayon, who once accidentally deleted the text of a twelve-page Labs section and had to pull some very late nights indeed to reproduce it in time for print.)

But I don’t need special backup software to make copies of my work files — because I save them into my Windows Live Mesh folder, from where they’re immediately beamed up to a remote server and synchronised with my laptop and home PC. In terms of data redundancy you really can’t do much better.

Ah, but, you may say: Live Mesh has comparatively limited storage, allowing you to synchronise a mere 5GB. What use is that in these days of terabyte drives?

What really needs backing up?

And that brings me to my main point. Yes, I would need a hundred Live Mesh accounts to back up my entire PC. But what exactly would I be backing up? The overwhelming majority of my hard disk space is taken up by videos, music, programs and system files — files I didn’t create myself and could easily replace.

(Yes, it’d be a pain rebuilding a music collection from scratch, but unless my MP3 player dies at the same time I can always just copy the files back from there.)

When you come down to it, if my computer were to wink out of existence tomorrow, the files I’d actually miss would add up to no more than a few gigabytes. And because the ones I’m actively working on are protected by Live Mesh (and are often wholly disposable once I’ve finished with them), the stuff that I need to back up myself changes by just a few megabytes a month.

Darien’s brute-force backup

So I have a batch file on my desktop which contains just one line:

This snappy command mirrors my user folder to a backup destination on another PC, recursing subdirectories but skipping NTFS junctions, system and hidden files, plus movies, music and VirtualBox disc images, files beginning with “_” (generally superfluous support files) and folders with names that start with “temp”.

The first time I ran it it took a good few minutes to do its work; but now I double-click on it whenever the mood takes me and, since it only copies changed files, it takes just a few seconds to update my backup. And if I ever need to rebuild my main machine, I can simply reinstall Windows, copy the “darien” folder back into its place and all my files (along with lots of useful application settings) are restored.

Of course, my system isn’t as versatile as a “real” backup package. It doesn’t run automatically, and it doesn’t encrypt or compress my personal data — not that it would be hard to add those capabilities if I could be bothered. And it doesn’t help me if I discover a month down the line that I’ve accidentally overwritten a vital file with gibberish.

But for all its limitations this single command has, so far, answered my backup needs admirably. I’m aware that it copies a lot of application support files that aren’t strictly necessary, but when you consider the wastage involved in a complete system backup I think it’s still a comparatively efficient approach.

Feel free to suggest refinements – or to tell me I’m an idiot, and point out what I should be doing instead. I’m interested to hear what you think.