After many conversations with our clients, it seems lack of proper backup techniques is still commonplace. People worry about fires, floods, and power spikes more than a fifty-dollar hard drive failing. In the past we have seen many hard drive failures and laptop thefts resulting in the loss of important business documents, years of family pictures, and the like. We have not witnessed a single power surge, fire, or flood to speak of that caused a client to lose their data. People buy $300 battery backups for their computers, but do not backup their documents on a regular basis.
My goal is to see every one of our clients backing up their data on a regular basis by the end of the year. We offer solutions for on-site server/workstation backups, as well as off- site backups to our data center in Indianapolis. There are many ways to automate the backup of your important data. Below are some backup techniques that we recommend for our small to mid-size clients.
External USB Hard Drive
This simple and sometimes not-so-painless solution is a great start for most people at their homes or small businesses. Most external drives come with backup software that help you schedule a regular backup of all your important data. In the past these drives were notorious for failure, but as the technology has matured they have proven more reliable.
Upsides:
- Cheap, Fast, and can be done by most computer users out there.
Downsides:
- You may not notice if your backups are failing if the software is not working correctly.
- If a theft/fire occurs at your office, you lose your data and your backup unless you remember to take your drive with you everyday, in which case it is not hooked up all the time and will not always be backing up on a regular basis.
Off-Site Backups Using The Internet
There are many online backup providers out there these days. Most of these solutions use encryption techniques to safely transfer and store your files. Backups are performed incrementally, meaning it only has to transfer new or changed files since the last backup.
Most online backup solutions offer “real time” backups, meaning it will backup your file the instant you create or save changes to it. Some solutions also offer daily backups once every 24 hours. Daily backups may suffice for most workstations, but servers should utilize real time backup techniques in most cases.
Upsides:
- Completely automated off site backup solution, most providers notify you by email if your backup fails, making it easy to address these situations.
Downsides:
- Some backup providers charge outrageous fees for this service. Do not get caught in a contract or trap with a “disaster” recovery service. We have seen clients pay up to $1,000 a month to backup 20GB of data who could have backed up to 2 or 3 different providers for $30/month each and ended up with the same result.
- Restoring large amounts of online backups over your Internet connection could take days if you have to perform a full recovery of the data. (Pavin The Way offers local off site solutions in Indianapolis with quicker recovery time for our clients, since we can load data on a laptop and have it delivered to your office in the same day after a failure).
Tape Drives
Does anybody use these anymore? They seem to have become antiquated in most situations and are way over priced for what they deliver. Disk drive storage is cheaper, faster, and more reliable for small business. If you have very large amounts of data, backing up to a tape drive might start to make financial sense. I still see clients using this method as their first defense for on site and off site backups, however, tapes are rarely rotated or taken off-site and can fail without notice.
In Conclusion…
Please find a solution, any solution, to backup your files on a regular basis. There are many low cost solutions that are fully automated and require 10 minutes of your time to set up.
– Jim Peters, CIO
Pavin The Way Software, LLC
Web Based Accounting Software
http://pavintheway.com/
Jim Peters