Backup Strategy for PCs
So you've decided to backup your
data but what is the next step? You
must have a backup strategy, irrespective
of whether you are a home-user or a
business-user. The depth of the
strategy is the only variant between
these two types of user.
People and businesses have massive
and ever-increasing amounts of unprotected
and difficult to manage data. In this
light, the need for a backup strategy
becomes critical. Take email as
an example: the 12/2004 issue of Smart
Computing states that 88% of adult PC
users send and receive emails. The
International Data Corporation reports
that 16.8 trillion were transmitted
in 2004 with this figure set to climb
each year.
According to Smart Computing, American
businesses send about 9 billion emails
a day. On average, home-users transmit
around 435kb in email attachments every
day. A typical corporation with
5000 employees accumulates 4 terabytes
of emails every year. The size
of my Outlook PST file for 2004 at work
rested at 1.4Gb; at home it was 650Mb!
And finally, Dataquest estimates
that the total number of hard-disk drives
shipped in 2002 rests at 212.5m units
- representing around 8.5m terabytes
of storage space.
Home-user data includes documents,
audio and video files, scanned images,
and digital photos. Businesses
have marketing-collateral developed
and stored electronically, customer
information stacked in databases, financial
records posted in accounting packages,
budgets and business plans recorded
on network storage devices. As
this list grows, the need for a backup
strategy becomes even more obvious!
Uniblue usually advise customers to look
at 5 key elements of any backup strategy: (Continue below)
1. Invest in good Backup Software:
Read the reviews,
visit the websites, and look out for
features and assurances that the product
you are buying is reliable, fast and
easy to use. Spend time reading the
websites of the various suppliers. Some
products cost no more than $40 but your
data costs much more. Losing your
data because the software you have bought
is not effective means that you have
thrown away an extra $40!
2. Plan Your Backups:
Most
software packages on the market have
schedulers. Use these schedulers. It
doesn't take much time to set up a timetable
for backups. Depending on how many times
you use your PC you can schedule your
periodical backups. At work I backup
every day at 9:00 a.m.. At home
I backup once a week.
3. Check the Integrity of your
Restore:
Even though you
have backed up, what guarantee do you
have that your data can be restored
when disaster hits? The best way
to ensure full restorability of your
data is to buy a backup product that
has bit-level verification (like WinBackup
2.0). Such a feature ensures that
while the product performs your backup
it also checks all the data down to
the level of bits and bytes. In
essence, the software first backs up
the data and then automatically performs
a test-restore to make sure that every
single bit has been copied.
4. Check the Integrity of
your Backup Medium:
You can
have the best software in the world
and back your data every hour, however,
if you do not have a good medium to
store your archives, you are doomed.
The second best way to ensure
the restorability of your data is to
choose good mediums and to do regular
test-restores from them.
5. Check your hard drives regularly
and make sure you have good anti-spyware
and anti-virus software. There is no
harm in checking hard drives for errors
and bad sectors as these drives do fail
over time.
Uniblue
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Copyright 2004 K.J.
Vella
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