Internet Security: Backups

---

A vital part of any security scheme is backup.
No matter how tight ... is, you always have the chance that a virus or hacker or even your5 year old kid is going to slip through your defenses A vital part of any security scheme is backup.
No matter how tight yoursecurity is, you always have the chance that a virus or hacker or even your5 year old kid is going to slip through your defenses and damage your systemand your vital data files. If you don't back up your data regularly you willbe out of luck.
And anyone who has been there knows how horrible it is torealize that your computer is destroyed and there is no way to get the filesback.In order to back up your system, you will need a backup device. Some peopleuse Zip or Jazz drives, others use tape drives, write able CD drives, orother removable cartridge systems.
I know it sounds expensive, but comparedwith the cost of losing your valuable data forever, each of these is cheap.I've found that the best all-around product for backup is Backup Exec. Thisproduct requires a tape drive, as do most other third-party backupsolutions.
Backup Exec is preferred because it can be made totally automaticand is one of the top-rated products industry-wide. If you want to back upto other media, though, you'll do best to stick with the backup softwarethat comes with the media.An important fact that I've noticed about backup is that you have to make ita part of your normal routine.
Even if you have automated backups set up andworking perfectly, you must check them constantly. If you don't you willfind yourself without a backup when you need it most! My advice is to tryrestoring files from your backup occasionally when you don't need it so youare ready and are sure you have good backups when you do need them.Be careful when choosing backup mediums for longer range storage.
There isnothing more frustrating then to need a backup, go to it and find that thefile that you need cannot be retrieved because the media is corrupt! Forcritical data I usually make sure I have backups on several different media(perhaps tape and zip disk), and for the really important stuff I tend torotate through half a dozen different medias. I mean, think about it, is thedata for your entire company worth a few dollars for some hardware andmedia? Don't risk all of your years of hard work trying to save a fewdollars on media.Backup Disaster - A True StoryNot having a good backup can be a disaster of epic proportions.
In oneinstance I've seen the lack of a backup turn a situation which wasuncomfortable into a complete disaster.I knew a guy who was working on an older Macintosh computer. Our entirecompany switched to PCs except for him, because he didn't have the time.
TheMacintosh was old and unbeknownst to anyone it had been outfitted with anold RAID drive (mirrored) from a manufacturer that no longer existed.This guy believed he was doing backups every day. Someone showed him how todo it and he followed those instructions to the letter, even to the point ofignoring the error that it produced each and every time it ran.
That wasactually in the instructions.One day his hard disk started making strange sounds so he called us. Wetried to boot it up but no go.
We asked him if he was doing backups and hehanded us his zip disks, which were blank! He had been faithfully doingbackups for over two years, and not one of them worked.We had to send the disk out to a disk repair shop, and they managed torecover about 20% of the data at a cost of over $6,000! It took the poor guyalmost six months with two temps to get all of the data hand-typed back intothe computer! Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .