Backup Your Network Computer

A Backup Article Contributed by Daniel Jones

Online Backup for Your Network Computer

Few things in the computer world are as easy as a backup on a network computer. One of the primary reasons for connecting you to the companies intranet is to give you access to the internet. If you have access to the internet then you can tap into a wide variety of online network backup solutions.

Online network backup is typically as reliable as your internet connection, which is a lot better then the 50% average failure rate from traditional backup methods. For most services the restore is also very easy and fast, and the cost of the online network backup service is usually a fraction of the equivalent non network backup alternatives.

An Example of a Typical Online Network Backup

Typically when you first start your online network backup service, you would do a complete backup of your hard drive. You would then schedule your nightly, weekly, etc... backups to occur late at night with the company bandwidth and your computer is not being used. These nightly backups would typically be incremental backups that only upload the files that have been added or changed since the last full backup.

Once a week, or once a month, depending on the volume of files that change, you would do another full backup of the entire hard drive. In a situation where you needed to restore the entire hard drive you would restore the last good full backup and then any later incremental backups.

Classic Backup Solutions Using Your Network

If an online network backup won't work for you, then there is always the shared drive solution. For years network administrators have had the practice of setting up a server with a large amount of hard drive space and making portions of that space available to individuals who need to backup data. The good thing about this is it usually requires very little in material costs. Usually the server is a retired file server with legacy hardware.

The bad news is that it is prone to failure, and even when everything is working well, maintaining this server take up valuable administrator time which could be better spend installing security patches and keeping viruses and hackers off your network.