With the proliferation of Digital cameras, MP3 players, PDA's, cell phones and Laptop computers it is more important than ever to have a strategy that will protect these Programs, documents, pictures, and music files.
Can you imagine having lost all your hundreds or thousands of pictures? Imagine how costly it would be to get the iTunes music or videos you have purchased.
A good Data backup strategy begins with a backup device and software.
The hardware of choice these days is an external Hard Drive.
The decreasing cost of these devices has made it the prime candidate for personal and corporate backups.
Weather you use a USB connected external drive or a RAID Network Archive Storage device connected to the network.
Proper use of the device and software will ensure a layer of protection for your data.
Backup software providers offer personal and corporate applications.
They can be very simple with few features or somewhat more complicated offering many features.
The problem most of the time with a backup system is remembering to check and verify that the backup was performed correctly and completely.
There are a lot of programs out there offering the ability schedule backups.
Additional features will notify you by email if you are getting any errors or problems with the backup.
As a Computer Consulting firm, we have dealt with many customers who are not diligent about checking the status of their backups.
Many customers have taken for granted that the backups are working, since they never needed to restore from a backup.
This "out of site out of mind" mentality is very dangerous.
We have a rule to check the backup every time we are in to see our customers.
We have saved customers from a possible catastrophe just by checking their backups.
Without a proper strategy, it is usually too late when they find out that their backup has not been working or was never working to begin with.
A proper backup strategy not only protects you from catastrophic problems but also protects you from accidentally deleted files.
A backup performed to a different folder for every day of the week will allow you to go back 6 or 7 days to recover files that were accidentally deleted and need to be restored.
Some of our customers can even have month's worth of backups for optimum security and remove them offsite to save if every the system crashes or the building should burn down.
I can't stress the most important aspect of the backup is checking and verifying that the data is being properly backed up.
Most of the larger companies can go a step farther and do test restores just to make sure the backup is being correctly performed.
In summary, There are many different kinds of backup programs available but the main things to look for is the ability to schedule a backup job and its ability to email you the results.
If you are diligent about checking your email each day, then after time you will get used to seeing your backup email arrive each day assuring you of a good backup.
It is also important that your Backup Hard Drive be large enough to accommodate the multiple backups.
So calculate the size of your data and multiply it by 10 to get a backup hard drive that will accommodate the backups and future growth of your data.