Posts Tagged ‘remote backup’

Are you Committed to protect your data? Part 2:

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

In our previous post, we listed the 3 primary options for data backup:

In this post, we will tackle the much more difficult issue of selecting the right method for your situation.

 

If you have limited technical experience, I recommend you engage a data protection professional (an IT professional with advanced knowledge in data protection you can learn more in a coming post on this subject) Who can assess your needs, recommend a solution, and possibly help with implementation.  An hour or two to complete this work is money well spent.

 

Questions you should ask when evaluating backup solutions:  If we skip the cost for a moment, please consider the following;

  1. How much UNIQUE data do you have? Is it under 1Tb or more?
  2. Do you know how to take an “inventory of your UNIQUE data”?
  3. Is all your data in one location?
    1. Is it one centralized storage (like a server)
    2. Is it distributed on several networked devices in one building?
  4. Your comfort zone with file storage structures, and network storage.
  • If your comfort zone is minimal, you are better off using as simple a solution as possible like the “clickfree” external backup device like http://tinyurl.com/yaywrr9

Note:  you should have more than one unit to use alternately.

  • If you are ready to deal with network and remote locations,  a whole new set of option are available.
  1. How often does your UNIQUE data change?  You are going to have to backup often enough so as not to loose too much newer data between backups should a crash occur before your next scheduled backup.

 Look for our next post, part 3 on this very important subject.

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Are you committed to protect your data, and want to know how? Part 1

Friday, May 14th, 2010

We at Cherry Systems, are asked daily by individual, small business and mid-size clients, “What should I do in the future so this will not happen again?”  The simple and easy one word answer is BACKUP.   It could be equated to another recurring question people ask, “What is the healthiest diet?” A one word answer to this one is VITAMINS. To continue the analogy of backup-vitamin, both require variety and frequency.

 The three primary backup methods to consider:

  1. Personal backup device (external drive, Thumbdrive, One-Click-Backup-device)
  2. On-premise network storage media (shared drive on one of the systems, or a NAS device on the local area network)
  3. Remote backup service:
    1. Remote shared drive like Jungle disk ,
    2. Remote backup unmanaged like Mozy ,Carbonite,
    3. Remote managed backup like Barracuda Networks 

 The costs:

1. At least $10-20 per month if you just have pictures and music and some odds-and-ends.

2. At least $35-55 per month if you have a small business.

Be careful with relying primarily on cost to make your decision.  As with other things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Either solution you pick you will have to; 

  1. Make sure you know how to do a partial restore.
  2. Test it at least once a year, and when you make a significant configuration change to your computing environment.
  3. Reassess for data growth, don’t hesitate to find a proper replacement, see all the notes which apply to your new computing environment above.
  4. Perform a data inventory as frequent as you can, but no less then quarterly.  Compare it to the previous one.  Than ask yourself why is there a difference, can you explain what could have caused the increase or decline.

Review our next post on selecting the right backup method for your situation.

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