Data Backup

Aloha!

Here's a little talk story about a conceivably boring subject: Computer data backup. You may think, YAWN! But you will say YIKES! if you don't do it.

I'm the guy in my family who handles the bookkeeping. I use Quicken software for the job. Works pretty well most of the time. So the other night I sit down to update some entries and soon as I open the program, I am greeted by some red flags, indicating that some bills I scheduled to pay are overdue - bills due in October! What the?

Turns out, I somehow lost the entire month of October (the data for that month). Was I upset? You bet. Did my mind race to the scenario of having to input all that lost data and reconcile my statements again? You bet. But my stress stopped there. Why? Because I had a backup from two days ago.

So the next thing I did was backup the current data file. Then I restored the one from two days ago and bingo! all my October entries were back. Right on! Am I gloating here? Nope. Just want to emphasize the peace of mind you can have when you regularly back up your important data.

I'm an IT tech in the business of solving other people's computer problems, and believe me, I have seen some upset clients who have lost critical data that they hadn't been backing up (not to my fault, of course!). So a word to the wise here: Backup your data often! You can backup to anything from a floppy disk (yes, they still exist!), to a USB flash drive, to an external hard drive, to a CD, to the Internet (paid online data storage). For one of my Hawaii clients, we have backups programmed to an external hard drive AND to the Internet.

Business cannot backup too much or too often. You can automate the process with the built-in backup software Windows provides (Mac has this too), or you can use a third party program, such as one's that come with external hard drives. My favorite is the manual procedure: You click BACKUP, such as I did in Quicken, and backup to an external device. I got to watch the process. (Call me old fashioned.)

One last word of advice: Test your backups from time to time, by restoring the most recent one. To do this, backup your most recent file, then restore the one before that. Everything OK? Then restore the file you just backed up.

My wife's uncle, who was an engineer in the early days of data backup storage to tape joked of his company's product, "Hey, we're a data backup company, not a restore company." You can chuckle now, but you won't if you can't restore your precious data file.

Wishing you akamai computing!