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Issue #48 | February 11, 2010
| office: 817.210.6177
Backing up is the Best Bet...
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Backups. The business of backups is a hard sell. It's difficult to budget money for something that you never plan on using. Furthermore, the true value of a good backup isn't obvious until you need one when you don't have one. Yeah, then you get it, but then it's too late. I'd bet there is at least one or two folders full of pictures or documents that you'd pay $1500 for. It's a safe bet because I've seen it happen several times lately. The cost for retrieving data from a "dead" hard drive, if even possible, ranges from $1500 to $3000. That could be the start of a very bad day. And it will happen to you. The painful suspense isn't in wondering if it will fail but rather when it will fail. Reports say that some 13% of hard drives fail in the first year. That's more than 1 out of 10. If the last six computers you bought didn't fail then odds are you've got it coming soon. That’s just the beginning, more than 43% of people have admitted to accidentally deleting important files. Scared yet? Only 3 in every 100 stolen laptops are ever returned. After you figure in fire, flood and lightning damage it's a wonder any data ever survives.
There is however a fairly simple solution. Backup your data. Even the stuff that only seems marginally important now is far more valuable when it’s gone. A good backup should provide a method of retrieving data in the event of equipment failure, accidental deletion, equipment theft, and structural damage. The first two are easy, simply copying your files to an external hard drive, thumb drive or DVD will provide adequate coverage there. The second two are a little more complicated. If a thief grabs your computer, odds are that he’ll grab the backup hard drive sitting on top of it. Fires and floods also have a non-discriminatory habit of destroying backup drives. The best bet is to get your backup, or at least a copy thereof, offsite. This can be accomplished by either having two external hard drives to swap between using and storing off-site or by using internet based backups.
HP makes an excellent, inexpensive, simple-to-use backup drive that is all but automatic. You can find the HP SimpleSave drives at BestBuy for as little as $79 for a 320GB drive. Open the box and plug it into your computer, there, backup done. The SimpleSave drive will automatically start its own software and grab all important files in nearly two dozen categories. Unplug it, store it off-site and repeat as necessary. For the truly automated off-site backup, Carbonite will backup unlimited files in their storage bunkers for as little as $55 a year. The online backups do have one fault though, if you have tons of multimedia ranging into the hundreds of gigabytes, it will take weeks to backup. Even worse, it’ll take far longer to retrieve them after a system failure. To accomplish a near bullet-proof backup you could easily combine both backups into a very thorough system for around $130. That’s a small price to keep you from spending $3000 in hopes that they find something on that fried hard drive.
Final Byte...
"Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools."
~Gene Brown
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