Its that time of year. The leaves are changing, kids are back in school. The air is getting colder. So, what’s your computer’s backup looking like?
No, seriously. Apple and other companies have introduced the concept of a lights-out backup solution so you set it and forget it. The problem is we’ve all forgotten our backups and whether or not they’re working as intended.
I myself have ignored the little icons and notices on my own computer from time to time. It’s not a completely trivial task to make sure you have a fully active and working backup, but it is one of the more important things you can do on a computer these days.
A few recommendations for your computer’s backup solution are as simple as 1, 2, 3.
1. Make sure you have a backup disk that is at-least twice the size of your current computer’s hard drive. This will give you room to have a full backup, and depending on your backup solutions software it could maintain a change log style backup with updated files over time.
2. Make sure you have more than one backup disk, if possible. As the saying goes, ‘Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket’ you shouldn’t have just one place for your backup. Having multiple copies of some backups might sound complicated to keep in order, but you’ll be better off if one of your backups failed or became corrupt over time.
3. Backup often and again in multiple places. Backing up only once a month might save time, effort, or money, but the sacrifice you’d pay for that convenience is not having the latest copy of your novel, or those pictures you took the week after your last backup completed.
4. Check in on your backup! Although they may be automated, and generally are a set it and forget it system, put a time on your calendar each month just to make sure the backup is still running. That way you know if it has run recently, and that everything is still working and in place! We’ve had this happen recently to a few clients who thought they had an active backup running, and something has stalled, or the drive has died, or a cable wiggled itself loose…
To use one last analogy, or phrase, ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’. Having a good backup solution in place is one of the more important things you can do simply due to the fact that mechanical hard drives, the ones with moving platters and heads, will fail. Its not an ‘IF’ it most certainly is a ‘when’ and ‘when’ is often right when you’d least expect.
If you need help determining if your backing up successfully, and/or just want someone else to take a look at what you are doing to protect your valuable assets let us know at My Tech Guy Rocks!
