System Backups – Live without Fear ..

Have you ever noticed how modern media and advertising play on our emotions? In fact the main emotion they target is fear!

Senstionalist headlines fill the papers about war, terror, strife and famine.

Adverts about the loss of hair, loss of income, loss of beauty; unsatisfactory sexual prowess and performance; fear of the country's demise; higher taxes; too strong a rand, too weak a rand; crime; and the fear of not keeping up with the Kardashian's...

The list goes on and on - its no wonder we are all a ball of nerves, running around like rats on a treadmill, scurrying through life hoping that nothing bad happens to us...

Well I don't buy it! I refuse to live scared!

There is however one tiny insy wincy little thing that does scare me...

It's the fear of switching on my computer and hearing that grinding unhealthy noise of a hard drive crash; or seeing that white text across the black screen "no operating system found".

Imagine the horror - all my hard work, all my emails, all my contacts and all my telephone numbers... All my organised priceless pictures of my kids, all my music collections and all my home videos... My knowledgebase and my entire history - GONE!!!

That really gets me quiverring in my boots! Makes my palms sweat! Pumps the blood through my veins as if I had run a marathon!

There is a simple solution, something that takes the lump out of my throat - it's called backups! Yip good old fashioned backups.

Now in my experience they don't have to be fancy they just need to be reliable. You also don't need to have an entire backup of your machine, you just need all the data! The programs, drivers etc can be re-installed easily enough from their original source; but its the data that's irreplaceable.

These days storage is cheap and accessible: readily available external USB hard drives and large flash drives are so prevalent its almost in-excusable to neglect backing up onto such a device. To avoid time delays you just need to make sure you have an automated method and that the backups are incremental (only changes made after the initial backup are saved).

Another option is to get your backups sent to a service provider on the Internet who will charge you a fee for backing up your software to their remote servers. Most of these charge per GB  but there are some that have a flat fee for unlimited size - you need to remember you may be eating into your bandwidth cap provided by your Internet Service Provider.

If you are running a manual-type backup solution – it is always a good idea to have all other applications closed. This is to avoid any access problems for the backup software trying to copy the files (usually files that are being used or written to are locked cannot be copied). So its best to schedule your backups for the evening or a time when you are not using your computers resources.

As usual I always like to give my loyal readers some useful info to walk away with, so I have taken the liberty of providing links to certain backup solutions that I have enjoyed using in the past:
Timeline - This is a good Windows backup solution. It can return your computer to a certain point in time by allowing you to select a time frame that you would like to backup to.
Back In Time - This is a good Linux backup solution. It also takes snapshots of your files according to time.
Time-Machine - Mac users already have a great backup system built-in called time machine - this links you to that product info.
VIP LiveDrive - This is a offsite backup provider with a really good price point. They are reliable and secure.

So after I have a healthy dose of my backup regime I can sleep like a baby - afraid of nothing (ok so my well-armed alarm system, passives, electric fencing, high perimeter walls and attack dogs; also help my sleep - but just a little bit! It is South Africa after all...)

BTFD (ByteBoy Thought For the Day)

“A backup is not like a fine wine – it gets redundant with age! Its more like a fresh fruit – the riper it is the more likely you are to eat it.”  (Byteboy; November 2010)

So make sure your backups are ripe and juicy guys!!

ByteBoy OUT!!