I'm curious - when was your last data backup? Do you have backups running automatically in the background, or is this something that you do manually? And what do you backup, exactly?
Do you know where your most recent backup is located... off the top of your head? If your computer crashed today, what kind of impact would that have on you - and on your business?
If your host 'hiccupped' and all of our site files went 'poof!' - how long would it take you to have your site(s) back up and running?
Just curious...
Technorati Tags: backup, data backup, back-up, computer crash, hardware failure, downtime, data recovery, hosting
About Lynn Terry
Hi Lynne
This is a very serious issue and having had a few disasters in the past, I know how important it is to have a back up. In my case I worked in recruitment and all those cv's and contacts are my life blood.
The reason for commenting here was it was the exact question I asked a client the other day, who was interested in buying our recruitment software. Like most people who work from home or a small business, he didn’t back up adequately or automatically.
What was ideal about our product was that the database was ASP based, so even if his office burnt down his data was safe. In fact he could pop into his local internet cafe and contact a candidate that evening if he wanted, rather than wait a few days for disaster recovery.
But this is fine for business, but I still do not have a backup for my personal documents. My plan was to have a separate hard drive independent of the PC like an IT friend of mine, but the other day I had a Eureka moment or should I say two things came together.
On http://www.techcrunch.com there was an article for http://www.omnidrive.com the article can be found at http://www.techcrunch.com/page/3/ which seems the perfect answer for our problems. What they are promoting is to put you’re data on the internet or should I say their servers, except the only issue is it isn’t due to be launched till September. So I have my fingers crossed that I do not wipe my hard drives before then!
Still I will watch these comments here for any other ideas from anyone else, but I am fairly convinced that having a virtual drive on the web is the safest option.
Hi Lynne,
I do backups every week, or more frequently if I add a lot of new data to the hard drive.
One of my smarter purchases was a portable hard drive last fall. It's 80G of space (same as my desktop hard drive), is not much larger than a deck of cards and has a built in USB connector.
I simply plug it in to the USB port on the front of my "box" and simply drag/drop everything over. It takes about 15 minutes tops, and I can toss the portable hard drive in my backpack and take it with me.
One other thing to make a note of is also backing up MySql databases on our hosting accounts. It takes just a few minutes to do, but can make a huge difference in the continuity of our business in case something should happen to happen on the host side.
We were on vacation a few weeks ago, and I did full backups before we left, taking the portable HD with me. It is incredible piece of mind.
Patty
I guess it would help if I could type. That should be "peace" of mind, not "piece" of mind.
LOL
Lynn,
Great topic, but one that people don't learn from until they lose their data, in most cases.
Here's my schedule, using Second Copy software, all backups going to a second drive on this PC, that's only used for backup:
1. Back up My Documents every day overnight (EVERYTHING I've got apart from software installs goes into My Docs), but ignoring my MP3 collection
2. Backup the MP3s once a week
3. Each night, a script runs on my main server backing up all databases, data folders, and a few other bits and pieces (like my cron schedule), and FTPs the resulting ZIP file to my PC (which then gets backed up to the second hard drive)
The only thing I'm missing is backing up of a few sites I've got hosted on other accounts.
Another thing I do every Friday is look at what I'm backing up, where it goes to, how often etc, and try to improve what I'm doing (eg, add those missing sites). That way, my backup schedule is being improved weekly.
Regards,
Andy
My site when "poof" about a week ago...had no backup done...however rebuilt the site in a few days... a real dam invconvience to start with but recovered from the downtime
Loosing all of your files seems to be awful. So I suggest doing a backup weekly. I prefer the backup running automatically in the background. So it eliminates the possibility of forgetting doing this act once.
I'm doing backups at least weekly to CDs and I've recently been trying out a newer online backup site called Mozy. You can get more info about Mozy at:
http://www.cashjunction.com/backup/
Been using it for about a month and a half now and it's a GREAT alternative "offsite" backup solution. You can backup 2GB FREE! GREAT way to try it out.
30GB = $4.95/mo
I just upgraded to the 30GB plan and I'm backing up daily. I checked out the restore process and it's pretty simple & WORKS fine. I LIKE that! Hope I don't have to use it, though. LOLOL
I'm also gonna try the Acronis Home True Image v9.0 backup software this week as I've gotten alot of recommendations for it. Info at:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
But .... Bottom line is to have some sort of backup plan in place. It's not a matter of "IF", it's a matter of 'WHEN" it happens.
My nickel anyway ...
Rick Wilson aka CorpRebel 😉