Easy Backup Solutions for the Home
Of course you should always have a good backup at work, with a fully comprehensive disaster recovery plan- if you don’t, call us and we can certainly help you with that.
But what about at home?
We’re here to bring you some tips about easy (and even FREE) ways to keep your data backed up in case of emergency or accidental deletion!
Concept 1: It’s not IF it fails, it’s WHEN!
You see a shiny new PC. We see a complex system of elecronics and moving parts with a rapidly increasing rate of failure with every day that passes.
If you don’t get anything else out of this article- get this.
EVERY HARD DRIVE THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE HAS OR WILL FAIL EVENTUALLY!
It’s the nature of their existance. It’s not their fault, and certainly they are more reliable and bigger than ever before. But with the advent of electronic storage for everything from documents and especially photos; preparedness is the mark of the successful!
The hard drive is a series of highly sensitive metal plates that store data while turning anywhere from 4000-15000 RPM- in some cases as long as your computer is on! That’s a lot of turning and a lot that can go wrong pretty easily. It’s a wonder we can store anything on these devices at all! But one-way membranes keep the platters dust and moisture free and they are manufactured with extremely rigorous clean room standards.
But all of that will not save them from years of heat, jolts and just wear from data being written and deleted millions of times.
So, at some point that you don’t ever know- your hard drive is going to fail. So what do you do?
One way to combat this is to have redundant drives in your computer- that way if one fails the other immediately picks up the slack. Ask us at TechSmart how this can be set up for you. But this still isn’t enough to truly protect you!
Concept 2: Life Happens
Fires, Floods, Theft- these are all things that happen to people that never dreamed of it happening to them. It may not happen to you, but then again fires don’t exactly tell you when they’re coming. Nor do thieves. You simply don’t know. There’s no way around it. The solution is to have an off-site backup of your data. We’ll discuss this more in a bit, but first you must understand concept 3…
Concept 3: CYA (or B)
Cover Your Butt is the nice way of saying it. It’s incredibly important to have a backup copy of your hard drive for when it fails. But you may be amazed to find that a shocking number of people that come into our office either have no plan at all or have a plan they aren’t following!
You need a backup solution that actually works with the way you do things.
For example, DJ will keep in his desk at work an external hard drive with a secured copy of his documents, photos and MP3 files. Securing these is a discussion for another time, but needless to say storing a hard drive at the office it wouldn’t be impossible for someone to walk away with it- so having a security solution on the device is important.
But here’s the problem; DJ’s recently been spending his evenings scanning all of his paper documents into secured PDF files and shredding the documents. To keep an up to date copy he would have to either carry the hard drive back and forth each night (which negates the purpose of having it offsite and causes wear and tear, not to mention an increased theft liability), or put it on a flash drive to sync at work ( a pain!).
Many customers have come in with bad hard drives and I ask them about their backup and they sigh and tell me that they haven’t updated their backup drive in months and need documents they created last week! This is the second problem with these solutions- they aren’t automatic, or aren’t automatic enough to be practical.
Concept 4: The Flash drive is for moving data, not storing it!
That brings us to the next concept- a wonder of technology called the flash drive. The flash drive is a small memory chip that attaches to your USB port and shows up as a drive in Windows. Many people use this as a backup solution… BUT THEY SHOULDN’T!!!
Studies show that the majority of flash drives will fail more rapidly than hard drives, and are much more likely to have memory corruption and loose files. In other words, their great for moving data from point A to point B, but NOT FOR BACKUPS!
The solution seems hopeless but we assure you it is not.
enter…
The Online Backup Solution
DJ has been using DropBox for several months now and loves it.
This solution is free for 2GB of storage and has a small application on your desktop that automatically keeps itself up to date with files you put in your ‘dropbox’ to syncronize online.
But it doesn’t end there- DropBox lets you access files thru a web browser from wherever you are (securely, of course) and even syncronize laptops or every PC in your house automatically (up to your storage limit).
DropBox also has a really cool undo function that keeps versions of your backup for 30 days (unlimited with the paid version). It’s also expandable with a paid subscription so that you can store more of your photos, whatever- without having to worry about keeping things up to date on an external hard drive.
And restoring files is easy- just install the application and put in your password and the application automatically restores your files to your DropBox.
DropBox does have one limitation in that in Vista, the file structure is different; photos and documents are kept in seperate folders (finally) but the DropBox has photos under documents.
What DJ does is uses a free utility from Microsoft called SyncToy that can automatically syncronize a set of folders to another. For DJ, this solves two problems- 1) His documents are about 1.4GB but at 12 MP, photos climb up to 3 GB a month (16 GB as of this writing). Obviously online backup would be expensive for this so a combination of solutions is used (SyncToy to both an internal and external drive one every week). 2) Only documents in certain folders change frequently enough that there’s concern about having an immediate backup, so this free solution works very well!
If you’d like some help setting up DropBox or any other online backup solution- give us a call- we can even use our remote support tool to be at your computer without having to visit your home!
Sooner or later, your hard drive is going to fail.
And now you’re out of excuses to have a reliable backup for when it does! Call us at 970-498-0808 to discuss the right option for you and to have us set it up right from your desktop!
