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There are two main ways to use laptop backup software to maintain copies of your critical data. This article compares the two approaches to show how using software to make local copies, or upload backup copies to web-based servers, each has benefits and drawbacks.

Traditionally, backups have always been done by burning copies of your computer data to a tape device/CD/DVD. More recently, external hard drives have made it possible to store vast amounts of data (even your entire laptop) to an external drive, and synchronization software such as Synctoy from Microsoft can speed up this process.

The key benefits of local copies are that you can easily access a CD/HDD if you need to do home PC repair work, such as restoring a backup registry file. The cost of burning CDs can work out quite cheap, and is even more economical if using external HDD storage device (i.e. the once off cost of purchasing the device).

The drawback to this approach is that there is always going to be a danger of the copies and your laptop being destroyed by the same disaster (e.g. fire damage to your house or theft) as they are located in the same room/building.

The more modern approach is to use laptop backup software to synchronize your data with an online server. These are commercial operations whereby you pay a subscription cost to use the backup server and install some client application that you configure to run the backups on a scheduled/continuous basis.

The benefit to using a backup server is that you can access these files from anywhere in the world using any machine (these systems are password protected). The client application allows you to automate the process of data synchronization to run constantly in the background if desired. Moreover, the backup servers are usually duplicated so are not prone to data loss should one server be damaged or lost.

The drawbacks of online backup servers are that you require a fast Internet connection, especially when uploading large amounts of data. Bandwidth usage will be an issue. If you are working online constantly then you will experience a slow web connection as the backup application is constantly running in the background. Finally, you have to weigh up the ongoing subscription costs of these services which may only permit one to two gigabytes of data to be uploaded (i.e. just enough to store personal data, but not your full laptop).

The key to any laptop backup software approach is to ensure that you automate the process of doing backups. This is the one surefire way of making sure you have a constant archive of backup versions of your data.