What should I Do about Backups?
Backups
Why
A backup is something that you should always have, but hope that it's never needed. Because of this some people can think that it is not important... this is definitely not the case.
A backup is not just there in the case of a total failure - it can also provide a point back to which to restore. A simple example of this would be a spreadsheet that is used on a daily basis. You would save the document every day overwriting its previous version. If you discovered that the spreadsheet was corrupted, you could use the backup to recover an earlier, uncorrupted version and just have to re-enter the information from the last day or two.
How
There are many types of backup ranging from a simple copy and paste to an automated cloud based backup. We would strongly recommend that you have a backup of your machines, in particular your server machine, and in addition, if you are running our Platinum Software, a separate Platinum Data Backup onto a machine and onto either a memory stick or to an external hard drive or both!
Backing up to an external hard drive on a regular schedule out of business hours is our preferred method. This allows you to disconnect the backup the following day and take it away from the source so that in the event of the machine being unusable the backup wouldn't be affected. To make this method even better, you should have more than one drive and it should be changed each day so that you have a rotating set of backups.
This will give you the extra security of having more than one backup on separate drives so that if one of the drives has a problem, you have the others on which to fall back.
Backups in Place, All Sorted?
So your backups are in place, and you are changing the drives every day and taking them with you, all sorted right?
No, you should also be checking that the backup is actually working.
- There is no point taking a drive with you every day when the backup is failing to run.
- You should use Windows Explorer to check that you have a backup file on the drive and that it is up to date.
- In addition to this, your Platinum backup has logs available to check that the backup was complete and successful.
See also
