About Security:
Top Tips for Backing Up Your Data
One day, the beautiful photos of your precious memories, the music that is the soundtrack of your life, and the data that keeps your business humming will disappear. This disaster can be merely an annoyance, if you are prepared.
You hear about it from time to time - a friend tells you how he lost all the photos from the last holidays or you accidentally delete a document you have been working on for the last few days. You think to yourself - I have to do something about it, prevent this from happening to me. Usually, that is where it ends and nothing gets done. Until one day...
You get a call at work that your house burned down or was burglarised. Luckily, insurance will cover most of the losses, but it will not compensate for loss of your data. Money wouldn't solve that problem anyway. If you work from home, it is a double disaster. From a security perspective, your customers' personal details are all gone and are now at risk, only adding to a very stressful situation.
What are the most common reasons for data loss
If you are using a laptop computer, it's not that hard to imagine what can happen. Someone might steal your laptop or you may drop or misplace it somewhere. This is enough to lose everything you have been working on.
Most computers still do not use solid-state hard drives, meaning they are more prone to malfunctions, bad blocks, and in effect... data loss. Your hard drive might stop spinning one day, and you will have to pay a lot to get your data back. I mean a lot! We are talking hundreds to thousands of euro.
If you have small children at home who have easy access to your computer, it's a disaster in the making. Spills, impacts, power surges, air humidity, dust accumulation inside the computer and high temperatures are all possible causes of data loss. Do something about it while you can.
Online Backup Solution
With a broadband connection and the availability of cheap online storage, the smartest option is to backup your data online. You might think that paying 10 euro a month for such a service is crazy given that you will probably never need it. It feels different when you lose all your data.
If you are looking for a good backup solution with easy access and data retrieval, take a closer look at Dropbox. It's free for up to 2GB which should be enough to store important documents and some photos. You can upgrade to a Pro package with 50GB, which costs only 10 USD a month. It is very easy to configure on any platform - PCs, Macs and Linux machines can use it.
Another similar solution is box.net, which has 5GB of free storage (with a limitation of 25MB per file), but for a 15 USD a month you can upgrade it to a whooping 500GB. Box.net offers many additional functions.
There is an added benefit in using these services. You can easily share large files with the world. This is great if you want to send a large attachment to someone, but your email cannot handle it.
Jungle disk is another great service. Requiring little technical knowledge from the end user, they provide great solutions for storing your data, and allow you to use Amazon Web Services for data storage. A very robust solution, you only pay for what you use. On average, it is 15 cents for 1 GB of storage in addition to a JungleDisk fee of 4 USD per month. It is multi-platform and works like a local drive on your computer.
Other solutions
If you are not too keen about online solutions and would like something more physical... you can buy a nice RAID array and pack several hard drives as a redundancy precaution. This will cost you a lot more and you will need to find an offsite location with a broadband connection to store it remotely. There is not much benefit in having a backup next to your computer. It is fine for the situations when you accidentally delete your data or your hard drive breaks down, but it is useless against fire and robbery.
If you have a friend with a broadband connection and a lot of technical knowledge, you can arrange to exchange backups. This really should be an automatic process, where you connect an external drive to your computer that works as a remote backup drive for your friend, and he does the same for you. Due to the technical knowledge requirements of this solution, it may not be as effective as online storage.
Do you have some experience with data loss and retrieval? Do you know some great data backup services that are cost-effective?
