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Backup Religion

Submitted by Heather on Sat, 05/17/2008 - 7:43pm.
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It's been said that one really does not get "backup religion" until you have a system completely crash and you lose everything.  Wouldn't it be better to backup regularly now instead of having to go through that?  Patrick is the backup guy around here and he makes sure we have our data backed up so if something wears out, we have an extra copy of the data we need which minimizes any resulting downtime. 

There are a few different ways to go about backing up your computer:

  1. External hard drive
  2. Online backup service
  3. Combination of above

If you go to your local computer/electronics store (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) , you can find many, many different external hard drives.  If you decide to go this route to backup your data, be sure to choose a hard drive with enough space to hold 2-3x more than your computer can hold.  Over time, you will want to be able to archive data on your external drive, but you will still need to use part of that drive to backup your day-to-day changes. 

Once you have an external hard drive, you will need some good backup software.  There are plenty of options available for this purpose - check to see if you have something already on your computer.  Backup software needs to provide a way for you to schedule your backups (so you don't have to remember to back it up every night manually), do backups of the whole drive to start, choose to backup just a particular folder and be able choose to backup only the changed files for the day.  These are some things to think about / questions to ask when you start looking for good backup software.

Another route to check into are the online backup services.  We are currently researching options in this arena.  So far, we have checked out Amazon's S3 service.  It's ok  - I need to play with it more before I give a final opinion on it.  The things to look for in an online backup service are security, ease-of-use and backup scheduling capability.  Let me add that backups are not just important for businesses - they are also very important for individuals, especially if you keep financial data on your computer (think Quicken, Microsft Money, etc.). 

What do you use for backing up your data?  Leave a comment and let us know.  Do you have a specific backup question? Tell us in a comment and we'll answer it as quickly as we can. 

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