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Backup Solutions |
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People and organizations are creating and saving vast amounts of data on a microsecond by microsecond basis. It is all vulnerable, so a single backup system in a single geographic area might be risky. Let's give an example. Suppose you were the IT director of a small service company that had 1200 customers and your treasure was contained in the customer records. It might be Widget Services Ltd. If you lost your records, the company would most likely fail. What do you do? The traditional solution was to backup your data incrementally on site every day, so that you were at risk for at most for one day of transactions. But what about natural disaster and everything failed including your backup device? Your business might be fried too just because of a massive 'bouncy' power failure. New solutions are emerging. We've all heard about backup solutions online and they are growing all the time. Just Google 'backup online' and you'll see. You incrementally backup your data over the Internet daily. You control the amount of time to do so because you are dealing with only the changed data. This is good and will work, but what about having to restore all your data? You have to realize that it will take a long time. Now what about the family? Do you back up the family pictures/music/family movies? If not, you are apt to lose them. A couple of solutions are now attractive. You can buy for less than $100 a fit in the palm of your hand backup device with up to one gigabyte of storage and more. This device can travel with you and your laptop. This is a good solution for the serious PC user. Keep in mind, it's not just pictures, but tax data too.
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Another solution is to STOP using mail services like Outlook Express and
switch to either Hotmail by Microsoft and/or Gmail by Google. They
offer what they term 'lifetime' storage for your email. If you
send your family pictures or music to yourself and using that as a means
of backing up your treasures, you will exhaust your storage pretty fast,
but you can purchase more from them. This is a crude way of
protecting your records.
The future of the net resides in what the industry now calls 'Cloud
Computing' where the PC applications migrate to the Cloud above
the net and your data is stored remotely in multiple geographic areas
with redundancy. The transition from the Desktop to the Cloud will
take quite a while, but both Microsoft and Google are working hard to
figure out both the technical side and how to charge for the the new way
of doing things. It should be interesting.
In the meantime you need to protect and save your data. The best
suggestion that we can give is to go to your local computer store,
Staples or Wal-Mart and buy a small backup device that is powered by
your USB port on your computer.
This last item is important. Up until recently all these external
drives had a separate power supply. Look around and you'll see
them in that tangle on the floor. They consist of those black
transformers and a separate power cord.
Forget those and buy a device that gets its power and data from the USB
port. This not only makes your working area more tidy and less of
a snarl of power cords going to your power bar, it is also safer because
your PC is acting like a big and expensive fuse. Don't
forget to get a really good power bar that can protect your PC from
those ugly power surges and bounces that we get in Bruce County and
other places.
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