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Maximizing Your Backup Strategy With a Disk Based Backup::
The need to protect your data has never been as important, there is no excuse not to...
So it finally happened…your hard drive bit the dust. It doesn't matter if you deleted it, formatted it, lightning struck your house, or you dropped it off the roof! The data is gone, so what do you do now?
The answer is easy, but I’ll bet you don’t have one. A backup of your data! Only 5% of PC users have one!
Why is it more important now you might ask? People these days keep data on there hard drives that is irreplaceable. Think about it, you might have business records, tax information, customer lists, email messages, personal information, the book you’re writing, all of your installed applications with there databases, and the list just keeps on going. Does the phase 'Don't Keep All your Eggs in One basket" ring a bell. Disks are getting larger 500GB is becoming fairly standard. Now just imagine one day, out of the blue that's all gone. You boot up to be greeted with the message “Insert boot disk” or “Drive failure”. This is a nightmare. Without a backup where would you start?
Again, the most important thing here is to make the backup!
There are three things you will need to make a backup. First you will need a backup media or target. We suggest using a hard drive mounted in a hot swappable mobile rack. Next, you will need a backup program. Modern computers usually have at least one controller with capability to connect 4 hard drives, if your main drive is 160GB and your backup drive is 250GB, mount the 250GB drive in a hot swappable mobile rack.
The Strategy, Media, and Software of making a backup.
The backup strategy is the most important aspect with new operating systems like Windows. These backup strategies vary from person to person and there in is the problem. In order to describe this new backup paradigm or the way we think about data backup, it is necessary to take a look at why we need to backup data and what about the data makes it require special backup considerations.
- Always have two backups, a short and long term backup.
- We recommend making Restore Points whenever any changes are made to the system. Any at all!
- Make a short term backup each week say Friday night at 3:00AM. A short term backup should consist of a full volume clone (Made once) and a differential volume copy of the changed data.
- Make a long tem backup each month or after making any system wide changes like installing service packs. A long term backup should consist of a full volume clone backup each time it is made, followed by a volume copy of data that may have been updated while the clone took place.
- Use Backup software that you do not have to babysit. We DO NOT recommend Images to DVD25 disks as this will cause you to be present at the backup.
- Make sure your backup software verifies the data as it's written. You don't need a backup that you can't use.
- It is very easy to ruin a perfectly good backup copy by bungling up the drive whilst testing. Most Windows installations will not allow you to have two working copies of Windows installed. As long as your backup program verifies that data DO NOT test the backup unless you need to use it!
| Did you Know: 6 out of 10 PC users suffer some type of data loss each year without any warning, 7 out of 10 businesses that suffer a data loss will go out of business, 1 out of 10 installed hard drives fail each year, a laptop is lost or stolen every 15 seconds, The average cost to recover lost data is $2700, and with all that said, only about 5% of users have backup of any of their hard drive. |
We recommend removable hard drives as a backup media because they are relatively cheep, very reliable, and fast. Today’s hard drives can be stored almost indefinitely without having the worry about loss of data. In addition, using a DMA-5 (SATA300) drive you can expect to backup 500GB of real data in about 40 minutes or less.
We of coarse recommend SyClone Wizard
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