Data Backup Solutions - Seven Things You Must Know

This article will discuss Data Backup Solutions overall and will provide a number of items that need to be considered when considering the right solution for your needs. This article will focus on the needs of the individual user and small to medium sized business owner.

For both users, you must know, or at least consider the five following items when considering a data backup solution.

1. What type of data are you going to be backing up? (Word Processing Files? Spreadsheets? E-mail? Databases? Audio Files? Video Files? Image Files? They all have unique characteristics and impacts to backup requirements).
2. How much data are you going to backup up and how often?
3. How rapidly do you expect the data to grow in volume? (Industry experts forecast data growth at 30%-70% per year. If you don’t know how fast your data will grow, plan for 50% growth year over year).
4. How long do you need to retain your backups? How many copies of backups do you want to keep?
5. Are there any regulatory or legal reasons to retain, or destroy data after a given period of time?
6. Do you want to manage and own the backup and backup process yourself, or is it something that you would rather not have to deal with?
7. How much is your data worth? What would the financial and legal impact to your personal or business finances be if your data was lost, either because of accidental erasure, malicious intent, fire, theft , water damage, some other loss type or just a hardware failure of the hard drive.

Once you know the answers to the seven questions above, that will help you in determining the particular requirements for your Data Backup Solution. For some people, it might be as easy as using a USB memory stick to backup their limited number of files, for others, it might be burning a DVD with up to 4.7GB of data every night or weekly using a simple copy and paste process in Windows. For those users that need to backup more data, they may want to invest in an external USB hard drive or two. Copies of data can be placed on each hard drive and each drive could be alternatively taken to an offsite location on alternate days, each with a recent copy of data. Still, other people may not want to go to all that effort and risk (what happens if a hard drive is left somewhere accidently or is stolen from a car/truck that it was sitting in?). For many people today, they are considering online, Internet based file backup solutions.

As you consider the options, also think about how easy it is to restore files when a data loss is sustained. If you have very limited needs, such as could be met with using a USB flash memory drive, your restore time could be as fast as taking the memory stick out of your pocket or purse and copying the files back to the computer. If your demand for backup is greater than what would fit on a flash drive, you might copy and restore from a DVD, though current Flash Memory sticks can hold more than a DVD Drive. Most users, if backing up locally, will opt for an external USB based hard drive. They are available and are inexpensive and copying take place at hard drive speed.

Of final note, don’t forget about security and encryption when it comes to backup media. While you likely lock your offices up at night, if you take your data with you, it should be encrypted or at least, password protected. If you use an online data backup solution, that’s already taken care of, and you have one less thing to carry around with you.