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What's Your Backup Strategy?
A backup strategy is not like an insurance policy. An insurance policy is something you buy just in case something goes wrong.
The brutal fact of the matter is that computers and software are prone to failure and that your systems will crash someday. On that day, will your data be ready to move to a new or repaired system?
We recommend a small start for our clients, and then expand on this as your needs grow. Here's the quickest way to set up a basic backup.
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go out and buy two (2) 120 GB external USB hard drives
(Seagate, Iomega, Maxtor, Western Digital... they're all good -- look for the longer warranty if you are unsure)
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label each drive separately with a big letter A on one and a big letter B on the other
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start with external drive A installed on your machine and external drive B stored at someone else's house, or in a fireproof safe
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install the software for the drives... this will typically include free backup software!
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get in the habit of saving all of your critical data in folders beneath a single folder
(i.e., C:\data or D:\data)
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setup the backup software to:
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backup this directory and all subdirectories
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backup all of the \MyDocuments\ folders for all users
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not "sync" data, but rather to continue adding content to the archive instead of deleting files that are no longer on your computer
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run the backup automatically at least twice a week
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let the backups run routinely --
this will ensure that local computer errors will not cause serious data problems
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every week, switch the backup drives A & B --
this will make sure that any serious physical catatrophe will still allow for good data from one week ago
If this schedule is not aggressive enough, we do the following for the next steps.
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increase the frequency of backups to daily
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increase the drive swapping to every other day
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increase the number of external drives to 3 by adding a HUGE drive labeled C with capabity >200GB
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use drive labeled C to archive off complete data backups in folders that are dated as follows: YYYY_MMDD (i.e. /2003_0113/)
For advice or assistance with setting up your backup routine, please contact us.
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