Preparing for Disaster

You don't know how many times I've been told, "Hi, my system crashed ..." I know what's coming and brace myself for the words to follow - "Can you help me recover?"

Outwardly I smile and say, "sure", but inwardly I wince because I already know the answer to the next question, "Can I have your backup?"

"Backup?" they reply, confirming my fears.

Let me be very clear. Let no one miss this message. Prepare for disaster. Your system will crash someday (computers love to do that after you've spent twelve hours working on a report which you have not saved). You may get infected by a virus which wipes everything out. Or you may just do what I did once - spill a Diet Coke on your hard drive.

Make sure you have a backup of your data files. Anything that is important to you. Some people back up their entire system - personally I don't bother.

What I do is divide my system up into two partitions (a C drive and a D drive). One (the C drive) contains the system and applications and is not backed up. The other (the d drive) contains data and is backed up. (Actually, to tell you the truth I have twelve drives with data ... over 300gb, but that's a different story...)

How do you back up your system? You can get a tape drive, a zip drive (I wouldn't recommend one), a Kangaroo (a removable hard drive) or any number of other hardware solutions. If you don't have a huge amount of data you can ever get a Freedrive or Xdrive on the internet and backup that way.

Once you've got a place to backup your files to, you need to get some software ... many people just use the backup program that comes with their operating system. Some use Backup Exec or some other third party solution. 

Okay, you've got your hardware (a tape drive or whatever) and you've got your software ... now you must actually do your backups! You don't know how many people I've run into which forget this important fact! 

Do a full backup once in a while and an incremental (only the changes) in between. Make sure you occasionally store a copy of all of your previous data somewhere else (in a safe deposit box, for example) in case you have a real disaster and lose everything.

Oh yes. One other thing. The ideal thing to do is to also get a Freedrive and/or Xdrive ("disks" which you can access over the internet) and back up your very important or critical files more often. Not your whole set of data (these internet drives are a little slow (they are over the internet) and they are not very large (30mb to 100mb) - just your critical stuff that you would never want to loose.

One final note - be sure and TEST your backup. Once in a while go to your backup set and get some files. Look at them. Edit them. Why? Every once in a while someone comes to me to restore their system and surprises me - they've got a backup! We then start to restore only to discover that the backup was not working! Now that's the most frustrating thing in the world.

I hope this has been of assistance.