Backup strageies and recommendations

If you own a business or if you have important files on your personal computer - you should really think what would happen to you if the hard drive crashed and . At the very least, you will loose a lot of time trying to recreate some of the files. In the worst case - your entire business can be devastated.

Beyond this scary disclaimer above - I'm not going to tell you why backups are important. But I will tell you about a few tools that you can use to make sure your data is safe. If you are a photographer or in any other business that depends on data on your computer, there are a few very cheap ways to make sure your important files will stay safe.

There are three basic strategies for backups:

1 - Backup to a secondary drive on your computer. Many people choose to duplicate data to a secondary internal drive in their system. This is not really a great strategy as processor over-heating, motherboard, power supply, memory or motherboard failure can damage or corrupt the data on both drives. But for an investment of a $100 dollars - you can have a cool 1TB (terabyte) hard drive. Which really makes it a good deal.

2 - Backup to an external/network drive. This means that your data is residing on one or several hard drives (as in case of RAID-ed storage) outside of your computer. In case of a full computer failure - there is almost no chance of loss or corruption on this external unit. These range from slightly more expensive than internal drives (as in case of USB 2.0, FireWire, e-SATA units) to very expensive, such as fully redundant and very large network attached storage (NAS) units that are spreading the data over many hard drives. These redundant NAS systems can loose one ( and in some cases even two) drives and not present any danger to your data. However, in case of a fire, flood or earthquake that takes out your residence - you are likely to loose your computer and the external drive. Just like internal drives - these are avaliable at any computer or office supplies store. If you decide this is what you want to do for your data - take a look at Buffalo TeraStation NAS devices. I can tell from personal experience of deploying these at numerous clients - they work well, are fast, and provide a lot of features for your money.

3 - Backup to a remote location. In this case you would be backing up your data over the internet connection to a data center, which could be hundreds of miles away from you. The advantage is obvious - an entire city can be destroyed, but your data will still be safe in a remote location. Modern data centers are also fire, flood and earthquake proof. At the same time they have large diesel power generators to make sure your data is safe in case of power failure.

And guess what - I have just found probably the best online backup service for you. It is called Backblaze. For just $5 a month, you can backup unlimited amount of data from a single computer. You can upload and download the backups as fast as your internet connection will allow. If you need to restore a lot of data quickly - they will put it on an external drive and ship it via FedEx (not free, and somewhat expensive). But recovery of files over the internet is completely free. They will also store 30 days of your backups, which means that you can recover files that have been long over-written. And this is something that is hard to find, as a month worth of archived data can easily grow into terabytes.

The backup application is very simple, with very trivial configuration. You tell it what to backup, how fast and you are done. It will do the rest. And if you are truly paranoid about your files - you can encrypt them, so no one without a secret key can gain access to them. Just remember, if you loose your encryption key - the data is lost forever. And you can access these files from anywhere in the world where you can get an internet connection. Isn't technology wonderful?

I highly recommend this service to photographers, graphic designers and other creative types who generate files that they want to protect.

But it gets even better - you can try the service for 15 days without paying a dime! Go ahead, do the right thing - protect your data.
 

If you are a photographer in San Diego area - join us for the photography class in San Diego - you will learn about backups, image processing and many other topics related to photography!