Russ Greenwald

Backing up your computer is one of the most important things you can do, ever… What’s the point of spending hours writing a proposal, report, web page, collecting and purchasing music, downloading photo’s, if you are not going to back them up. One HD failure, which is very possible, will destroy everything, and make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get it back. (If this does happen though, I’ve heard good things about Data Hounds)

How to Backup Properly

• Purchase 2 items
  • Lacie 1TB Hard Drive – This is a 1 TeraByte Hard drive, I do like Lacie Brand
  • Symantec Ghost – This software is able to take snapshots of your computer at the moment of backup, data and configuration. If you Hard Drive went up in smoke, this software would be able restore your computer exactly as it was before, from instance of backup. You would not need to reinstall programs, configure email, etc.
• Plug in USB Drive and Install Symantec Ghost
• Configure Ghost to
  • Run Backups to your new USB drive
  • Run Full Backups Weekly, and differentials daily. This means Ghost will backup everything in full once a week, then the other days it will backup what you worked on since the full backup.
  • Tell Ghost to keep up to 3 copies of the above scenario, i.e. 3 Weeks worth of data. That way you can always go back 3 weeks to recover something, if you forget.
• Sign up for Mozy from EMC.
  
  • It is $4.95 per month
  • It installs software on your computer that constantly backs up all your data to Mozy’s offsite servers.
  • If your equipment is stolen, house burns down, or some awful scenario, Mozy will still have all your important data.