How often should I backup my data?
There are two good questions in here. Tackling them in order, the first is how often should I do a backup? The answer all depends on the data that you are backing up. If this is for personal reasons, then you need to backup as often as you feel comfortable losing data. Everything will break or have issues eventually. If you are happy with backing up once a month, and are willing to lose that much data in the process. Then that is how often you should backup. If you are a business, then you might have different regulations as to how often you backup, how long you store your information, etc. These types of items need to be taken into account.
The second question about media types depends on the amount of data. For example, you can backup 4.7 to 8.5 Gigs of data onto a Double sided DVD disk. If your data is larger than 8.5 GIGs, then you have several choices depending on how automated you wish to make the process. If you do not mind swapping DVD discs, then you can continue to backup on them. However most people at this point wish to move to a tape drive or a removable cartridge unit for the backup process. These units usually support 20GBs per tape up to 120 GB per cartridge.
Another very popular way to backup is using another drive. For several hundred dollars you can purchase a Shared Storage Drive. This unit plugs into your existing network and allows you to store upwards of 500Gigs of data. They rely on a hard drive, so you are back to having a device that has the potential to fail. But for backup purposes they are great because the chances of both this drive and your hard drive in your computer failing are low. This type of system does not address the business needs of off-site storage of files for “X” number of years. Nor does this unit help you if for example your office had a fire and the unit was next to your computer.
So how valuable is your data? Does it require off site storage such as a safety deposit box at a bank or at minimum off-site at say your house instead of the office in a fire safe container? For which disaster do you want to backup your data? Are you only worried about a disk failure? Or are you worried about other natural or unexpected issues such as a fire or theft. Asking about backup media and when to do so usually evolves into a question about disaster recovery.
If it is your home data, most likely you can piece meal that back together. If it is business data, you might want to consider putting together a disaster recovery plan.
As for myself, my wife and I were just having this conversation the other day… We were talking about all of our digital photos. The computer that they are on has been having issues with the hard drive. Fortunately I have the photos on a secondary drive and it is ok (the main drive finally failed) But I was also fortunate enough to have made a backup of all the photos about a month prior. So at best we would have to re-import about a month of pictures… not bad for our non-planned impromptu test of our backup plan.
If you are interested more in building a disaster recovery plan, email me a message, I have some documentation that I am willing to share that will help with the process.
