After living through the tragedy of my friend Kristen’s computer crashing last week, the internal conversations at StoneHill ignited a list of questions. My brain is dominated by the right side and does not operate even a little bit in a logical let alone technical sense. I have worked with computers my whole life, but in the last two months I have learned more than I ever imagined being around my brilliant co-workers.
Unfortunately, I not only had to report back to Kristen that due to her lack of knowledge about cleaning her computer had led to the death of her hard drive, but also had to tell her that because she failed to back-up her data there is a very good chance that all of her research, work, and personal items may be lost forever. It seems backing up data is not only one of the most important components of maintaining your computer’s health, but also the most neglected. In the midst of this conversation that not only intrigued, but inspired me to write this, another one of my co-workers Zach Hart made the statement “If there is not a backup system in place it can costs 10’s of thousands of dollars with no guarantee that all the data will be recovered.”
It’s amazing to me how much we think we know, but don’t. Therefore I wanted to share with you some tips and resources to prevent any suffering to you personally or professionally from data loss. This information caused me to inquire about how to effectively back-up data from the individual station to your businesses network.
- Purchase a Zip Drive and back-up daily. Although this is the cheapest method it can be very time consuming and has limited memory.
- Purchase and external hard drive that you can back up to regularly. Christos recommends: Western Digital.
- Back-up online. This has become a very popular option where you rent virtual space to upload your data on.
StoneHill offers an affordable service to our clients called BDR; this system is recommended for small to medium sized businesses. BDR is very affordable and has many great functions including, but not limited to the following:
- Very frequent backups
- Optional off-site data storage
- Multiple restore points
- Standby server capabilities
- Advanced restoration options
With StoneHill’s BDR backups are performed as frequently as every 15 minutes, providing clients with numerous restoration points compared to traditional tape backups.
