|
|
ONLINE FEATURES
Book Reviews
BW Video
Columnists
Interactive Gallery
Newsletters
Past Covers
Philanthropy
Podcasts
Special Reports
BLOGS
The Auto Beat
Byte of the Apple
Europe Insight
Eye on Asia
Getting In
Investing Insights
The New Entrepreneur
NEXT: Innovation Tools & Trends
On Media
Technology at Work
The Tech Beat
Traveler's Check
TECHNOLOGY
Product Reviews
Tech Stats
Hands On
AUTOS
Home Page
Auto Reviews
Car Care & Safety
INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip FINANCE Investing: Europe Annual Reports Bloomberg BW50 SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth Companies: 2008 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs Rankings & Profiles | |
SEPTEMBER 29, 2005
By Stephen H. Wildstrom Bless Both of These Backups Here are two ways to protect yourself from data disaster, each with distinct advantages, if your hard drive dies
That's because I practice what I preach: Everything on that PC was backed up -- twice, in fact. So when my new desktop arrived, all I had to do was reinstall applications from their disks and download the data from backup. (I could have restored the applications from backup, too, but that might have reloaded all the junk the old computer had accumulated.) ALTERNATIVES WITH ADVANTAGES. The standard backup method used to be to copy everything onto removable media, such as floppy disks. But with the accumulation of photos, music, and video on today's massive hard drives, even the 4.7-gigabyte capacity of writable DVDs is too small. A reasonable alternative is to use an external hard drive linked to your computer with a USB or FireWire connection. One good choice is the Maxtor OneTouch II series, with models for Windows and Macintosh starting at about $150 for a 100-GB version. The included EMC Dantz Retrospect Express software, like any good backup system, both automates the process and allows restoration of both the latest version of a file and copies backed up earlier. Instead of this, I chose two different routes to security, both somewhat more expensive than a simple external hard drive but each with distinct advantages. The first is continuous backup, which creates a copy of a file whenever it changes; the other is online backup, which stores the information in remote data centers. STASHED OFFSITE. Most backup systems copy files once a day, so any work you have done since the last backup could be at risk. I used a Seagate Technology Mirra Personal Server that plugs into a home or small-business network. Software, which can run on every Windows PC on your network, synchronizes files whenever they are changed, so your backups are always up to date. And you can use Mirra to give others on the network -- or on the Internet, if you enable the feature -- password-protected access to files of your choice. Prices range from $400 for a 160-GB version to $800 for 400 GB. My second backup was Connected DataProtector from Iron Mountain. The software runs a daily audit of all the data on my computer, then encrypts the files needing backup and sends them off over the Internet to be stored at a secure data center. Connected offers a variety of plans, based on the amount of data transferred, starting at $80 a year. As we have been cruelly reminded, catastrophes happen. Off-site backup is currently the best defense against disasters such as floods or fires. When I was ready to load files onto my new drive, I first retrieved everything backed up on the Mirra, because a local network is far faster than the Internet. But I had failed to include some key files -- such as my Adobe Photoshop Album catalogues -- in the Mirra backups, and I was able to download these from Connected. PRICEY RECOVERY. Had I been less scrupulous about backups, I still might have salvaged my data -- at a price. Just to check that out, I sent my damaged hard drive off to Kroll Ontrack, which is a wizard at data recovery. It was able to reconstruct most of the data on the drive. But there were two disadvantages: The recovery would have cost about $2,000; and Ontrack could not recover the directory structure, so I would have faced some hours of work in getting files back into the right folders. If Ontrack's recovery had been the only way to save that data, the $2,000 might have been well worth it. But the experience was a strong reminder that prevention in the form of regular backups is a lot better than the cure.  Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for BusinessWeek. You can contact him at techandyou@businessweek.com
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now!Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
 Copyright 2005, Bloomberg L.P.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version
