How to develop a Backup Solution for all your Data

You finished writing your e-Book or downloading those precious holiday photographs on the old laptop, and now you begin to edit. Suddenly you get the dreaded blue screen of death and no matter what you try you just cannot get the infernal machine to work again. It suddenly occurs to you that all the hard work of the previous months has been lost. But of course you had a backup in place correct? It is amazing the number of intelligent computer users that do not backup their work in a logical and safe manner. Even most of the operating systems today have inbuilt an internal backup facility using the computers own hard disk. But sadly this method still cannot beat the blue screen of death.

So what does making a safe backup of your information mean? Basically backing up your information is placing it on removable media and storing it externally to your computer. Developing a safe secure backup solution is essential for all computer users whether a large multinational concern or a single person that uses his or her computer for pleasure such as storing important letter or photographs. Depending on how the computer is used depends on the frequency of the backup. Multinational companies often have an automatic hour by hour backup in place, and often this backup is remotely sited from company. If you only use the computer infrequently then backing up your information just before you shut down is ideal. There are many ways to backup information.

One of the safest backup systems you can employ is known as the Grandfather, Father, Son backup and this system will safeguard your precious information against all disasters. The Grandfather, Father. Son backup works like this. The son is the immediate backup and is used on the shortest time scale. This can be minutes, hours, or days. This backup is the most up to date and theoretically contains all the up to the minute information. After a preset period which is usually twice as long as the son backup the information is further backed up on another media storage system, and finally the grandfather backup usually happens twice to three times the father backup.  This backup system means that at the worst you will still on loose the father and son backup. The son is formatted on a regular schedule while the father every six months or so and the Grandfather never.

There are many methods of storing a backup, the most common one is to use a partition on your hard disk or if you have a desktop then the addition of another hard drive is common. Other ways of storing backups are to transfer them on to a Cd or DVD disk. This makes a hard copy of your information and can be safely stored. External hard disk drives are commonly used for data storage however these are not as safe as the optical disk. External hard disks do fail. Flash drives and thumb drives can be used as temporary storage but are not recommended for long term data storage. Storing your data on the internet is another option and Microsoft has developed a useful skydrive remote data storage system. Cloud computing will eventually take over as the premier data storage system. But it must be kept in mind that this type of storage unlike optical and HDD’s could be open to attack by hackers and data thieves. Developing your own safe backup solution is essential especially for your most important data, because with no backup what is lost stays lost forever. Backup! You know it makes sense.

David Hamer is SEO for SecurStore provide of Cloud Backup Solutions. Secure your data with SecurStores Online Backup solutions.