I'm fresh off a couple of disastrous issues this past month, and rethinking my strategies. I had two clients lose important data when they had drive failures or damaged systems. In both cases, backups hadn't been running correctly for months, and no one had checked them. This is an even greater issue on client's home PCs - most clients have tons of pictures, music and videos on their systems, much of which (especially the pictures) is irreplaceable, and yet they don't run regular backups.

I hate to see a client lose data; it somehow feels like a personal failure. But no matter how often I try to check in with people about their backups, remind them to check their own backups, etc., I still have issues like this arise.

I've not been a fan of online backups in the past, primarily because of cost, and the difficulty of really restoring an entire system this way. I'm now rethinking it. There are a number of great companies out there offering affordable online backups. For business and home users, you can't beat Mozy. I use it on my home system; for around $50 per year, my system gets backed up several times daily (backups begin whenever my system is idle) and I don't have to worry about losing the project I've just completed or the vacation pictures. The initial backup took a long time, but most daily backups take minutes, as it only updates changed files.

They also offer business backups, and the pricing is a flat fee plus .50 cents per GB. This can add up fast, but most businesses wouldn't benefit from backing up their whole server anyway - this service is more appropriate for critical data, such as accounting and EMR data. Even if you did back up your entire server, though, most businesses wouldn't small businesses I work with wouldn't be backing up more than 100GB per month or so, and $50 per month is a small price to pay to ensure that you have an alternative backup of your data stored offsite in case of a real emergency.

        

 

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