Planning for Computer Recovery - Ignorance or Bliss

Planning for Computer Recovery - Ignorance or Bliss
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Blue_Melnick]Blue Melnick

“70 per cent of small businesses go belly up within a year of suffering a major loss of data.” - Joanna Pachner, Globe and Mail, May 16, 2007

Deep down, you know that regular computer backup is the responsible and prudent action that could one day save your business from the utter chaos of a major data loss. You know this. But even so, you put off getting a reliable computer backup system in place and continue to cross your fingers, hoping for the best. All the while, with each passing day you store more and more of your business’ critical information on your computer’s vulnerable hard drive.

When it comes to planning for data recovery, ignorance is the opposite of bliss. Let’s take a closer look at how you’re neglecting your computer backup and then at a few simple strategies for protecting the future of your business.

How You’re Neglecting Your Computer Backup

You use a computer every day to organize, grow and operate your business, but you can’t remember the last time you made a backup of the information stored on your computer.

You don’t know how to perform a backup, but you have an IT guy that you think backs up your computer from time to time. You’re not sure how often he does the backup, and you’re not sure what happens to the backup once he’s completed it. Does he take it home? Does it get transferred to another external hard drive in your office? No, he leaves the backup CD on top of the computer, so that when your office is robbed, the CD is stolen with the computer. (Repeat outcome for fire and flooding.)

You or your IT person perform a backup of your computer system on the first day of every month and store it safely offsite. If your computer crashes on the last day of the previous month, having to recreate 30 or 31 days of hard work would be a complete nightmare, but so far you’ve been lucky.

Your assistant backs up all of your computers every Friday afternoon to CDs, which she then puts into her purse to take home. The information is unencrypted, but she’s been with you for years and she’s practically part of the family. On her way home, she stops at the grocery store to pick up a few things, and as she’s loading her purchases into her trunk her purse is stolen from the front of her shopping cart. As she already has her car keys in hand to open the trunk, she doesn’t even realize that her purse is missing until she arrives home. Now your private information (and the private information of your client base) is available to complete strangers, who also happen to be criminals.

How You Can Act Now to Protect Your Business

Recognize that your time is a non-renewable resource, and therefore the time spent working on your computer is extremely valuable. Protect that investment by backing up your computer every day.

Ask yourself: how much time do I spend working on my computer every day? Is it 4 hours, 6 hours, or perhaps even 8-10 hours? How would you feel if your computer crashed and you lost an entire day’s worth of progress? How about a week’s or a month’s worth of progress? If these are unacceptable scenarios for your business, you need to get serious about computer backup and recovery.

Train a second and third person to perform a complete backup. This way, if you are out of the office for any reason, two other people can step in to backup your computers.

Personally store a copy of your recent backup offsite, in a secure location like a safety deposit box. If your IT person is copying your backup to an external drive that resides in your office, have them also make a CD version that you can take offsite.

The best way to ensure that your computer backup is completed every day, encrypted, and securely stored offsite, is to use a reputable online data backup and recovery service to automatically backup and securely store your information. These services are inexpensive, reliable and managed by digital storage experts.


When you’re planning the future of your business, don’t neglect the importance of daily, offsite computer backup. Because being able to recover all of your information after a frightening computer crash or theft is pure business bliss.

Copyright 2007 - Blue Melnick. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, and include the following byline:

Blue Melnick is the Co-Founder and Lead Storage Specialist of Virtual Tape Drive Canada. Blue invites you to contact him through [http://vtdcanada.com/]www.vtdcanada.com or by phone at 416-462-3323. Not sure if online data backup is right for you? Why not sign up for [http://bizlinknews.com/]Biz Link News—Blue’s free monthly ezine—to learn more about how this new technology can “save” your business?

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Is Data Backup Worth the Hassle?

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=James_Walsh]James Walsh

Over the years, individuals tend to accumulate a huge amount of data, mainly text files, family pictures and emails. Corporate companies generate even more data, including everything from customer records, research results, financial statements, architectural drawings to other intellectual property.

The value of this data cannot be underestimated. It can be worth its weight in gold and more for many companies. Some data just cannot be replaced. Who can bring back lost digital photos of the first steps of your baby? How can the loss of archival records of the last four decades be compensated? It is not possible.

Most of the data is usually stored on computer hard disks that can accommodate a whole lot of information. Commonly available hard disks have the capacity of 160 GB, though if one really needs them, those having a staggering capacity of one terabytes are also available in the market.

Manufacturers take great care to make their hard disks as reliable and sturdy as possible. However, they still represent a very complex piece of machinery and there are many things that can go wrong.

Hardware and Software Failures: Hard disks are not as reliable as they are assumed to be. They are very sophisticated pieces of engineering that can go kaput for a variety of reasons. They may stop working due to hardware failures like a malfunction in controller card, circuit board or spindle motor. Additionally, the read / write head, that is suspended less than a hair’s breadth over the platters, may come crashing down. Then there are software errors like deleted partitions, corrupted system files and virus attacks.

Disasters: Many companies are struck by natural or man-made disasters every year like fire, flood, storms, lightning strike or even a terrorist attack. When this happens, the computers are damaged quite badly and the work of the entire organisation comes to a grinding halt. They face tremendous losses as employees sit idle, work piles up and data recovery companies start their painstaking work on damaged hard disks.

On-site Data Backup

On-site backups are the most common way of storing data for companies as well as individuals.

CDs: The capacity of compact discs is not much – just about 700 MB – but they are great for storing text and picture files. Rewritable CDs make an ideal choice to take daily data backups if your data needs are not huge.

DVDs: These are the bigger cousins of CDs. They can hold up to 4.7 GB of data. This is a very good capacity for individuals to hold their critical data. DVDs are rewritable and their cost has crashed.

