Have you ever lost data on your computer? It can be very frustrating. If you're in business it can be time consuming and expensive, too.
What would be the consequences of losing all of the financial records of your business? Or how about losing years of family photos?
Problems with power (including lightning strikes and low voltages) account for a large number of computer failures. Another culprit is computer viruses, and just plain hardware failure.
Don't put backups off, data loss CAN and probably will happen to you sometime.
The simplest and cheapest backups involve copying your data over to CDs or DVDs.
Another option is USB flash drives or external hard disks.
Don't forget to keep a copy off site somewhere - if there was a fire in your office, your backups and computers would probably be both ruined.
Another option is online backup. Companies such as Carbonite and Mozy will back up your data over the internet for a small fee (approx USD$60 per year). There are drawbacks, however. Your initial backup can be very slow if you have a lot of data - it is possible for your first backup to take weeks, however once the first backup is done, only what has been changed will be backed up. Another drawback is that these companies only guarantee to keep your data for 30 days after it is first backed up - that's fine if you're always able to backup, but if you can't do a backup for some reason, all of your backups may be deleted.
Mozy offers free backup of up to 2GB of data, for non commercial use.
Call your Computer Support Technician for help to implement this, if you need it
Test Your Backups Regularly
Backups are a necessary fact of computing, however even if you remember to do them they can fail for several reasons, such as the backup disk filling up, or being disconnected/failed.
It's very important to test your backups regularly. If your data changes frequently, at least one test a month would be necessary. More often would be even better.
1. Check the backup logs. Some programs will have an option where you can see the results of your last backups. Sometimes, opening up the backup program will be enough - you can often see the results on the main window.
2. Try to restore some data to your computer. Test restores are the only way to be absolutely certain your backups are working. Restore the data to a location other than the one it was backed up from. A folder on the desktop called "Restore" works for me.
Shelf Life of Backup Media
While you're doing those backups, don't forget to give a thought to the shelf life of your media.
Floppy Disks can start to degrade after a year or two - more than 50% are unreadable after 5 years.
Writable CDs and DVDs don't last as long as your movie DVDs - they aren't constructed the same way. Some reports indicate that ten years is a reasonable life expectancy for CDs and DVDs, but heat, dust and other environmental factors may shorten this time.
USB flash drives and hard disks are magnetic storage media and will lose some of their magnetic imprint over time. Also they can be quite easy to damage. Dropping a hard disk can cause it to fail completely, where as I've seen several physically broken USB flash drives.
What's the answer? Keep multiple copies of your data on different types of storage media and in different locations.
Recommended (Cheap) online backup companies
http://www.carbonite.com.au
http://www.mozy.com.au
Ian Burgess.
Director
Exatek Computer Support
Turramurra
Australia
http://www.exatekonline.com.au/
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