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A Guide to Backing-up Company Data

Written by Halim Hafez

Strayer University - Front Range Community College and Regis University

Associate of Applied Science and Bachelor Degree of Science ============================================

My advice to all small companies and entrepreneurs is to back up your data, and use the technology to speed up your businesses. Backing up data is a very critical process to every business, big or small. No one can afford to lose their data, which is why a backup is a necessity. A backup is an extra copy of data or a software file that you can use if the original file becomes damaged or lost. You can lose data during to system failure, a virus, a file corruption or a computer crash.

Whether you have windows 98, 2000, XP, Linux, UNIX, or Mac operating system, you need to back up your data.

Backing up to tapes is the most widely used because it is inexpensive, and if available, you can back up your entire hard drive on one tape. The most known and used plan of backing up is “the child, parent, and grand parent backup method”; to start this method you will need four daily backup tapes “for the child backup” and rotate them each week. Label the four tapes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

For the parent backup, you will need five tapes. You will use one each Friday of the month and rotate them each month. Label the tapes Friday 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

For the grandparent, you will need 12 tapes, one for each month of the year, and rotate them each year. Label the tapes January, February, and so on…….

There are three types of backup which I suggest all companies and firms to use:

• Full backup backs up all the data on your hard drive.
• Incremental backup backs up files that have changed or have been created since the last backup, either full or incremental.
• Differential backup backs up the files that have been changed or created since the last backup.

How to apply this method;

You begin by performing a full backup each Friday. Monday through Thursday, you perform incremental backup to back up only the files which have been changed or been created since the last full backup. Then you will need to do a full backup once more after six or seven incremental backups. The backup utilities exist in all versions of Windows except Windows 95, and they do support incremental backups.

In all versions of windows except Windows 95, you can backup either manually, or it could be scheduled to run automatically without user interaction. A scheduled backup is performed automatically by software when the computer is not commonly in use, like in the middle of the night. You can do that through the power management utilities and schedule tasks.

This is my advice to every firm and company, small or large.