Backup Tips

Who hasn't lost data in a hard drive crash or through some other hazard of technology? There are many ways to backup your data these days, and so many reasons (family photos, financial files, etc.) to make sure you have backups in place.Carbonite was recently discussed among my entrepreneur friends as a great online service, although I haven't used it myself.
If you are averse to leasing things that you can own, as I am, you can buy your own device, hook it up to your router, and schedule a nightly backup using any of a number of free programs. It puts the onus on you to manage the backups, but pays for itself in 2-3 years of payments to an online backup service. We have a Buffalo LinkStation drive, and use free GFI Backup software. I recently priced a Buffalo backup device with 1 TB of storage on amazon.com for $139.

Regardless of the route you choose, keep in mind:

• Even the best backup device can go bad. A backup is only a backup if the data exists in two places. Moving your data to the device instead of copying it is no better than leaving it on your hard drive without backing up. (I'm sure that online services mirror/backup their own servers since it is their business, so this is less critical if using a service.)
• The backup is only as good as the setup. If you don't include the right files and directories, you're out of luck. Different applications save data in different places on your hard drive, so if you have questions about this, it is best to have someone technical help with setup.
• Setup email confirmations in your backup software, and read them when you receive them each morning! I see it happen far too often that, when you need a backup, you discover that the job stopped working 3 days/weeks/months ago, and no one noticed. The backup services likely monitor this for you.
• Make sure you know how to recover files so you aren't scrambling when you need them. After setup and periodically from then on, rename a file and restore from backup to make sure that things are working as expected and that you know/remember how to restore. There's nothing worse than being up against a deadline and losing valuable time because of a technical problem. Being comfortable with your backup and restore procedures can help!