Tape Drives: Most organisations today hold their archives and daily backup in tape drives. These are quite inexpensive, can be used again and again, last for a very long time and commonly have a capacity of up to 20 GB.

Portable Hard Disk Drives: These are stand-alone drives that have recently been introduced as a viable backup media. They normally have a capacity of 160 GB and come with software that takes automatic backups at periodic intervals.

Remote Data Backup

On-site backups have one flaw – they do not protect data against disasters like fire, floods, storms and earthquakes in which the whole office building may get destroyed. Usually, on-site backup media is stored inside the same office and when the entire building is devastated by a disaster, original data residing in the computers as well as its backup, both are lost.

That is why many vendors have started offering remote backups. In this, the data stored on your computers is sent every evening by wires to remote servers of the service provider for safe-keeping. This backup data can be accessed only by the client through a secure password.

Data Recovery is Expensive

Data backups, though they look like a hassle and a waste of money, can be life-savers. Indeed, according to statistics, one out of four companies that lost all their data, goes belly up in the next few years. It is difficult for most companies to get back on track after they have been hit by a data disaster.

Data recovery is an expensive proposition. The cost of extracting gigabytes or terabytes of data from damaged hard disks can burn a large hole in a company’s pocket. And then, too, there no surety that all the data can be successfully recovered. Data backup is like insurance – it seems a burden in ordinary times but is great to have in an emergency.

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk

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Backup Your Data! It Could Mean The Difference Between Business Success And Business Failure

Backup Your Data! It Could Mean The Difference Between Business Success And Business Failure
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Paul_Melland]Paul Melland

Here at Prime PC & Networking Services, we have found that backing up data is one of the most common mistakes small businesses make when it comes to their computers and computer networks. Not because the data backups get done incorrectly, but because they aren't done at all. A lot of the Value of a small business is stored on the computers that the business uses. Think about it: customer lists, inventory database, proprietary software, the business's books. Close your eyes and imagine how you would continue business as usual if someone came in over the weekend and stole every computer in your workplace? Or your building burns down. Or a tornado takes everything to Oz. Get the picture?

Determining your Backup Strategy is very straight forward and by answering a few questions you will be half-way there.

What data (computer files or programs) do you need to run your business?

Make a list of and the location of all computer files that you will need in case of a disaster.

Most of the time these files are spread throughout the various computers in a small business.

Attempt to consolidate these files in as few locations on the computers as possible. This will make the actual act of backing up less complicated.

Decide how often you need to backup your data. Monthly, weekly, daily? I used to work for an organization that backed up their data the instant anything was written to their servers. The backups were on live servers in a far away place, which allowed the business to continue operations within hours in case the something terrible happened to their building. The frequency of your backups should be related to how much new data is written to your systems each day and how crippled your operation would be if you lost a day's, week's, month's worth of this information.
Decide the method of backing up. Something as simple as burning a CD with the mission critical data works for some. Others need sophisticated systems such as external tape drives backing up on a two week rotation, with the tapes stored off-site (sometimes simply in a fire-proof safe in an employees closet at home).

Finally, Just Do It! And keep a log that shows the date, time, success of backup, and the person logging the information. It is also recommended that a backup is restored and tested on a regular basis to make sure a backup is actually taking place.

The Boy Scouts of America had it right when they picked the Scout Motto: "Be Prepared"

Paul A. Melland, CNA, has over 5 years of experience working with small businesses and their technology needs.

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Why Use an External Backup System

Why Use an External Backup System
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Terry_Fitzroy]Terry Fitzroy

When it comes to backing up your data and ensuring it remains safe, you have plenty of options at your disposal. Some options are clearly better than others, and when it comes to the debate about external backups vs. internal backups, for many external wins hands down. Here's why you should use an external backup system.

Your external backup system can be done with many different devices. CD's, tape backups, key drives, and online backups are all forms of external backup systems, but tape backups are definitely the most popular external backup especially if your business needs to backup large volumes of data that would otherwise require a lot of storage space. Tapes are relatively small and can be stored offsite with only a small amount of space available.

External backups offer a key element that other backup systems may not, it is off premises, which can be the difference between recovery after a disaster and the end of your business. In a nutshell it can be the difference between survival and failure.

Your tape backup allows you to backup all of your data and then you remove the tape from the tape backup and take the tape off site for storage making it a great option. You get a full backup and you store it safely offsite with little hassle. Off site means that should there be a disaster you will be able to get your company up and running quickly, and when disaster strikes often the company that gets back into business first is the one that succeeds. Research has shown that those that open later are 50% more likely to fail even if they were a successful business prior to the disaster.

When an internal backup is done it is often simply a secondary hard drive that's installed on to the system. There's no question that this is simple and convenient, however, should the system crash your data retrieval may be jeopardized and in the event of a disaster that wipes out your business space you won't have a backup to pickup the pieces and carry on. The same goes for those that store tapes onsite.

An internal backup is usually a secondary hard drive. You can quickly and easily copy your data from your main drive to your internal secondary drive. That means for those small human errors you can quickly retrieve your data.

Tape backups aren't error proof. They certainly offer you some excellent benefits but when it comes down to reliability tape backups are known for being finicky and they must be run on a compatible machine. In fact many times the machine they are recorded on is the only machine they will run on.

Recently another external option has become available. Online backups give you the convenience of being able to schedule backups that are completely automated service or you can create backups on the fly whenever you need whether it's a big problem or a small one. Perhaps you are installing some new software and want a backup just before the install. How convenient!

Now that you know why an external backup system is best and what some of your options are, you're ready to choose.

Terry Fitzroy is a [http://www.exabyte.com]computer data storage, [http://www.exabyte.com]tape backup drives, and [http://www.exabyte.com]autoloader drive professional writer.

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