The Importance of Backing Up Your Data

The single most important task of each day or week is to back up your data files.

Why make a backup?

Backing up your files provides insurance that you will be able to restore your work if the original data should be lost. Hardware failure is the main cause for loss of data, and is often a matter of when it happens – not if it happens!

What should I Backup?

Backing up an entire hard disk is time consuming and often not practical to perform on a regular basis. (Although entire systems can be backed up to enable continuous operation during a Hard Drive failure on an integral system.) With a normal backup, there are three categories of data that should be backed up. These are your documents, e-mails (and address book) and internet links (Bookmarks and Favourites).

Documents may include word processing files, spreadsheets, databases and presentations (such as PowerPoint). It is strongly recommended that all your documents are stored in a single folder (eg “My Documents”). It is important to know where you have stored documents so they are easy to locate and backup. E-mail data and internet links may be stored in different folders depending on your operating system.

When should I Backup?

You need to ask a few questions before you can determine the frequency of your backup.

• How many files do I work with?

• How often do I make changes or create new files?

• How important is this data?

• How would it affect me if I lost today’s files, last week’s files or last month’s files?

The key is to determine a schedule such that it will not be too difficult to recreate or update your data from your last backup. For example, if you work with a database that is updated daily, then you should backup daily. On the other hand, if you type only a few papers each month, it is acceptable to back up at the end of each month. There are many software programs that can automatically schedule backups to occur to ensure peace of mind. And you can schedule backups during office downtime. This guarantees you will not miss that all important backup. (Remember Murphy!)

Note: Always do an EXTRA BACKUP before performing any maintenance tasks or software changes to your system.

How should you backup?

There are a few ways to back up your data. Your choice depends on your budget, the size of the data you are backing up and your preferred method of storage. Note that for a lot of people, a combination of these techniques are frequently used, and recommended. With the price of hard drives in today’s market, you can opt for a RAID option in combination with another form of backup.

This provides you both real time and offline options. It is also recommended that you test your backups regularly, to ensure you do have your data if and when you need it most.

Coral Computers Pty Ltd can recommend a backup solution for your particular requirements. Call us on (02) 9870 7777 to discuss your typical daily routines so we can determine the solution that is best for you.

Type of Backup Data	Size	Comments
Zip Disk	100-750MB	Zip disks are fantastic for drag and drop methods of backing up. They are also good for sharing data between machines that have Zip drives.
Recordable CD	700MB	With fast recordable CDRW’s you can create CDs in under 5 minutes.
DVD-R/RW	4.7-9.6GB	Great for large data that cannot fit onto CDRW’s.
Tape Drive	5GB-40GB	Important if you have a vast volume of data to back up.
RAID	80-200GB	RAID copies the entire contents of the drive, and provides a real time data cloning environment. However, this is not an offsite backup, and only protects you from hardware failure, not theft, fire or any other unforeseen event where the computer is lost or damaged.

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