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The absolutely most underrated and overlooked aspect of any home office or small business is backing up data - and nothing is worse than knowing that the only copy of that marvellous presentation, or of your 17 page essay clearly explaining the meaning of life, is sitting on a hard drive that is attached to a computer that won't boot up any more. Maybe it's repairable and you won't lose any work, just a little time, but maybe it's gone and you regret not having copied it over to your laptop. The more seriously you take your computers, the more you should take advantage of the technology that's usually sitting in front of you with a few suggestions.
With the cost of hard drives being what it is, extra storage space is becoming easier to get and thus being used for more reasons, and the affordability of CD and DVD burners giving storage options of 650 to 740 megs for CD-R and 4.7 gigs for DVD+R discs. Here are a few ways of making a copy of some of your critical files:
- Create a directory on your desktop and call it "Backup Files", and store all your important files in that directory. Once a month, burn that directory to a CD or a DVD.
- Get a second hard drive, and use it as your back up drive. Copy your working folder of important files over to that hard drive once a month, with a separate directory for each month.
- Add an older computer to your home network, and give it a few extra hard drives of storage - share those hard drives with your network and use that PC as your "file server" or local library for files - copy anything over that you need to, with more important files copied over more frequently.
- Use an external hard drive or USB drive to store your files while you work on them. They are far less likely to suffer any impact from your computer crashing, however, especially in the case of some of the smaller USB drives, they are small can be either lost or broken because they are so portable.
Other solutions include online storage solutions, from simply emailing the smaller files to yourself on your Hotmail or Gmail account, to subscribing to services which allow you to FTP your files up to a redundant server, which is itself backed up - the company guarantees the reliability of your data by making safe copies that they can restore in the rare event their computers have a hardware failure, thereby making sure that the files are always there when you need them. A simpler version can be just uploading the files to your own webpage hosted by your ISP - most ISPs do similar backups of their systems, letting you get away with a safe copy of your files, as long as you have the space available - as long as your webpage doesn't link to the files that you upload, you can be pretty sure that no one else will know that they are there. Ultimately, the farther your backup data is kept from your original data, the safer your data will be.
Professional online web servers will typically use tape media to back up their data, with capacities per tape ranging from a few dozen megs up to a few dozen gigs - they will often use several tapes, perhaps one a day for every day of the week, or one tape for every weekday and adding one weekly tape for every full week, and cycling through those tapes repeatedly. The downsides are that getting a tape drive can be costly, and buying enough tapes to complete a cycle, with extra tapes to replace those that fail and a cleaning tape to keep the machinery working, can end up being quite costly - this is why it's very rare to see in a home office environment, especially when cheaper alternatives are out there.
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