May 25, 2004

When was your last backup?

Effortlessly back up your PC while you sleep

By Rick Dexter
Special to the Times

If you use a computer, it’s almost guaranteed that at least once in your lifetime you will experience data loss. The hard disk drive will break, or your computer will be lost or stolen.

Do you have any information that you don’t want to lose? How about your contact database? Is your Quicken data important? When was your last backup? Do you know if it was a “good” backup?

Backups are archived copies of computer data files that are stored on a media (CD/DVD, tape, floppy, etc) that can be physically removed from the computer system. It is important to do backups regularly.

If you can’t easily tolerate a day of data loss then you must backup daily, but if you can tolerate losing a month’s work, then you only need to backup monthly. A good backup strategy rotates multiple media in case a single media is damaged and not recoverable.

Finally (and most important), you must store these backup media someplace other than where your computer is – if you store them in your laptop bag and it gets stolen at an airport, your backup is in the bag with the laptop! What if your house or office burns down and your backup is in the drawer of the computer desk?

In my experience, most people view backup as a mundane and thankless task. They don’t do it often enough, and very few people store their backups far enough away from their computer.

Even with a fully automated backup system, human intervention is still required to make sure everything is working, to rotate media and to move media offsite and back. However, with today’s online technology, routine daily backup and offsite storage can be turned into a virtually effortless process.

The best online backup services work by pushing encrypted copies of your data files over the Internet to a server in a highly secured data center. The server is then mirrored to other servers in geographically redundant locations and also backed up to tape. As long as your computer is on and has a connection to the Internet, you can backup all your important data with virtually no effort.

Online backup is especially wonderful for mobile users, because a laptop can be backed up while connected to a hot spot in an airport without having to worry about where to safely put the backup media.

Of all the online backup services I have evaluated, I have only found one that allows you to backup fairly large amounts of data, even over slower Internet connections such as dialup.

Although the first backup is going to take awhile to complete, subsequent backups only send changes, greatly reducing the time required. The data being backed up is encrypted with a private password before it is sent over the Internet, so you have to have the password to read the data.

This service allows you to backup and recover multiple versions of each file to allow recovery from accidental changes. Backups can be scheduled to automatically occur during times you are not using your computer (such as the middle of the night), or you can start them manually, or a combination of both.

I have created a special Web site to download a working demo of this service at http://ndynamics.backupmybusiness.com. It works with most versions of Microsoft Windows. You can try out the service free of charge for 15 days. After that, the monthly fee is based on the amount of data being backed up.
After many years of searching for the best backup solution for individual PC’s, mobile laptops and small business networks, I think I’ve finally found it.

Rick Dexter, founder and CEO of NDYNAMICS Network Professionals in Campbell, lives in Almaden. Rick has over 25 years of experience designing and supporting computer networks, particularly for small businesses and startups seeking reliable and scalable IT infrastructure. If you have a computer question that you would like to have answered in a future column, e-mail it to computerconnection@ndynamics.com.