01/20/2007 Utilities

How to Play your data backup Strategy?

1. Invest in good Backup Software:

Read the reviews, visit the websites and look out for features and assurances that the product you are buying is reliable, fast and easy to use. Spend time reading the websites of the various suppliers. Some products cost no more than $40 but your data costs much more. Losing your data because the software you have bought is not effective means that you have thrown away an extra $40!

Recommended Backup Software: WinBackup




2. Plan Your Backups:

Most software packages on the market have schedulers. Use these schedulers. It doesn't take much time to set up a timetable for backups. Depending on how many times you use your PC you can schedule your periodical backups: at work, I backup every day at 9 a.m.. At home, I backup once a week.

3. Check the Integrity of your Restore:

Even though you have backed up, what guarantee do you have that your data can be restored when disaster hits? The best way to ensure full "restorability" of your data is to buy a backup product that has bit-level verification (like WinBackup 2.0). Such a feature makes sure that while the product is performing your backup it checks all the data down to the level of bits and bytes. In essence, the software first backs up the data and then automatically performs a test restore to make sure that every single bit has been copied.

4. Check the Integrity of your Backup Medium:

You can have the best software in the world and back your data every hour, however, if you do not have a good medium to store your archives, you are doomed. The second best way to ensure the restorability of your data is to choose good mediums and to do regular test restores from them.

5. Check your hard drives regularly and make sure you have good anti-spyware and anti-virus software:

There is no harm in checking hard drives for errors and bad sectors as these drives do fail over time.