Customized Software Development

Why should you do backups? Have you ever heard of a system crash? How about viruses that corrupt your files? Take a minute and think about this. If your computer crashed right now and you had no backups, is there anything on it that you would have a problem losing? I don't know about you but I kind of cringe just thinking about having to recreate everything that is currently on my computer THAT I ABSOLUTELY NEED. Then there's all the stuff I would have no way of recreating like all the pictures I've ever taken with the digital camera. It's just too scary not to have backups of all of my files.

How often should you do backups? Again, the question really should be, how much data you are willing to lose? I'm not going to discuss how a large business should be handling this because they should have an IT staff that is taking care of it. But for the small business or individual, you need to look at your activity and determine how much work you are willing to re-do if your system crashes. If you only use your computer for surfing the Internet and playing solitaire, you don't have too much data to worry about. Even if you type up the occasional letter, maybe you still don't care if you lose it. But what about that database that has the names, addresses and phone numbers of every single personal or business contact you have? Or how about the spreadsheet where you've been keeping track of your expenses? If you were forced to recreate these, it may be very hard, if not impossible to do. What I like to do is a periodic backup of ALL of my files and in between the times that I do a full backup, I will just do incremental backups on the things that I have been working on.

Some things you might want to think about when you're planning your backup strategy, include:

• Your level of activity, to determine how often backups should be performed.
• Making sure that you actually have a “good backup”. If you have a backup that can't be restored because it's corrupted, it isn't going to help you.
• Keeping more than one backup. One reason for this is if one backup is corrupted you will have another one to use. Another is if for some reason an important file gets deleted or something else happens to it and you don't immediately realize it, you may have it on one of your older backups.
• Keeping at least one of your backups offsite or at least in a fireproof cabinet. If the computer burns, your insurance company will probably replace it and they may replace the software you have on it, but there's no way they would be able to replace your data.

Hopefully I've convinced you that backups are truly a necessary task and you will start doing them on a regular basis. If for some reason you don't want to do a regular backup or if you don't know how, there's no problem with just making copies of your files.