Plan B: Why You Should Always Have a Computer Backup Plan

There is an old saying, If it aint broke dont fix it, many people subscribe to this philosophy with their computers. If they can turn their computer on and access their email or play a game, then preparing for an eventual disaster is usually the last thing on their minds.

If you use your computer for business or store important files like family pictures or tax records, it is imperative that you formulate a plan to backup your computer on a regular basis. Even if your computer is brand new, or just a few months old, hard drives can fail, power surges and lightening strikes happen, and viruses or malware can wipe out your data at a moments notice.

Recently, the main hard drive failed in one of the computers I manage for a busy Real Estate office. They had a backup plan in place, but they failed to routinely follow it. The latest backup data on the external drive was over a year old. They lost hundreds of contacts and thousands of dollars in labor spent building data bases and specialized software files.

I restored all the old data I could and immediately instituted a regular backup schedule that they have been following religiously. They were not worried about a catastrophic data failure because they had installed new hard drives in their computers just over a year ago. But hard rives are very delicate and complex, and one never knows when there may be a failure.

So how do you go about setting up and following a proper computer backup plan? Here are my suggestions:

1. Get Some Form of External Storage Capability. Windows XP has a built in restore feature, but that is worthless if you have a catastrophic hard drive failure. To be truly effective, your computer backups must be stored outside of your computer. You can do this by writing the data to CDROMS or DVDs, but this is a rather slow and cumbersome method. There are online services which allow you to store your data on their secure servers, but the upload times can be really slow, even with broad band.

I recommend getting a large capacity external hard drive, preferably with USB 2 or FireWire capability. Buy the largest capacity drive you can afford, a minimum of 120 Gigabytes. Now if your main hard drive fails, you will have a current mirror image of the drive you can restore using a special boot disk created by your backup software.

2. Buy a Computer Backup Program and Use it. There are a lot of software solutions out there, Norton Ghost is probably the most well known. For various reasons I wont get into in this article, I dont recommend Ghost as your primary backup software. I have tried many different backup programs and the one I use most frequently is Arconis True Image. Regardless of what program you choose, learn to use it effectively, develop a computer backup plan and stick to it.

You may want to backup once a week, every other day or even daily if you are constantly adding new and important data. I perform an incremental backup of each computer every five days. This gives us recent enough data files to work off of should we experience another failure. Whatever schedule you choose, stick to it, no excuses.

3. Create a boot disk and know how to use it. The most recent backup in the world is useless if you are unable to restore it. If your hard drive fails, you must be able to restore your backup data to your new drive or computer. To do this you will need a bootable CD or a set of bootable floppy disks to restore your backup image. Each program does this a bit differently, be sure to read the manual and fully understand the process.

By following the Best Practices I listed above, your data will be safe from eventual loss. Hard drive failure will no longer be a major catastrophe, if you have a proper backup plan in place you can be up and running in a matter of hours.

Article by Mr. Shannon Baker, over 20 years persuading computers to do his bidding. http://www.fix-my-slow-computer.com

Top Six Reasons Why You Need A Data Center Disaster Recovery Plan
I have seen so many startup businesses make the same old mistake of not having a data center disaster recovery plan and thinking that is not necessary. The most common reason that most of these businesses make this decision is that they see a disaste...

Computer Backup Solution
Once a week when I start my computer, a window pops up to ask if I want to back up my files. I always say no because I dont want to go through the hassle of burning all my files on CDs. Yet after my boyfriends computer had a virus from the internet, ...

The Importance of Data Backups
All computers and their components are subject to failure. In fact sooner or later every business will be confronted with some type of computer failure. The largest threat to businesses during a failure will be some type of data loss or data corrupt...

Data Recovery And Remote File Storage
You have lot of sensitive personal data on your PC, like photos, word documents, journals and address books. It would be a very hard time if you lose your data. That is why there are a number of online backup facilities available in the market. For e...

Easy File Recovery: Basic Backup Guidelines
You can skip these backup guidelines and do not backup if: you have never misedited a file and saved deleted a file by mistake never had to recover from a hard disk crash, a virus, a computer theft or other similar computer disaster. Probably...

Not Using Remote Data Backup? Your Data Is Lost
It is an hour to deadline for submitting a proposal for a job you have committed to doing for a client. Your computer is down and you have no idea of how to bring it back. Everything you have tried is to no avail. What will you do? The bad part of th...

Data Backup Which is the Better Way?
Before we investigate which data backup method is a best fit for your business, we need to evaluate why and what you expect from your backup solution.Obviously, we backup our data so we can continue trading after a disaster, but what type of disaste...

Data Backup and Security
Whether your computer is for business or personal use, losing your data is tragic either way. Your data is your life, keep it protected and secure! This is why you should always have a data backup plan! There are many different data backup methods to...

Little Known Ways To Restore Registry From A Backup
It is impossible to discuss all the computer problems and the registry hives that need to be restored. The most common registry problem is created by installation of a bad or incompatible driver, or another similar configuration process affecting har...

Online Backup - A Necessity for Every Computer Owner
Why is online backup important?Most people have important (if not priceless) documents and files on their computer. The hard drive of your personal computer may be filled to the brim with years and years of personal photographs, MP3 music, financial...

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Data Recovery Service . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.