Backup Your Data!

Last week I spent two whole days attempting to recover data from a new clients nine year old server which died the previous day.  They had a supposedly redundant set of drives configured, but it broke and they had a backup that hadn’t run in three months and nobody knew. 

After two days and many attempts to recover their data with various tools, late at night I successfully managed to get all the data off the faulty server.  I can’t tell you how lucky they were to have a good result, and a downtime and recovery cost so much less than what it might have been.

All of this time and money could have been saved if they had a simple daily backup notification that just sent them an email each time the backup ran and advised them of its success.  The same goes for everyone at home as well!   Backup drives are dirt cheap and there are any number of free backup programs which will tell you if the backup worked.  I use Cobian Backup myself which allows quick access to your files by simply plugging the drive into another computer.  The built-in Windows 7 backup is good too.  The Windows 8 backup is rubbish (no surprises there).  So stop right now and if you don’t have a backup, go and sort it,  right now!