Backing Up Your Computer Data
Do you back up your computer data properly?
1) Create a daily or weekly backup of your essential data.
2) Store it offsite (ie. out of town).
If you don’t do the 2 things above for backing up your data you are putting yourself at a lot of risk to lose the data.
What could happen to my computer?
You run a home based business and rely on computer data to operate.
1) Tornado/fire
Say a tornado happens to rip through your house. Your computer is gone. You just lost everything if you didn’t back up your data and store it off site. You now have hundreds of hours of data re-entry to get back to where you were. Your customers data is all gone including accounting and tax information.
2) Hard Drive/catastrophic computer failure/moron deletes wrong directory
Hard drives fail frequently. They are just like a record player with spinning disks and an arm to read from the disks. The difference is they spin at 5000 to 10000 rpm where a record player was 33 to 45 rpm. They will eventually fail. Even if you get a good one that lasts 4 or 5 years that just means you have 4 or 5 years of data to lose.
If you did back things up here is what you need to do:
a) Go purchase a new PC.
b) Buy the program you stored your data in.
c) Go to the offsite location and grab your backup.
d) Find a place to set up the computer
e) Install the software
f) Reload the backup.
g) Re-enter data since the last backup.
How should I backup my data?
This depends on how much data you normally want to backup.
Anything less than 700MB will be easiest/cheapest to backup with a standard CD burner. CDs can be purchased for less than 20 cents each now and they only need to last as long as your next backup. Burn the data you want to archive everyday/week.
If you want to do full computer restores with many gigabytes of data then you should probably look into a portable USB or Firewire hard drive. You’ll want to buy 2 of them so that you can have 1 to store and 1 to backup on.
Other options in the sub 1 gigabyte area are:
USB thumb/stick drives
Flash memory cards (Compact Flash, SD, etc.)
ZIP drive
Web Site Hosting Company
What are some easy ways to back up data off site?
The easiest way is with a backup buddy. I know it sounds corny but it really works and takes your data out of harms way.
Find somebody with a similar problem of backing up as you do. You also need to make sure they are trustworthy or that your data is not too sensitive for somebody else to see. They may just pop the backup on their computer to see what is there?
Make sure to meet with them once a day or week to exchange backups.
If you are using CDs then just give them the new CD.
If you are using a flash memory, ZIP disk, or portable hard drive then give them the newest backup and take that previous backup to use the next time. This will eliminate the hassle of retrieving the backup just to update it then give it back.
Another good off site backup location is a safe deposit box at the bank. It would be a little more hassle to get access to do this but it is a very secure place.
Another option that will cost money is a web site hosting company like this website is hosted at. A link is in the right hand column. They have a fixed fee every month for the amount of storage you can use. Usually above 5GB. You will also need a broadband internet connection (cable modem, DSL, satellite) to upload the data to the hosting service. You would probably only want to use this option if you have less that 100MB backups because depending on your internet connection it could take a long time to upload.
A good on site back up area for intermediate backups (ie daily backups if you weekly is off site) is in a small fire resistant safe in a storm shelter. The safe deposit box and fire safe should also be used to store non-computer data that is critical to your business.
When should you backup your data?
If your data is extremely critical it would probably be best to have off site backups daily.
To avoid the computer crashing problem it is OK to have a daily on site backup but make sure your weekly is off site.
A simple script could be written to automate the whole process. Simply double click on the script when your work is done and the backing up will be done for you.
This sounds like paranoia but look at the things that have happened lately that have completely destroyed businesses. Hurricanes, floods, terrorist attacks, and tornados. I think people are undervaluing the cost of the data that they enter into their computer.
Example
As an example, I’ll use my step mom and her business.
She works in a home office taking phone calls about trucking loads and handling the day to day accounting. If a tornado took out the house tonight these truckers would have trouble receiving their calls for loads and by the time everything was set back up the accounting data would be a few weeks out of date. With the proper backups, she could be set up and running the business fully in less than 24 hours at another site. Forward the phones and fax machine, purchase a new computer and the software, pull out the backups, and continue on so the truckers never miss a day of loads.
In this case I would recommend that she get ahold of my aunt with the new pool (see how sneaky I am with names). My step mom has a 1GB thumbdrive already. I think she should buy a 2nd thumbdrive. Make her daily backups to the #1 thumbdrive. When she meets my aunt at church on Sunday she could give my aunt the #1 thumbdrive and retrieve the #2 thumbdrive for her daily backups for the next week. Once a month she should check both backups to make sure they aren’t getting corrupted by a bad thumbdrive.
Feel free to leave feedback and suggestions.
