Winter Preparation – Check your backups

If spring is a time for cleaning fall is a good time to check your backup strategy and ensure that your existing backups are working. In the winter there are more chances for power outages, flooding and other types of natural disasters.

Locally in Seattle there are worries that damage to the Howard Hanson Dam caused last January may cause flooding of the Green River Valley. The valley, home to thousands of businesses and residents, has been readying for the possibility that this thin, lazy stream might swell into that area’s worst flood in nearly half a century.

If you are currently performing backups of your important files take some time to check the following:

1. You are backing up the correct files.
2. Your backups are running with no errors according to an automated schedule.
3. Perform a test restore to make sure that the backups are indeed working.

If you aren’t currently performing backups it’s time to start. The threat of the worst flood in nearly half a century should get you motivated. If it doesn’t then consider the most common cause of data loss are human error and hardware failures. Remember the last time you forgot to save a file or accidentally deleted one. How about when you or someone you know had a hardware problem and lost years of documents, and pictures. This was possibly caused by or happened shortly after a power outage.

The first step of a successful backup plan is determining what needs to be backed up. The most common place to start is your documents folder, and where you store your pictures, and music. Also spend some time thinking about files that may be on other computers or are stored on the internet. One common example would be email.

Once you have identified what files need to be backed up it’s very important to remember. You should never have only one copy of any important files. The second important part of a successful backup plan is there should be an automated process that creates a second copy of these files. Manually creating a second copy periodically is better than nothing. However there are many solutions that will create daily backups of your files while your computer is idle.

One solution I’ve been using for over a year and highly recommend is Crashplan. I reviewed it about a year ago and it’s still my favorite solution. They continue to make improvements every quarter and now it’s free. Another solution I use for smaller files is Dropbox. It isn’t a backup program but does create another copy of your files.

Over the next week I plan on talking about a few different solutions primarily for home users and small businesses.