Plan B: Why You Should Always Have a Computer Backup Plan [aboutcomputer99.blogspot.com]

Plan B: Why You Should Always Have a Computer Backup Plan [aboutcomputer99.blogspot.com]

There is an old saying, "If it ain't broke don't 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 moment's 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 won't get into in this article, I don't 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 ne w 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.

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

Question by cyrus_xi: Best options for reliable computer backup? I'm looking for the most efficient (cheapest but still good) option for backing up family photos and such. I'd rather it not be integrated in my computer, so an external raid enclosure with mirroring would be cool unless there's a better idea. I basically just want to not have to worry about HDD failure, but don't want to complicate storage with manual or weird software backup. Specific products would be nice... Thanks! Best answer for Best options for reliable computer backup?:

Answer by DB
Wouldn't bother with raid - its not like you'll be reading and writing millions of times like a system drive does. I'd just get a single external hard drive and replace it every few years, or if you want redundancy, get 2x external drives and maintain 2 copies of your backups. Thats essentially doing the same as a mirrored raid but much more flexible P.S. if you're really concerned with HDD failure then you could get an enterprise class hard drive as these have higher performance and lower failure rates

Answer by Christie Hemme
Take a technician's help and stay tension free. Check source.

Answer by Aravind
If you only want to backup your photos, then uploading them to Picasa is my best idea. There is no fear of hard disk failure in Picasa. If you want to store your data independent of HDD failure, I recommend you to backup your data to another disk drive using a backup software. If you want free, fully featured, unlimited size backup solution for this, I recommend StoreGrid's local backup feature. -- Aravind

Answer by josephnpride
The most efficient backup is online backup, or so called off-site backup. I did not even care before to backup my files on my computer but I realized too late when my hard drive crashed and I lost all those a lot of photos, documents and financial documents and sadly I was not able to retrieve them... I decided to use online backup which was the best choice I ever made which put me at ease. I do not have to worry about hard drive crash, limited space, and reminding myself to backup the files manually. I use FileBacker, they offer online data backup for about $ 5 per month for home users, Unlimited Data, Secure and Automated (you will have to install a software on your pc) It has cool features and you can access to your backed up data anywhere by going online through web patrol! Check out http://www.FileBacker.com wish you best of luck!

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