Backing up your data

I have been preaching data backup forever, it seems. Still,  I have customers who do not back up their data and risk losing some or all of it.

Yesterday a customer asked me about a subscription service which, for a modest annual fee, will automaticaly back up all of your data on an ongoing basis. When you start with them, they will take a day or week or longer, whatever it takes, to backup all of your data over your high speed internet connection. They will do it gradually if you permit them, so that your system will not be down or extra slow while they do this backup. Thereafter they will do incremental backups, meaning they will back up your data that has been updated or added since the last backup. They will store your data in an encrypted format at some remote location of theirs. As far as I am concerned, this is all goodness. Having your data backed up and stored elsewhere at a reasonable cost is a good thing.

If you elect to go this route, you must also take the responsibility to make sure that all of your data is backed up. The emphasis there is on the word ALL. I had one customer who subscribed to a service like this, thought all of their data was being backed up, and when the you know what hit the fan, they found out that all of their 2008 business financial data had not been backed up. They were able to manually recreate the files by entering all of the data from paper back into the computer. They were lucky. At least they could recreate the data. You may not be so lucky, so be sure if you go this route that you are completely covered.

I do not recommend one of these backup services over another because I have no experience with any of them. Conceptually this sounds like a good deal.

My preference is to be in control and not spend money if I don't have to. You can read more about how I manage my backups at this earlier blog post: http://pcdocsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/backing-up-your-data.html