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The Need for a Backup Strategy
by Kevin J. Vella
Uniblue Systems
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 users.
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!
We usually advise customers to look at 5 key elements of any backup
strategy:
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
WinBackup 2.0 Standard
Awarded Best Backup Software by Computer Shopper and termed "exceptionally
simple to use" by PC World, WinBackup 2.0 Standard is now the obvious
choice for home and small office users. Being one of the most efficient
and reliable backup solutions available WinBackup 2.0 Standard
will help you save both time and money.
Buy
now or get
a free trial of Winbackup
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