When organizing your home office or small company, you are often very busy just keeping up with your current tasks. So you may not be focusing on making sure your information and the income you derive from it is safe if something went wrong. One of the opportunities with IT is to easily back up your information to protect you from loss. If you kept all your information on paper in a locked filing cabinet, you couldn’t take a copy of it all before locking up for the weekend. If it’s on computer, you not only can, but you should. After all, the local burglars probably don’t want to steal a filing cabinet, but they might try to steal your shiny new PC. By putting it on computer you increase the risk of harm, but you also get the means to keep it safe. So you should take that opportunity.
A good backup strategy is essential. A typical strategy might look like:
Monday: Incremental backup
Tuesday: Incremental backup
Wednesday: Full backup
Thursday: Incremental backup
Friday: Full backup removed to remote secure destination
The incremental backup involves copying your work or data generated for that day onto a separate storage device. I suggest a USB stick and you could get three different colored sticks for Monday, Tuesday and Thursday (and Saturday or Sunday if you work then). These can be overwritten each week. This incremental backup means if you overwrite a file the next day, you will still have a copy.
The full backup is best done by copying all your information to a more permanent media such as CD-ROM or DVD-ROM disk. Most modern computers come with this facility built in, so you do not need to invest in expensive backup systems. This protects you against major equipment failures or theft of your computer.
Finally by removing the full backup once a week, you protect yourself against major catastrophes such as fire or flood. It makes sense to do this on Fridays, if the premises will be left unoccupied over the weekend.
Using this schedule gives you daily protection against equipment failure or a power supply failure, or against accidental deletion. It means that you are never more than a week away from full data in the event of a major catastrophe.
This schedule will probably seem irksome and over-the-top until something goes wrong. And if nothing goes wrong, then you can consider yourself very lucky!
For more information about back up strategies in Windows XP, refer to the article Perform Backups with XP's Backup Utility.
