It always hard to get people interested in backups. Which is a shame - because the alternative is that they will instead have to become experts in data recovery. Or at least they have to pay an expert a lot of money to recover their data.
You see, there are two types of people in the world. Those who have lost data - and those who are going to.
There are ways to minimise your risk, but it's something you need to pay some attention to sooner rather than later. In my job, I see people almost daily who have lost digital family photos, customer records, MYOB & Quickbooks data, PhD Theses and even audio recordings of loved ones who have passed on.
Losing data is painful - and in the case of business - sometimes catastrophic.
And yet it's so very easy to automate backups so that once they're setup, they'll run indefinitely and you won't need to spend any more time on it.
So here's a few easy options:
1. Burn a CD or DVD - Burners and Blank Disks are cheap and XP onwards has burning built-in but this is a low capacity, manual process.
2. USB Thumb Drives - Capacity is starting to grow with 32/64gb now available, but they're easily lost and broken.
3. External Hard Drives - huge capacity, inexpensive and can be automated, but the data remains on site.
4. Over-the-Internet Backups - cheap, fast and off site. The best and most reliable option by far.
If you've already got an external hard drive, but you're not yet doing automated backups - take a look at Syncback. It's free and lets you set up a schedule to make a copy of your PC hard drive. But keep in mind this won't save you if there's a fire as the backups will burn with the PCs. We do have a solution for fire - we're now selling ioSafe fireproof and water proof external hard drives. They're awesome. They're not as cheap as standard external drives - but think how safe your data will be! Contact us for more info.
Of course there are many other options, but these are easy.
If you have larger backup requirements, get in touch as we have some brilliant and cost-effective strategies for small & medium business.
