Why Bother Backing up Your Data?
As I go about my day to day routine I constantly see Small and Medium sized business customers, and home users, particularly home users, who have no online or local backup plan in place and then when their PC or laptop experiences hardware failure, becomes infected with a virus, or the Operating System becomes corrupted, are in a state of shock and ask me how this could happen to them. Well it happens to all of us sometimes or other, and having a good online backup plan is important.
The purpose of this post is to briefly explain several types of backups and their benefits and short comings, but first let us analyze some of the reasons for backing up your valuable data.
Hardware Malfunction: Without a backup plan in place, recreating data from a failed hardware can take days, weeks, months, if it can even be recreated at all. Look through your data right now in your My Documents folder, or home folder, what with all of the email, PDF files, word documents, and others, could you recreate these from your failed hard drive?
Human Error: Accidentally deleted your contacts in Outlook? An employee who thinks they are being helpful by deleting old files they think are no longer needed. We have all done this at one time or other and frequent online backups are the only remedy.
Software Corruption: It happens all the time. An employee or the kids install a new program and it breaks another program such as QuickBooks, or your custom applications. What now?
Computer Virus: More and more computers are getting infected with viruses that seem to be getting worse and potent! After an infection what was once a system that ran perfect will never again run just right. Do you rebuild the system from scratch or back up your essential data? Obviously the latter option is the more feasible one.
Natural Disaster / Fire / Flood / Theft: Not wanting to spread fear, but these unfortunate incidents can occur unannounced, and if they do, is your USB drive connected to the computer still of any value? What about the tape that was left on top of the server?
Government Compliance: Depending on your type of business, there can be Federal or State laws that require you to backup and maintain emails and other data for a certain amount of time. Do you have data contingency measures in place? If not, now is the time to start.
Backup to Network Attached Storage (NAS) or a USB disk
First up are the NAS devices, and as the price of hardware has dropped these items are ridiculously inexpensive and do work well. A simple NAS with a terabyte of disk space can be had for under $200 and includes streaming media servers and shareable iTunes folders. You can also buy simple home servers from Acer or HP running Windows Home Server for under $500 dollars. MLD Services uses these in its office with great success.
Most come with their own backup client such as Seagate’s Black Armor. We only see two down sides to these devices. One, they are in your home or office and if you experience a fire, flood, natural disaster or theft the NAS might be destroyed along with the other computers. The second issue is with a wireless network that can take a long time to backup.
USB devices are another item that can be used to backup your data, they are inexpensive and portable! Some are now small enough to fit into a safety deposit box at your bank. Most come with software that manages your backups. Alternately, in Windows 7 you can now create an image of your hard drive and then run incremental backups to your USB drive.
We use these in our office with great success. Most come with their own backup client such as Western Digital’s SmartWare and can range in size from 80 GB and up to a couple of Terabytes in size. MLD Services only sees two down sides to these devices. One they are in your home or office and if you experience a fire, flood, natural disaster or theft then the USB drive might be destroyed along with the other computers. The second issue is if you do take the device offsite, to a bank or your office, will you remember to routinely back up the drives? In some cases old backups can be next to useless.
On-line drive services such as dropbox.com or Windows Live
These services may have a place in your strategy or they may not. Some of the pluses that we have seen in testing these services are the ability to access your data at other computers, keep multiple computers data in sync, or share with colleagues, family, or friends. These are not really backups but are sync or storage services that could be used. Most offer a free plan, and then have a charge for more storage.
On-line Backup Services
True online backup services offer a desktop, or server client that allows you to backup whole or just parts of your computer, laptop or server to the Internet “cloud” and gets your data offsite with little effort on your part. These services can also offer multiple copies of a file available for a restore. This is useful if say your server is shared by a group, and someone needs a file restored from two weeks ago. Some of these services now offer mapped drives that can be used like dropbox or Windows Live and can be accessed through My Computer or through a web browser. Some services even offer email updates on the backups that were performed with how much was backed-up, lists of files and folders, and if it was a success.
What about MLD Services?
We will soon be offering an online backup service as part of our effort to provide our customers with a one stop IT shop. The service will offer backups, online file shares, all of which will be encrypted on the server and during transmission from your computer, laptop or server to the cloud. Emails will be sent giving MLD Services customers a list of what was backed up and whether it was a success. Contracts will be offered on a month to month or yearly basis. Look for prices and software downloads soon.
