Backups
Considering that most people realise the importance of backups it is amazing how few people actually have an effective backup policy. Just imagine if you lost everything on your computer as of now! How would that affect your working day, or even your private day? They did a survey in the USA which discovered that 80% of companies that lost all of their data went bust within months!
Still feeling comfortable? I think that most people shy away from doing backups because they aren’t too sure of the safest way of doing them. Let us take a look at some alternatives.
The most basic backup for a PC is to copy your data to another hard drive on your system, or across a network. The problem with this is that it is a manual process and, despite the best intentions, you probably won’t do it regularly. You also need to know which folders to select for email etc.
The next step up is a backup program which will do this automatically, but there are problems with this too. Firstly, if you are only backing up your data, if your system crashes you will have to reload your operating system and all of your programs before you can then restore your data. How long will that take and do you have the skills and time to do it?
The next step up is to have a backup program which does a backup of your entire drive and has a disaster recovery option so that you can restore your entire drive very easily and quickly. I have one of these which I can thoroughly recommend because it restored my crashed system recently in under an hour!
This is a very good partial solution but what happens if you have a fire or you PC is stolen. Your data is gone. You can have two removable hard drives and swap them each week, keeping the other one off site, but again my clients that do this usually end up keeping both drives on site, often in the same room!
The extra safety you need is to backup your data online and there are many sites that offer this service. You can backup your data automatically through Google Drive or through Microsoft Onedrive if you have an Microsoft Office subscription.
So using a combination of a disaster recovery backup solution and an online data backup solution I feel I am very safe. Are you?
Still feeling comfortable? I think that most people shy away from doing backups because they aren’t too sure of the safest way of doing them. Let us take a look at some alternatives.
The most basic backup for a PC is to copy your data to another hard drive on your system, or across a network. The problem with this is that it is a manual process and, despite the best intentions, you probably won’t do it regularly. You also need to know which folders to select for email etc.
The next step up is a backup program which will do this automatically, but there are problems with this too. Firstly, if you are only backing up your data, if your system crashes you will have to reload your operating system and all of your programs before you can then restore your data. How long will that take and do you have the skills and time to do it?
The next step up is to have a backup program which does a backup of your entire drive and has a disaster recovery option so that you can restore your entire drive very easily and quickly. I have one of these which I can thoroughly recommend because it restored my crashed system recently in under an hour!
This is a very good partial solution but what happens if you have a fire or you PC is stolen. Your data is gone. You can have two removable hard drives and swap them each week, keeping the other one off site, but again my clients that do this usually end up keeping both drives on site, often in the same room!
The extra safety you need is to backup your data online and there are many sites that offer this service. You can backup your data automatically through Google Drive or through Microsoft Onedrive if you have an Microsoft Office subscription.
So using a combination of a disaster recovery backup solution and an online data backup solution I feel I am very safe. Are you?
