Trust Not Thy Backup

Do you back up your files regularly? If so good for you, you’re at least trying to protect your important files. Now for the hard question, do you trust your backup? Do you really? Are you sure?

When was the last time you ran a fire drill? No I’m not talking about making sure the family knows how to get out of the house in case of a fire. Yes that is an excellent idea, but the fire drill I refer to in this case involves your latest backup.

At the office where I work, at least once a month, I will pull one of our backup tapes (we have 16) and try to restore a random file. In the I.T. world, this is known as a fire drill. The 16 backup tapes I have, would be nothing more than paperweights, if I could not restore the files from them. I run the fire drills for my own peace of mind. My job security would be worth about as much as a paperweight if the need were to arise and I had to tell my employer that not only does the backup not work, but I took no action to make sure it was working.

Okay, so you may not be running a business, but aren’t your personal files just as important to you as a business’s files are to the business? Would you want to risk losing those family photos or the family history records? How about your bank or tax records? A fire drill takes about five minutes to run, costs nothing, and you may be surprised how often that DVD you burned, cannot be read by your newer computer.

Next question, do you store all of your backups in the same location? Is that location the same room as your computer? Do you take a copy of your backups and put them in, at the very least another room in the house, or better yet in another building. Do you have copies in you safe deposit box? Are you covered in the event of a disaster?

Final question, are you aware of some online options available to you for backup? There are companies like www.Carbonite.com that will store and backup your files for you on their servers. I do not use Carbonite myself, but I have been told they are an excellent service for a price.

The service I do use is hosted by Uncle Bill’s kids at Microsoft. This service, Skydrive (http://skydrive.live.com/) is free and provides 25 gigabytes of storage on their servers. It is available with any decent internet connection, and is as secure as any online bank.

The only real restriction they place on the service is that you may not upload any single file that is larger than 50 megabytes. Other than that it’s like having a free 25 gig thumb drive that you can access anywhere you have an internet connection. In addition to backups of files I DO NOT want to lose, I keep copies of my school files there, so I can always pull down my homework, and know that it is as safe as any DVD.

So what are you waiting for? Run a fire drill today, you may be surprised at what you find.

Remember; Trust Not Thy Backup!