Yet another Sunday rolls around and as you know, technology takes a few more steps in a direction we would never have thought about 10 years ago. Think of the implications of wave, in how we communicate, both in the office and with clients/vendors - not to mention family - I for one, can't wait to get my hands on it.

While all that happens, have you considered what happens if your computer decides to go belly up? As you know, they rarely do this with warning and never when we want them to.

So - this week - I am going to tell you a bit about back up for your computer - I KNOW - Terkel, just how boring of a subject can you pick - we have foreclosures and call kinds of good stuff - and you pick this???

Ok, that is my own "why I don't want to talk about it" excuse too.
But the fact of the matter is, we don't back up our data NEARLY enough, as a matter of fact, I am going to guess that only 1 in 10 who reads this, have some sort of back up in place, and of those, only a few will have automatic back ups and recovery plans.

Why is this important? Well, for one thing, computers do cost money, and even if you can buy one, what about all your "stuff"?

So, let's break this down a bit, we are primarily looking for data here. And there are different types, such as the pictures from last summers trip to Disney land, or the contract that just came back last night, via emal - not fax... and what about your .pst file? (Ah, yes, a what file?), the pst file is the file where Outlook stores your outlook data, contacts, email, calendar... You name it.
Note - if you are on exchange, don't worry too much about your pst, it will be backed up on the server - if this is absolute gibberish to you, you probably don't have exchange and you can disregard this part.

So, 3 kinds of data, lets recap:
Personal files - Want to keep them, but the business would not keel over if they were lost.
Business files - Major headache if lost.
System files - Allows you to keep operating on a different machine.

Great, now lets talk about the back up options, generally, we are working with 3 different options, a disc array (RAID) where you can do very safe back ups, generally, this is reserved for geeks and/or people with access to corporate serves - it can be done at home, but it is not something you will be picking up at Radioshack anytime soon.
Portable drives, most of the portable drives out there, are made for just this reason, so you can transfer data, or back it up. I am staring at a .5T FreeAgent from Seagate (a harddrive manufacturer), these days I think you can get a 1T for about $100 on sale. That is a LOT of storage and it will take you more than a week to fill the thing. I kinda like these things, I use it as a back up to my disc array - just in case... It is also easier to move around.
Finally - Online backups, most tech companies out where you buy a computer, will have some flavor of this as does Norton/Symantec and a few other companies. The biggest benefit to this is one thing - your back up is off site and the back up is being backed up on their servers - if you want redundancy, this is the way to go.

Ok, so let's recap this one.
Disk Array - steep geek factor.
Portable drive - easy peasy desktop solution.
Online backup - probably the most redundant and safe storage solution.

Frequency... This is the other big deal with backups. Backing up once a year is great, as long as the important file showed up 10 minutes prior to the back up. So you want ot back up, probably once a week, as a rule of thumb, you can configure your system to do it automatically and to only add files that have changed, so you don't have to do the whole thing over and over, most systems will also let automate the process, so thursday morning at 4 am, it is done while you are dreaming of 5 escrows opening later that morning.

Now, I think this is it. Please ask questions if you have them. We have plans for most everything out there, including the road inPalos Verdes falling into the ocean...

Now go get your data backed up - and I mean NOW.

Terkel