Four tips for backing up your data.

1. Automated Back Up

If your data is not automatically backed up, your data is not adequately backed up.

People are inconsistent and make mistakes. People cannot be trusted to back up their data manually.

Automate your back up process.

If your automated process breaks, make it your priority to fix it first.

2. Multiple Offsite Backups

If you can lose your data with two failures, your data is not adequately backed up.

In other words, if your main hard drive fails and you go to your back up, your back up might be bad. Two failures, no data. It happens enough that you need to protect yourself from this situation.

That means you need at least three copies of your data at three locations. Even that, might not be sufficient insurance for you.

3. Test Your Back Ups

Back up hard drives go bad.

Back up processes sometimes do not work.

You need to check your back ups to make sure they are good.

4. Archive Older Versions

Lets call a back up a copy of what you currently have at the moment.

When you change your data, you want your back up to look like your current set of data.

If you delete or change something and later realize you made a mistake after your data has been backed up, you may not be able to get back your original data.

So, you want to keep old copies of your data around too. Your recycle bin keeps short term copies of old data. Some programs keep multiple older versions of files. Some back up programs also keep old versions of your data.

I use the convention of renaming an old version by appending an @ followed by the date. To me, the @ means the file is deleteable. For example

myfileetxt
myfile@20100716.txt
myfile@20100621.txt

Also see this article for a back up plan.

www.internethandholding.com/Articles/tabid/153/Internet_Marketing/191/Windows-Live-Mesh-for-Automated-Real-Time-Backup-and-Synchronization.aspx

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg