Backup your files

Data, that four letter little word, sounds rather innocent and innocuous. And it is, until you loose it. Then it can cause tightness of the chest, pain in the jaw, pounding headache and an almost overwhelming sense of doom.

Businesses fold because of lost data. Individuals can have legal headaches over lost data, but mostly it’s just a hassle or heartache.

Data represents tax returns, photographs, research work (in the case of geneaology work it can mean years and generations of research), letters to loved ones and emails.

As I stated in my post on Protect your data! http://atotalnetworksolution.com/blog/2008/protect-your-data/
computers are made up of mechanical parts such as a hard drive, motherboard, power supply, etc. All of those can fail, as they are just electronics. Most of the parts when the fail do not pose a risk to data. Hard drives do, CD-Rom drives can. A lightning strike can fry everything in your computer. (See my post on Power / Surge protection http://atotalnetworksolution.com/blog/2008/power-surge-protection/ )

In my post on Protect your data! (http://atotalnetworksolution.com/blog/2008/protect-your-data/ ) I explained the concept of cloning hard drives. While cloning hard drives is a great practice, you still run the risk of losing data. How’s that you ask? If a fire occurs at your home (or small business) and you’ve been cloning that hard drive, where is the hard drive? In your computer, along with the master hard drive. Cloning your hard drive every day won’t save your data in that case.

In this post, I’m going to discuss backing up, or making a copy, of your data. If you are a business, you will probably want to think about having a tape backup. (I did some research about 15 years ago and found that 93% of businesses close their doors within 2 years of a major data loss. Since then, businesses depend much more heavily on computers, so I’d say the percentage is much higher.) Home users can also use tape backups, but it isn’t necessary.

Here’s how I do mine. I have a CD/DVD burning program (I use Roxio, but there are many others, including some free ones) and I burn my data to a DVD. I created a Data job and have certain folders (such as TurboTax, Quicken, Documents & Settings) that I will copy to a DVD. Roxio has a feature in it called “Validate” and it will compare and update anything that has changed in the “job” since the last time I burned my DVD, or backed up my data.

Backing up the data isn’t all you need to do. Just like in the case of the fire above, having that copy of the data isn’t going to help if the DVD or tape gets stored on the shelf next to the computer. What you need to do is get that CD off the premises. Store a copy at a friend’s house, in a safe deposit box, whatever, just get it out of the building where your computer is. All the backups in the world are no good if they go up in flames in the fire that took out your computer.

So, safe yourself some major headaches and heartaches. Clone that hard drive, and backup that data! More than likely, one day, you’ll be glad you did.