What’s Missing: Cloud Backup

While Windows 8 offers a fairly complete selection of backup and recovery tools, many of which are discussed elsewhere in this chapter, there is one key piece of the puzzle missing, and that’s cloud‑based backup. That is, in addition to backing up key data locally to another drive attached to your PC or, better still, to a completely different PC or device on your home network, you should consider having an off‑site data recovery solution in place. This will provide that final measure of safety should a real‑world disaster occur, such as a fire or theft.

To better understand the scope of this issue, consider how Windows 8’s various backup and recovery tools work together to keep your PC and its contained data safe. At the most basic level, you can use the Push Button Reset functionality to quickly recover the operating system and, optionally, your data, settings, and Metro‑style apps. So even in the worst‑case scenario, software‑wise, all you’ll lose are your traditional Windows applications, which will need to be reinstalled.

Of course, recovering the operating system is only one layer of safety and this won’t help with your precious data–documents, photos, and so on–if the PC’s hard drive fails. So Windows 8 also offers a nice File History feature, which backs up not just your data, but the various revisions of your data as well. And it does so to secondary storage–another hard drive attached to your PC–or to a network location, further enhancing resiliency with physical separation.

You can enhance data storage in general, or File History specifically, with Storage Spaces as well. This amazing feature lets you mirror data across two or three disks, again providing protection in the event of hardware failure.

Old‑timers, or those who simply can’t let go of the previous ways of doing things, can take advantage of Windows 7‑era backup and recovery features too, including various troubleshooting tools, System Restore for repairing bad driver installs and other issues, and even Windows Backup, for complete end‑to‑end PC image backups.

But none of these solutions will help if your home is destroyed, or the PC and its hard disks are stolen. What you need to complete this end‑to‑end backup and recovery picture is off‑site storage. You need cloud backup.

Sadly, this is the one backup and recovery solution that Microsoft doesn’t explicitly provide in Windows 8. You could, of course, pay for SkyDrive additional storage, use the SkyDrive application or a third‑party solution to provide Explorer‑based access to Microsoft’s cloud service, and then back up data in that fashion. We happen to like using SkyDrive for this purpose, since it keeps valuable documents, photos, and other files synced between PCs and the cloud. The SkyDrive app’s folder structure can be seen in Figure 11‑25.

Figure 11‑25: Using SkyDrive instead of regular folders to keep content synced with the cloud.

Or you could use a third‑party service such as CrashPlan–which we’re both using because of its low cost and excellent performance–Carbonite, or similar.

While we wish that Windows 8 completed the picture, there are certainly enough cloud backup services out there to satisfy anyone’s needs. Just be sure to use one of these services, as ultimately, the responsibility to protect your data is yours alone.