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Newsletter #10 - Back It Up (Again) |
Since it’s  , consider
this spine-chilling thought: you have just lost all your business computers, all your software,
and all your information about it. Everyone’s okay, and you’re about ready to go back to
work, but you have no work to go back to. Hopefully you will recall, our February newsletter also concerned the whys and hows of backups, but it’s so important we want to keep the discuss going. Not to nag, but any document, accounting, customer or product information that you would be sad to lose, needs to be saved in more than one place. That's all there is to it. This issue, Cheryl talks about general backup techniques and ghosting software (no Halloween pun intended). Next time, Bob and Jay give practical, step-by-step advice on how to use Windows backup and restore tools. |
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I admit, I’m nagging now (only because I care), but you absolutely must back up your
computers. And not just once. Come up with a schedule and a plan to store multiple
copies of important files in multiple locations. Assign responsibility for the backup,
and let your people know what’s riding on it. Afterall, if you lost weeks’ or months’
worth of business information, layoffs might be a consequence. Instead, be prepared. Regularly copy important documents to a different computer: to your server if you have one, to another workstation if you don’t. Then backup that drive. Burn CD copies of all your software and store them off-site. Be sure to include the installation key codes with the CD’s (I usually print the installation code right on the CD with a permanent marker). |
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If you have a website with a lot of extra space, you can transfer and store data there on your web host (like I do). The setup takes a little thought, and you have to get some FTP software, but once in place, you have off-site storage for little or no additional cost. Then there’s ghosting software.
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Most of you have complex workstation setups, with industry- and company- specific software
applications, weird little mirroring routines running in the background, third-party database
interfaces, etc., etcetera. They take hours to set up, when all the software and
documentation is right there. To rebuild your application setups from scratch would
take days. But how would you like to have a set of CD’s containing everything, a ghost of your system, with all its applications and connections and settings preserved? You could take the CD’s, pop them into a new computer with the same hardware, and you wouldn’t even need me to set it up. This is what ghosting software can do. The queen of ghosting software is Norton Ghost 2003, which now handles NTFS (Windows 2000) and costs about $70… Cheap insurance. Check it out. http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/ghost/ghost_2003_info_tutorial.html |
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