Backup a little please

Most of us happily admit to not being techie nerds. Even those of us who reckon we’re pretty skilled are often baffled by some new crack in our Windows. And Windows, lets be honest, already has a few cracks.

So what? I am glad you asked. After four professionals hijacked my bag at the Waterfront last year, I took some time out to think about how reliant we are on our PCs. In fact, that’s not quite right. PC’s can be replaced. The data inside them cannot! So here is a quick quiz.

How many PCs do the folk in your firm work on?

If those PCs were damaged (by flood, fire, theft, virus, electricity blip):

- How long would it take before you were fully functional again? (Replace equipment, Restore Windows on each machine, restore software backups for each machine, restore data backups for each machine)?
- How much would it cost to recover all the information lost on each machine (between the time of last backup and time of event)?
- How much momentum would be lost while you try and recover (missed sales, missed deadlines, missed deliveries, missed collections, penalties, etc…)?

By now you know I like Apple. One of the reasons is that I can duplicate my entire hard disk onto a portable drive, and then I can boot off that on any Apple anywhere. So backing up and recovering is a breeze – for one machine. That’s what saved my bacon in December.

But Windows does not have that readily available. In fact, backing up Windows is a real challenge. Since there is a 94.7% chance that you are using Windows, it is the focus of the rest of this article.

I did some research in the Business Warrior forum, only to find that almost nobody is doing complete backups. (That would be where you easily backup up an entire disk – operating system, programs, and data.) If life goes pear shaped, then you restore the entire disk and continue as before. Total lost time – a couple of hours.

The moment you have to reload Windows (assuming you have the disks) and assuming you can activate it (you have not reloaded it too many times before) you’re already down a couple of hours. Then re-installing each software application, searching for the serial numbers, and activating them (assuming that they too have not been activated too many times) – well that can take a day or so (per PC). And then it’s a question of getting the data back. (Assuming that you did export it correctly from each application and you can just import it now.)

Bottom line, I can’t think of too many folk who won’t lose a barrel full of money if their PC goes down. If it is a network, then it is much, much worse.

So what to do?

If your business has 5 or more PC’s which are critical, I am going to ask you to check out a simple solution.

The first phase will back up your system by copying everything onto two local external drives. One of these is stored securely offsite. Then, every day, all changes are backed up – locally and offsite at the same time. If something goes wrong, the local external drive is the first level to fall back on. If that too is under water, in ashes, or in the boot of some migrant entrepreneur – then the second, offsite unit allows you to restore everything quickly. You can even set up a ‘hot’ backup which you can wheel into action within a hour or so.

My first thought when studying this answer was that amount of traffic on my Internet line would wipe out my bandwidth. It won’t. Once the main backup is done locally, the offsite backup only needs the changes for each day.