… or more importantly, your clients stuff. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Of those companies, 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. Please, I beg you, backup your data. This not only provides a way to go back to that design the client decided they liked from last week, but also to recover from accidental and unexpected data loss. I continue to hear stories from non-profits, businesses and individuals about how they lost everything due to a hard drive crash. I’ll pepper these throughout this post to help make the point of how important it is to have good backup.
More often, we suffer from accidentally deleting a file or writing over it (32% of all cases).
Like the insurance policies we have on our cars, businesses and homes, it is comforting to know there is a way to recover from information loss. You need to protect the data in your computer from physical issues like dropping, lightning, flooding, or excessive heat. Even expensive solutions like RAID (two or more hard drives configured to provide more than one copy of data), on-site tape backup, and surge suppressors won’t protect you from the damage of a fire or natural disasters. There are solutions to securely archive your documents and data online. A number of companies now provide ways to archive important data online automatically.
Like most applications there are consumer and professional versions of these backup solutions. The consumer versions work well as a simple means to backup devices like laptops and home computers. The professional versions provide managed backup all computers, laptops, and servers in your office from a central control panel. Recovering a file is often as easy is going into an archive drive on your computer and pulling out an old version of a file. Many services even allow you to remotely access your documents so you can restore them to another computer and view them anywhere in the world.
The main downside to these online backup services is you need to have a broadband connection to the Internet. Depending on your upload speed and the number of documents you have stored it could take hours or even a day to backup everything. My suggestion is to install a backup solution as one of the first steps of setting up a new PC. It is just as important as anti-virus and firewall utilities. You also benefit from a quick initial backup before your computer gets filled with documents.
The major providers of this service are: Carbonite, Mozy, iBackup, and Dell DataSafe. These providers can backup most systems including both Macs, PCs, and servers. There are some other providers who specialize in particular platforms. You can do a quick Google search to seek them out.
What about Time Machine & Windows Shadow copy? These are great services if properly configured. You can achieve similar results as the backup services mentioned earlier if paired with a service like MobileMe or Windows Live OneCare.
So every business owner has a choice. He or she can have a good backup system in place like Jeff or the settlement company or lose sleep and time like Ruth’s old neighbor or Jen. Or you can setup proper backup allowing you to rest easier knowing that you won’t lose files due to a mistake or a crash.
What do you use for backup? What experience have you had (good, bad, ugly?)
2 Comments
I’m a tangible kind of guy. I need to see and touch most of my things I buy and I would suspect there are many other people like me.
An auto mechanic once told me that if he told a person that their steering linkage was about to go, they would put it off until the last moment risking their life and their passengers lives. But they would skip paying the bills for one month just to get those shinny new rims for the car. For some reason, showing off that new steering linkage just isn’t as cool as showing off those rims at the local corner.
Well unfortunately, that’s how I treat my backup system. I can’t see it and I don’t use it (at least not yet) so why buy the hardware or software?
Well I started to worry more and more at night just thinking, what if I lost my laptop? What if I crashed my hard drive? I wouldn’t know what to do. Like a lot of people, I work from home so I don’t have the “warm fuzzy” feeling that my company is backing everything up for me at night. I realized I needed to take action in order for me to get some sleep at night.
After reading this blog, I decided to go with “Carbonite.” I love it. I’m finally getting some sleep!! Carbonite is a software that you download and install onto your computer. Depending on how much data you have, the first back-up could take a few days. No worries though, you can still use your PC during this initial back up.
The cool thing about this type of back-up software is that once your back-up is done, it only backs up what has “changed” since the last back up. So there is no scheduled full back up that is constantly bogging down your PC. Once you open up a spread sheet, change it, then close it, it will then back it up online within a minute or two. So cool.
Here’s the kicker for me. It puts little “green dots” by all of your file names that are currently backed up. Giving you assurance that you are good to go! If you open up a file and change it, it will then give you a “yellow dot” letting you know that it is scheduled for back up within the next few minutes. Neat hunh!!
Once that dot turns “green,” its like that little rim shining back at you letting you know what you spent your money on!
Makes me happy every time.
Thanks Lou. I appreciate your comments. I’ve heard similar things by other people who now have backup setup. They love the confirmation that their information is backed up and that they don’t have to worry about loosing hours, if not years, of work.