Using a safe to save your data

I read an interesting post this morning on using your safe to save your data. The link to the post is here. The person who wrote it obviously lost some precious photos and I am sure much much more in the fires that ravaged Victoria last year.

The post makes some really good points about using a safe to store your data in. I know several businesses that keep a hard drive with a copy of their files in the safe. How safe is a safe in the event of a fire? Depending on how ferocious the fire is, most likely event is that the hard drive would partially melt and also be unusable. In terms of retrieving data from it, this might still be possible, but you would be up for a bill from your Techo.

The article also makes reference to several methods of protecting your data, such as keeping a copy of it at a friends or relatives. My opinion is that for a business this isn’t really practical, particularly if you are running backups every night. You would need to visit them atleast weekly. I think it is messy. If it is personal photos etc, then that is more manageable, but again it would never be totally up to date.

Someone was talking about data protection – computer hard drives and the like. They were saying move HD onto portable drive and just pull the drive and leave. Life is never that simple, life is never that easy. Trust me you don’t have time. Don’t rely on remembering – don’t rely on it won’t happen to you – don’t rely on off-site servers (Although better than nothing) Rely on friends and family outside the area and rely on duplicity.

There are several online backup services available today that also allow you to share hardware space with friends by forming a network to store data for each other. This can be worthwhile if you can trust the other person and if you never end up in an argument.

Any backup is better than no backup. If you are going to use a hard drive to store data at home or for your business, then we always recommend that the most critical business files are also kept offsite. Online backup such as Carbonite is a great way to get started. It takes 5 mins to get set-up and you could be backed up in a day (depending on how much data you had).