Recently I shared 5 Tips to Keep Your Computer Healthy. If you took the time to go over the list and used some of the programs I shared with you, your computer should be running a little better. In fact, it is probably secretly thanking you for giving it a little attention.

Unfortunately, it’s still talking to you but you can’t hear it. Right now it’s asking you when you are going to back it up? This seems to be one of the hardest things to get people to do.

Data backup is the most important part of a digital world. Unfortunately most people have to learn the hard way just how important it is. When I meet with a new business client, the first thing I ask is about their backup system.

Today I thought I would spend some time on backup solutions for both Residential and Business environments.

Residential

External hard drives have really come down in price over the last year or so. You can get 1TB for generally under $150 and upwards of 2TB for under $225. They are great because you can store a lot of data for very little money. The other nice thing is they are a pretty safe place to store your data as long as you are careful with them.

Thumb drives, usb drives, flash drives, etc have become extremely popular and very inexpensive. The biggest problem here is that these are NOT a good choice for backup. They are great to move data from one computer to another or a temporary backup of non critical files, but they will fail. They are not acceptable for any type of important data.

Online backup systems have become very popular and work pretty well for the home market. The biggest problem here is that if you have a major failure and need a new computer, it may take several days to be able to get your data back. In some cases upwards of 7 days (read the fine print).

One of the things we have recently come out with for the home market is a $299 all in one backup solution. It uses software to make an image of your hard drive and backs up that image on to an external hard drive. By doing this we can restore your entire computer in a short amount of time. This is the quickest and simplest solution out there.

Business

Businesses have very unique needs when it comes to backups. Sometimes you need yearly, quarterly, weekly, and nightly backups. Sometimes you need hourly backups. Needless to say there are many options as far as media and software.

The most common software solution is called Backup Exec by Symantec. This software allows you to backup to disk, tape, or even a remote system. It will backup Exchange Server, any files that are left open, and is generally considered to be one of the best. This is the software we recommend to our clients.

Once again Flash drives are not acceptable. I received a call from a client this week who had one die. These are inexpensive solutions designed to quickly transfer data from computer to computer. They are not designed to be a backup solution, use one and I guarantee you will loose your data at one point or another.

Tape is still one of the best forms of backup. It has a shelf life of 20 years, is portable, and very large sizes are available.

Hard drives are also a good solution, however I still feel they are second to tape because they can fail randomly and you need to replace the drive every 2 or 3 years just to be safe. I have seen them die in as little as 6 months with no warning. Often we will use dual external hard drives just to be safe.

Online backup is a good secondary backup solution, but it is not a good primary solution. It’s used for an extra piece of mind, but I much prefer to have a physical copy of data I can hold in my hand.

If you need hourly backups and fast recovery times then you would move to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution which has some type of snapshot technology like a Network Appliance unit. This is very expensive and only needed for large amounts of critical data in excess of 10TB. These units can now store upwards of  1,100 TB of data.

If you haven’t verified your backups lately or performed a backup I highly recommend you have someone come out to help you so it is done properly.

Disaster Recovery

When is the last time you tested your back up? Have you ever? What would happen if for the last year you thought your backup was working properly and then it failed and you learned it wasn't backing up properly or the data was corrupted?

Any backup system is not a "set it and forget it" solution, you need to maintain it. You need to have a disaster recovery plan in place and test it from time to time.

It costs between $700 - $10,000 to recover data from a dead hard drive. Stop and think for a minute what would happen to your business if you lost all of your data tonight. Would your business survive?