Welcome to the first article on ComputerDumb.com … I thought I’d start with a very important topic that has the possibility of touching the lives of many: Computer backup.

Oh, everyone knows that you are supposed to backup the data on your hard drive every day… and of course everyone actually does it!

Wait a second… you haven’t backed up your hard drive in weeks? … months? … years??

I can’t tell you how many customers have come to me wondering if their accidentally deleted files could be recovered somehow, while sheepishly telling me they don’t have a recent backup. Or worse yet, the customers who have a complete hard drive failure, and the only way we could recover their data is to send it in to a service that dismantles the drive in a cleanroom environment and pulls the data off the platters sector by sector. That option is freakishly expensive! (to the tune of $500-1500!)

Now that we’ve established you should backup, the first thing I want to mention is that I highly recommend making sure you have an OFFSITE backup. If you use backup media, make sure you rotate them, and keep a copy outside of the building your computer is in. This ensures that if something happens to your home (ie. fire or theft), you still have a current copy of your data that you could restore to a new computer.

So, how do we backup our data? There are a number of options available. For the purposes of this article, I am going to assume you are a home user or small business with only a few PC’s.

Manual Options

1. CD/DVD burner – This is probably the most common method. Just about every computer sold today has a DVD burner, or at least a CD burner, and the disks are cheap. The trouble with this method is that its terribly tedious, and takes a long time, depending on how much data you have. If you are lucky, your computer came with software to assist you in actually backing up, rather than simple “add your data files and go” … likely it didn’t, so this process becomes a tedious game of finding the files you want to backup, and dragging them into the software and burning. If you have a lot of data, you may also be stuck having to swap out several disks.
2. USB Flash Drive – This can be just as tedious as the CD option, but requires manually copying any files you want to backup to your flash drive on a regular basis.
3. Tape/ZIP/Jazz Drive – This option isn’t very common for the small office & home enironments, but most of the time tape drives will come with backup software automating your backup scenario. This still requires swapping out the tapes so you have something offsite.
4. External Hard Drive – One of the more common solutions is the external hard drive. Many drive manufacturers are including backup software with their drives now, which makes this a nice option, as long as they do, indeed, do that. External hard drives are nice in the fact that they are inexpensive, and come in very large capacities. The downside is that they are usually inconvenient to disconnect, and usually don’t leave the computer’s side.

Automated Options

1. Backup Software – As mentioned above, some hardware comes with backup software, but most do not. You can, however, buy off-the-shelf software to make your media-based backups more automatic. However, these are not foolproof, and still require some amount of manual intervention.
2. Remote Data Backups – Backup your data via a a small software
   utility over the internet to a remote datacenter.  This is the most
   reliable and user-intensive option, and also allows for instant restores to
   multiple previous versions of your data.

Recommendation

Remote Data Backups – By far, the most trustworthy, secure & efficent method of backing up is remote data backups. This is an online service that, through an automatic process will continuously record and backup your system to two offsite mirrored secure datacenters. There are a number of services out there, but we have only come across one with the professionalism and infrastructure in place to make it a trustworthy backup solution. Support is top notch, and backups & restores couldn’t be easier. If you want to roll back a file to yesterday’s version after you made a stupid mistake… no problem! Need to roll back your entire system to a week ago? No problem!

These powerful, easy to use data management tools
help you work more efficiently and effectively, providing you a
significant return on investment (ROI).

Get more information about this solution, and try a 30-day free trial at
http://startech.databu.com.