Peace of mind: knowing you have a good backup…

If you fail to plan a backup strategy, you can plan on the failure of your data recovery efforts should the inevitable happen. Don't procrastinate, back up your data today. A lot of the information below will relate to the home user but certainly could apply to a small business as well.

Unfortunately, many people don’t realize the importance of backing up their data until it’s too late. They live with the belief that “it won’t happen to me” until it does. A hard drive dies, a system is stolen or damaged in a fire, and along with that drive goes all of the data. This often times includes personal financial data, irreplaceable family pictures, and music that you’ve spent a good amount of time and money to accumulate. Here are some simple steps to get started today.

Go to your local computer store and buy an external USB hard drive. I just saw a deal the other day where a 500GB external USB hard drive was under $100, so it’s not too costly a solution for peace of mind. Obviously, the larger the drive, the more you can back up. I even recommend that you get 2 identical external hard drives if you plan on not only backing up your data, but also plan to store your data. You should always have some level of fault tolerance in place should the external drive fail. When you simply back up data, that original data also resides on your system. The 2 external drives can then be rotated on a regular basis (weekly / monthly), and the drive that’s not being used can be placed in a fire proof box. I’ve seen and experienced these drives get damaged by accidently being dropped, and you just don’t want have to spend the time and money in professionally getting the data restored. You can see how this gets more complicated for a business backup strategy when the costs are weighed between the level of fault tolerance needed and the money available in the IT budget since the higher the level of fault tolerance, the higher the costs.

Now that you have the medium that you will use to store your backups, you will need to get the data from your system over to the external hard drive. I won’t go in to the specific details in using backup utilities since that would be an article on its own which I’m sure others have written. That being said, most operating systems and external hard drives come included with some type of backup software. You can then use this software, and automate the data backup process to run after hours when you won’t be using the system. There are also free utilities which are easy to use such as SyncBack by 2BrightSparks, which can be used to synchronize data (back up the data that has changed) from your system to the external hard drives. Nowadays, this can be a great time saver when the amount of data can easily easily exceed 40GB when taking in to account the backing up of your email, pictures, music, and documents.

Like insurance, it’s better to have a back up strategy in place and to not need it, then to need to recover important data and not be able to.