Why You Need Them

No it’s not because your data may be stolen it’s because you may commit the crime of not protecting it!

We all know the importance of a proper strategy for backing up our precious data and how this needs to be done to a regular schedule. Yet, how often do we forget or put off creating the backup until "a bit later". This then becomes days or even weeks and then along comes the PC crash, a powercut an OS glitch, a hard drive failure, the accidental overwriting of a file. Even with a good backup strategy properly implemented he worst of this is that it is often very difficult to tell exactly what you have lost until much later when you can’t find that precious photo or the resume that you spent a day carefully crafting.

Over the years I have had my share of disasters and lost files that can never be replaced. So I have learnt by tough experiences that not only must you have regular backups but you also need to put in place other strategies to minimise the damage. My day job over the past ten years has involved a great deal of desk based computer work. Writing technical/scientific reports, developing spreadsheets to analyse data, producing presentations and developing bids for new work. These all involve a lot of "original thinking". Bitter experience, combined with much racking of the brain, has taught me that once lost it is very difficult to remember those great ideas or clever sentences that seemed so good at the time. Therefore I have developed ways of saving and protecting as much as I possibly can with a variety of techniques and methods. Many of them overlap and create several backups of the same data in different places and at different times.

The plans and strategies I have developed are based on timeline and place shifting. The techniques and methods have changed as new products become available but the basic strategy remains the same. That is the storage of data by different methods for different time intervals combined with multiple copies in different places based on the importance of the data being protected and with as much scheduling or automation as possible. This is not a cast iron, military strength solution but a method that should be within the reach and pocket of many PC users. In catastrophic situations such as those described in the opening paragraph some data loss is inevitable it is a case of making sure that it is as little as possible.

How to Do It?

Over the next week or so I will write in some detail on the various methods I have adopted and the reasons behind them. To be clear, there is nothing new and groundbreaking in the methods or the tools used. What is proposed is simply a combination of different tools and strategies to minimise the risk of loosing data. As I consider the safeguarding of much of my data as highly important I use commercial (paid for) software and solutions, as well as freeware.

The 10 Ways or Steps are as follows:

1.  Identify Where the Data Is.

2.  Where to Store Your Original Data

3.  Where to Store Your Backups

4.  What to Store and For How Long

5.  Storing Long Term Backups

6.  Avoid Loosing Files

7.  Protect Information Just Created

8.  Backup Your Operating System

9.  How Will Data Be Restored

10. Future Planning

Each of these Steps will be the subject of a post so watch out for them. As the posts are published I will link the above steps to them.

Other Relevant Posts

Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications

TeraCopy – High Speed Copy and Move Files

SkyDrive – Increased to 5Gb Free Online Storage and out of Beta

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Hints & Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.