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Why Should you backup?
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Data is the lifeblood of
your company
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Mail, Databases
(SQL Server, Exchange, etc), Records, Invoices,
Presentations, Contracts, etc: everything is ‘data’
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The amount of data created
by the average user/company is increasing exponentially.
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The loss of revenue for each hour of
downtime varies from industry to industry
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What’s your cost of downtime? |
What should
you backup?
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Think data: data that is
proprietary to you / your company and cannot be replaced,
eg.
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E-Mail, Databases
(SQL Server, Exchange, etc), Customer Records,
Invoices & other Financial Data, Presentations,
Collateral, Contracts, Pictures, Drawings, Your
Bookmarks, Your Desktop, Your Appointments, Contacts,
To Do list in Outlook, Files you’ve synchronized
from your mobile phone to your PC, Your ‘My
Documents’ folder………
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What needn’t you
back up?
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Anything that’s
easily replaceable! Installed software, typically
your Operating system and applications –
are replaceable! They’re available on a
CD for download, and with the license keys, you
can get them up and running quickly. So you needn’t
spend time, effort & money backing this up.
Maybe it’s a good idea to store all your
license keys in a simple text/xls file and back
that up, though
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How should you backup?
For starters, any backup is better than no backup. But if
you’re planning to start off safeguarding your data, you might
as well do it right. Typical options are:
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Back up to removable
media (CD/DVD/USB)
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While this
might work for really small amounts of data, it
is not automatic (relies on human intervention).
Typically, you take a full backup each time (not
just the changes), and most importantly, the data
is still on-site. In case of a disaster, your
backups are of little help!
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Back up to tape
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Enough has
been written about the pitfalls of tape backups
– from people running into burning buildings to
recover tapes they never bothered sending offsite
to stolen tapes with credit card details to tape
deterioration that was discovered when a customer
needed to restore his data. Besides, tape restores
are cumbersome and require sys admin intervention
even if all you want is to restore a single file
before that meeting in the afternoon.
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Back up to an on-site machine
(backup server)
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Certainly an
improvement! As long as you have the right software,
you should be able to backup automatically, incrementally
and securely, and restore painlessly and quickly.
But bear in mind that your data is still ‘on-site’.
In case of a natural disaster / calamity / theft
/ vandalism, that’s of no help unless you’re replicating
your data to a remote server…
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Back up to a remote server (online backup)
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The safest
of the lot since your data is off-site and there
is a online backup service provider focused on
facilitating your backup & restore operations.
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