A Case for Backup
A Backup Article Contributed by Pearlyn Williams
Backup - a Smart Way to Do Business
A small legal firm in New Jersey always insisted that all its employees perform daily, weekly, and monthly backups on their computers. In the accounts department, Troy was very meticulous about carrying out these backups on a consistent basis, and even took the backup tape home each day, just in case. When it came time for him to go on his vacation, he left the tape at home and went to the Caribbean.
While he was away, he learned that the company was completely demolished by a huge tornado occurring on the weekend. No one was hurt but every important documents and records were destroyed except for the backup tape that he had at home containing over a million dollars in accounts receivables, important customer lists, and case files. The owners thought they were out of business but were relieved to learn that Troy had the backup tape at home.
It is far more important to safeguard the contents of your disks than your hardware. Whereas one can replace a computer, it is often impossible or difficult to replace lost files. Hence, a very important rule of thumb in computing is: Backup Your Files.
What is Backup?
Backup in computer engineering refers to the copying of data for the purpose of having a second copy of an original source, in case of damage to the original data source.
Backups are most often created from hard disk based production systems to large capacity magnetic tape storage, or optical disk WORM media like CD-R and DVD-R and similar formats. In earlier days, backups were done on floppy disks.
Backups are useful to restore a computer to an operational state following a disaster, such as loss of a hard disk or the file system being so unstable or corrupt that it cannot be read. Backups are also used to facilitate the recovery of files that may be accidentally deleted or corrupted by a user or program.
Of course, backup can only be as useful as its associated recovery plan. The most important part of the plan is to ensure that the software required to read the backed up files is on one of the tapes.
A Case for Backup
When important files are created, e.g a letter in MS-Word, or a spreadsheet in MS-Excel, they are stored on a disk. However, if the disk gets lost or damaged (demagnetized, scratched, overwritten), the files are unlikely to be recovered if they were not backed up.
The process of back up can be simplified, by configuring your computer system with a tape backup unit. The alternative to this would be to use other backup media like zip disks, CD-Rs or DVD-Rs.
The Internet - a Backup Device?
Although, traditionally, most persons and businesses have backed up the contents of their hard disks using magnetic tapes, removable disk cartridge units, or even additional hard disks, a now tool in now on the market and seems to be gradually making inroads - it is the Internet.
There are several companies today offering backup capability online for a small monthly fee which vary according to storage needs.
The immediate advantage to this new concept is the cost saving on backup devices and media, and the main hardware requirement is a modem. Also, internet backup stores files at different locations, preventing scenarios like the one outlined at the beginning of this article.
