ShadowProtect Blog

How to Avoid Losing Your Data

 The truth is that hard drives fail. No one likes it, but technology is fragile -- more fragile than we'd like to admit. But there's an easy way to avoid the grief of a hard drive failure: back it up.

A recent article on Gizmodo.com ( The Five Stages of Data Loss Grief ) is pretty funny, taking you through the stages you go through, much the same way that therapy takes you through the stages of grieving the loss of a loved one. If you've ever had a hard drive crash, the steps may hit a little too close to home.

But this problem is entirely avoidable through a simple backup plan.

1. If you don't already have it, buy backup software (like ShadowProtect, of course) that you can automate.
2. Install it and set up a schedule. How often should you backup your drive? Think about how often you make changes to your data. Most of us only need to backup a few times a day, especially if the backup is running in the background. For some, it's important to backup several times an hour.
3. Save your backups to a removable hard drive and then set it up to e-mail you in the event your backup fails.
4. Create a separate backup of your hard drive that you can save in a remote location; update your off-site backup periodically.

These steps may take a little time to plan and accomplish, but in the long run, you'll sleep better and be much happier when your drive fails. Think of all the time you'll save -- and all the grief you'll avoid.

 

 

 

Buying a Better Backup

We live in a 24/7 world where you can't afford to lose any data. The beauty of buying backup software that lets you protect your data on a real-time basis - throughout the day - means that you won't lose that critical presentation you've just spent hours creating. Can you afford to lose that document, slide show or spreadsheet? 

Most business backup takes place once a day, usually in the evening. But most employees are updating information throughout the day. If you lose that information, you've lost productivity. What's even worse, lost data can effect morale as well. 

The solution is backup that updates throughout the day. And forget about recovering from a tape backup. A disk-based solution will help you restore in a few minutes, rather than hours. Plus, you can restore the entire system, if you need to - not just files and folders. 

When you evaluate a solution, here are some things to consider:

• How quickly can I perform a backup?
• Will this backup solution allow me to restore from a specific point in time?
• Can I recover quickly?
• Is this solution only able to recover data? Can it also recover my entire system, if necessary?

The bottom line is to evaluate the solution that will be best for your bottom line.