How Safe & Sound Creates Automatic Backups; Defining Your Backup Strategy - McAfee VIRUSSCAN 5.1 User Manual

Many things can cause the data on disks, tapes or drives to become garbled or
lost: hardware malfunctions, worn out media, electrical storms, excessive heat,
static electricity, magnets, loose cable or power cord connections, and so on.
CD discs, though durable, can become scratched enough to damage their data.
Human actions can also cause lost data, such as deleting the wrong folder or
formatting the wrong drive. Even a well-designed application can sometimes
cause its own files to become corrupt.
With so much at risk, you have everything to gain by allowing Safe & Sound
to automatically make backup copies for you. You simply decide what
information is important to you, how you want it to be backed up, and where
you want the backup copy to be stored. Safe & Sound takes care of the rest!
How Safe & Sound Creates Automatic Backups
When you select to have Safe & Sound automatically create a backup set for
you, it creates the first backup set while you are stepping through the Safe &
Sound Wizard. Thereafter, while the Enable Automatic Backup option is
selected, it continues to update your backup set at the time delay you've
specified. If you chose to make Mirror backups, Safe & Sound updates your
backup set at the same time that you resave the original source files.
If you select a write-behind delay longer than zero seconds (a Mirror backup),
Safe & Sound updates the backup set at any time after the specified time delay
when your PC is idle. This allows Safe & Sound to work in the background so
that it does not interrupt the work you are doing. This is a good option to use
with the protected volume file backup type since it eliminates any speed loss
due to more frequent disk accesses and larger file sizes associated with the
protected volume file backup type.

Defining Your Backup Strategy

After you decide which backup type you want to use (either a protected
volume file or a directory backup set), the most important questions you must
answer when defining your own backup strategy are:
• Where will you store the backup set?
• What files are important (which files must be backed up)?
• How often should you or Safe & Sound make these backups?
About Safe & Sound
User's Guide 259