|
Five
Steps for Making Sure You Can Retrieve Your Data in Case of
Loss
Having
a backup software is just the tip of the iceberg. Whether you
are home user or a business you must have a plan how you are
going to backup your data. You should also make sure that you
can restore the data that you have backed up. Here are five
steps how you can make sure that your data is protected with
100% accuracy in case of data loss.
So you've decided to backup your data but what
is the next step? Our experience with our customers has taught
us that one of the most important things in backup is to think
ahead. Prior Planning...
Why think ahead? Protecting your data involves two
things - (a) saving the data somewhere safe, and (b) making
sure that you can reproduce it with 100% accuracy at a later
date. The later date may be next week or in a year's time.
So you have to 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 users.
You should think about how am I going to make
sure that I can access the family photos or text messages I
have stored over the years. In the case of businesses, how can
I make sure that I can guarantee that I can retrieve all that
accounting information, email exchanges with customers, etc.
and keep on doing business. Data, Data Everywhere
As time goes by people and businesses are facing massive
and ever-increasing amounts of data that are difficult to manage
and that remain unprotected. In this light, the need for a backup
strategy becomes critical. Let me just take email as an example:
the 12/2004 issue of Smart Computing reports that 88% of adult
PC users send and receive emails. The International Data Corporation
reports that 16.8 trillion emails were transmitted in 2004 with
this figure climbing to 19.7 trillion this 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. One other research firm estimates that
typical corporations with 5000 employees accumulate 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! ....Prevents Poor Performance
We usually advise customers to look at 5 key elements of
any backup strategy:
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 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 makes sure that while the product is performing
your backup it 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.
Experience Uniblue products
Click here to run a demonstration of:
RegistryBooster 2 - Clean, repair, and optimize your system.
SpeedUpMyPC 3 - Maximise system performance.
SpyEraser 2 - Protect your PC against privacy threats.
|
