Quick guide to computer backups

Your data is not safe on your computer. Trust me. I have attempted to recover data from dead hard drives hundreds of times. A bit less than half of the time, the data is just gone, and for all intents and purposes, irretrievable unless you want to spend thousands of dollars to have a specialist recover your files.

When people ask me how often they should back stuff up, I always say: "How much data can you afford to lose?"

Backing up your company's important data isn't really difficult, it just requires a little discipline. It also isn't especially expensive. Considering that it takes all of your employees all day to create the data, an investment of around $500-$1000 is not unreasonable.


Now, the tutorial:
How to back up your computers
First, make a plan.
Ask yourself the following questions:

1. How often will you back up your data?
2. Can your internet connection support sending huge amounts of data to a remote site? (A typical T-1 can send about 1GB per hour.
   
3. How much time and money would it take my employees to re-input the data to be backed up?
4. Do I have a long-term source for replacement backup media? (Spools of DVDs, replacement tapes, hard drives, etc. Try to use industry standard media.)
5. How much data do I plan on backing up, and what type of retention period do I need? (Do this math carefully to determine how big the media needs to be.)
6. What legal retention policy must I abide by? (Doctors, lawyers, etc. may need to keep data for a long time.)
   

Second, find simple to use and reliable backup software. Learn how to backup and restore. Lately, we have found Backup for Workgroups to be a very reliable backup program.

Whichever program you choose, make sure it supports the following:

• Emailing of daily backup status
• Simple user interface
• Simple restore procedure
• An easy way to verify that the data you backed up is safe and current
  

Third, pick a good media type to back up to.

There are many choices here. CD/DVDs, Portable hard drives, tapes, online, etc.

Reliability scale:

1. Online Backups
2. Portable Hard Drives
   
3. CD/DVD
4. Tape backup
   

Simplicity Scale:

1. Portable Hard drives
2. CD/DVD
3. Online backups
4. Tape backup
   

We employ a pair redundant external USB hard drives (500+ GB each) as our method of choice. Hard drives offer a good combination of simplicity and data security, and by rotating a pair of them, one in the office, one at the business owner's home, we can greatly increase the chances of a successful restore even in the case of a major catastrophe.

Fourth, Set a backup schedule and check your backups on the regular.

Thanks for reading this! If you have any questions, post a comment or email me. We'll add to this tutorial as needed.