World Backup Day
Yesterday was World Backup Day, an event to remind us all to backup our stuff! If you don’t have a good backup plan, now is the time to think about it.
I still remember when I worked in IT during college. I was the low guy on the totem poll, so I got the jobs no one else wanted to do: including backups. My normal routine was to go around at night to each system (on a rotating basis) and hookup a backup drive and do a save. This took a ton of time but was worth it–it saved a lot of people a lot of headache. But I had one person, our controller, who always took his laptop home with him. And one day I got a call from him to hurry to his office.
Basically he was writing his MBA thesis in Lotus 123 (the old rival to MS Excel). He was so comfortable in the program he decided it would be good for word processing, too. Well, with slip of a finger he deleted a cell that contained a good portion of his paper. And he couldn’t undo it. But even back then Lotus had an auto-save feature. But my boss hadn’t turned it on (another good thing to check for)! So his paper was gone. And we didn’t have a recent backup. And this was just a user error, nothing to do with the hardware at all. Think about how many times the software saves us now when we make a mistake, but if our drive crashes, or we get a virus, that won’t help.
So below are a few links to help you think about your disaster recovery plan, it can take a few hours to setup, and might cost you some bucks, but in the long run, when the inevitable crash does happen, you’ll be prepared and can recover quickly. And, for our particular systems, we offer scripts to help ensure your perform a good backup, just drop us a line to discuss.
- World Backup Day (lots of great advice for getting started)
- Lifehacker’s Backup Plan (a favorite site of mine)
- Microsoft Server
- Cisco Small Business