Several posts ago I wrote an article called, Web Design IS Multimedia. This post carries on the same theme. You often hear about computer security in terms of virus protection or keeping someone from “hacking” into your computer or network.

You often hear about insurance in terms of protection and recovering from the loss of expensive equipment. The target audience for this blog is the small business or organization so I can understand how your basic home user might be a little less concerned but still annoyed by losing emails, photos and other stuff.

To the small business owner or organization leader/worker I often say two things. No amount of insurance you buy will bring back your lost data and the greatest security threat to compromising your data is often yourself. I’m not saying that to point a finger at anyone as the first person I am aware of these dangers is myself! I’ve lost count the # of times I hit “delete” by mistake or altered a file and forgot the original state. Nothing is more scary. Scary of course from a personal standpoint but when one has information clients depend on for their business it ceases to be a minor personal annoyance and it now a matter of business continuity and reputation.

We are serious about backups in our business. We do not depend on just one backup but quite a few and are exploring more and better methods and needs warrant. What do we use?

• Frequent incremental backups on external hard drives - I use Time Machine on OSX Leopard
• archiving client files to removable media and stored in a safe place - CD’s, DVD’s, flash drives, etc.
• clone backups of the hard drives on our machines - I use a Mac program called Super Duper.
• Remote backups of current and critical projects (especially client data) - currently trying a remote service and software called Jungle Disk. - So far very satisfied. Jungle Disk is also support on Linux and Windows.

The main computers we use in our business are Macs but you will find similar or exact solutions on other platforms. I’m also looking at getting a Drobo in the near future for even greater data protection for my local backups. We have a local company that also does remote backup called Servosity you should really look into if you are a small, medium or Enterprise business. They are many other remote backup solutions out there as well. I stress remote backups because if your home or office was destroyed in a fire, flood or other disaster any local backups would probably be lost as well. All prices I have seen for local storage, backup software and remote services are an extreme bargain compared to the losses you would never be able to recover.

What are some of the solutions you have used in your home or business? What stories can you share about how backing up your data saved your business or how loosing your data brought you trouble?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Organization, Security, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.