Back to Backup

May 05, 2014
An affinity for News
Kurt R. Rahlfs

Back to Backup

Many of you have heard me harp on the importance of your data and backups. I became a big fan of correct backup procedures when, in graduate school, I lost a term project a week before the end of the term. This was because the company I was working for backed up its data by writing over last week’s backup. I destroyed my work just before the backup took place so my empty set of data wrote over the mostly complete set of data from the previous week.

This is more oriented towards businesses from small to large but the basics apply to the home user and the hobbyist who records income in quicken or QuickBooks.

Data Protection

The most common failure of a computer is the hard disk. It is a mechanical device so it can just stop from the time you take it out of the box to years after. When it goes and gets replaced you are left with even less than you had when you got it from the manufacturer. Though not really a backup, the first line of protecting your data is to use one of the approaches to “mirror” your data on more than one disk. This way if one disk fails, you are still up and running on the other disk. You can then replace the failed disk with minimal down time. Otherwise you may have days of recovering your data and reloading all the programs that had been loaded since the computer left the assembly line.

Basic Backup

Though you may seem to be protected by the disk mirroring, it doesn’t protect from things that you may do unintentionally (like me for my term project) or that hackers, thieves or nature can do. Computers have come to me with anything from sewers backing up to fires and tornadoes. This protection needs a backup. The first backup I now recommend is a cloud backup. The main advantage of this is that the backup is not near the computer. Backups with tapes or disks that are attached to the computer only protect you from the mistakes you make. The more common problems are not protected by local backups.

Help

The national business stores that work on home PC’s, like Best Buy and Apple, don’t have a staff of industry certified technicians. At affinity all our technicians have A+ certifications to work on any of your computers and Net+ certifications to work on your networks and Internet. A Security+ is also available to protect your computers. To always get an industry certified technician call affinity Computer Masters at 350-6984.