Recent happenings at our company have prompted me to write this installment. Two of us have had computer problems which required a change in hardware. In other words, computers have died. Over the years we have developed methods of backing up our personal and corporate data that reduce the anxiety of losing data. I thought I would share some things you can do to avoid problems with your information.

There are stories everywhere regarding the loss of computer files. Suffice to say at any time your hard drive can crash. This will happen without warning at the worst possible time. What can be done to protect you from the inevitable? The answer is easy, back up. The process is more difficult, but I have been through all available processes and will demystify the process.

Most of our customers use a laptop computer. Sometimes it is the only place that data is stored. We know this because several times a month we get a request to resend project files. This is due to the loss of data on a laptop, or the fact that the office never received the files and wants another place to keep them safe. As mentioned before, all hard drives will fail. If you own a laptop your chances increase exponentially. The reason is the fact that a laptop gets banged around in addition to the environment it needs to work in. Dust, moisture, and shock are enemies of a hard drive. This makes the necessity of data backup even more critical.

Experience has taught us that to be secure, data must be saved in at least two different physical locations. The easiest way to do this is back up to a portable hard drive and keep it in a different place than your desktop. You are only as secure as your last backup. The frequency is up to you, daily is recommended, weekly is more practical. The question you need to ask yourself is how long will it take to reproduce what I lost since I last backed up these files?  The easy answer is daily, so you need to find a way to perform daily backups of your data.

The easiest way to perform daily backups on your computer is to have a remote hard drive and online backup. A search for online backup sites yields hundreds of good hits. Look over some of them and pick one to be your online solution. Do not rely on this as your only source. It is also advisable to have a portable hard drive stored in a fireproof box also. You will need a special fire proof box for hard drives. They fail at lower temperatures than paper. A regular fireproof safe gets too hot to protect hard drives and all other electronic media.

Armed with all this information, here is a practical way to make sure you are safe with your data. Get an online backup service. They will check and update any file changes every time you connect to the internet. Laptop users, this means you need to connect to the internet at night when you get in from the field. Next get a fireproof storage box for a portable hard drive and a portable back up hard drive. Install a program for backing up your data. Many of these portable back up disks come with software you can install making it even easier.  Every week do a backup to the hard drive and put it back in the fireproof box. For this application you are not as worried about theft as you are fire.

If you have any questions or need recommendations for hardware or software drop me a line. Just make sure you do something. If you don’t think you need to back up. Just try to get through a day without turning on your computer.