Doing On-Line Backups of Your PC
Better be safe than sorry
Whether you use your PC for personal work, business purposes or a combination of the two, it is hard to find an argument of not backing up your PC's documents, files, and even settings (last know stable state). One popular traditional method of doing this is using an external hard drive with backup software but increasing in popularity is the practice of doing online backups of your PC.
Data protection has always been an important and sometimes vital consideration. Individuals and businesses alike have that need. Electronic backup is currently the most used kind of backup but businesses have found interesting ways to retain their paper records. Some large, older companies store current and historic paper documents in salt domes located deep beneath the earth's surface.
Why Do Data Backups?
There are many reasons to backup your data but the most obvious one is... you might lose it all! This can happen for a host of reasons such as a hard drive crash, one or more drive sectors becoming corrupted, intentional loss, or damage from a downloaded virus.
If you just have a home use computer you are likely to be concerned about losing all those treasured family photos; some things you just can't replace for any amount of money. There are many internet sites that are dedicated to store and display your photos and perform fee-based services such as emblazoning a coffee mug or mouse pad with your favorite snapshot of the baby. So you see that there are a lot of advantages of data backup even for private individuals.
If you use your computer for business reasons you have more to be concerned about. Not only are you responsible for your own files and data, but that of your customers, vendors, prospects, etc. Routine backups not only make good business and ethical sense but may be mandated by the government. As a matter of fact, government regulations mandate retention of corporate email.
PC Back-Up Procedures
On-line PC backups should be done on a regular schedule to ensure that the maximum amount of fresh, recent data is saved and also that if the need for a retrieval arises, the data will be the latest and actual data loss will be minimized.
A common routine is to do a comprehensive online back-up once a week, typically on the weekend, at night. Then, an incremental back-up is done each night. During an incremental backup, the back-up utility compares the data on the PC to the data previously backed up, and only backs up new or changed data. Additionally, it is a wise practice to store several versions of backed up data. This becomes important when you need a previous version of data that has since been modified and backed up.
The best way to perform back-ups is to schedule them automatically. It is one less chore for the PC user and it will virtually eliminate user error in the process. To do this with Windows XP Professional, an authorized user can set this up by going to the Control Panel, click on “Scheduled Tasks”, and then add the scheduled backup task.
On-Line Back-Up Providers
Due to the rising popularity of on-line backups nowadays, the competition is strong and there are many providers at a reasonable cost. A lot of pages offer two options for your backup. The Basic backup package is free but it only allows for 2GB of storage which relatively small by today's standards. The next level up is the Pro package which allows unlimited backup storage. For personal use the price is around 50$ per year and for small business use is a bit higher at 100$ per year. Why is small business so much more money? Presumably, a small business needs more “unlimited” storage than an individual.
There are a lot of big backup sites online that offer other helpful features. They use the same encryption methods as many banks and internet payment systems to keep the data free from prying eyes; an essential feature for critical data. Another feature is not having to schedule the backups – the system is continuously running in the background and when it detects a modification it goes into action backing up the data. Even so, they do maintain archival sets of data in case a rollback is needed.
Most of the time the backup works like this: the PC user installs a small executable program that serves as an interface with the internet page's servers. When you download data or perform a backup, this program causes the PC to see this sever as just another virtual drive on the PC. Typically part of the backup process is to reduce the size of the data by placing it in .zip format (or .tar if the PC is running on a UNIX or Linux platform).