Backup Methods for Home Office and Small Business

“What is the best way to backup my data?” Many people call up asking this question. The real answer is that the more you do to backup your data, the better off you and your data will be. A single backup method or technology is rarely appropriate for a person or company.

Our businesses tend to hold multiple types of data and therefore we should be considering different backup strategies. Before we begin to worry about the technology or media we are going to use, we need to determine what data needs to be backed up. If your computer or office were completely destroyed and you had to get new equipment. What would you want restored to the new equipment?

To get started you should undertake an audit of your data and where it is held. Once you have it all listed, the next step is to classify it according to how quickly you need to be able to recover it, as well as how current the backup needs to be.

They aren’t easy questions to answer. One way of working through this is to think about what you would need to first to get your business backup and running after a fire destroyed all of it. This categorization will relate to which backup methods are most appropriate.

• For letters, spreadsheets, digital photos, and other documents; you should consider both online backup as well as an external hard drive. Online backup services should be able to chew through smaller files very quickly. The same goes with using an external drive.
• Outlook and other email, online backup will ensure that timely automatic backups keep your latest emails protected.
• For large collections of MP3 files or video files; backing up to an external drive and physically keeping a copy offsite is probably best. Although in both cases online backup can also be used, however the backing up or retrieval of videos can be slow will eat into your monthly download limits.
• For software; making copies of your installation media and maintaining copies in an offsite location is best.
• For databases or software that includes a database eg MYOB; I would use both an external drive and online backup. The combination of both will ensure that data is automatically secure once it has been written or the file closed. Depending on the size of the data, an external drive can be a very quick way to restore it.

The above recommendations are intended to be examples for home computer owners and small business computing. The other considerations that you should make are how organised are you regarding using external drives. Will you or your staff keep the drives plugged in and are you willing to have more than one so that they are rotated. Online backup is a great compliment to a manual backup strategy as it ensures should you or your staff not keep up with regular backups, then the online backup system can take over.