Our customer base is primarily in the Data Recovery, Data Security, Digital Forensics, Electronic Discovery and Spy Agency industries. When threatened by Hackers, Ransomware and Data Loss, what one technology is the ultimate solution to prevent the need for Data Recovery? It’s so simple, that I’m a little embarrassed to harp on this. Yet, the majority of computer users don’t bother to take the time, or spend the money on it.
It’s World Backup Day! Backing up your data is the magical answer. When your data is backed up, then all of those threats can be resolved within hours. Last year, I read in a survey that of the 54% who reported a data loss, only 10% of them has been backing up daily. Now, that’s really painful. I expect that most all of us have experienced some level of data loss. My first experience was as a young programmer, who lost all of the code written for a musical software application on the Atari 800. I never went back and restarted that project. I also never bothered much with music in general. What might have been different, if I hadn’t experienced that painful data loss. My second data loss event was in 2008, not long after founding Forensic Innovations, Inc.. I lost all of my emails and cli
ent data. Thankfully my source code was all sufficiently backed up. Ever since, I have been backing up regularly. Lesson learned!
There are multiple ways to backup your data. Locally, it’s recommended that you use a local server and/or USB drive to backup your files down to the hour. When just one computer experiences data loss, you can restore quickly from the local copy. Remotely, a company server or third party service can typically backup all user data (not OS and executable files) daily. You would probably need to order a USB drive to be shipped to you, if a whole computer goes down. The advantage over a local server or USB drive is that the remote
backup is off site, and should escape catastrophic events like earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and hurricanes. Locally copied & remotely stored, is another good idea to store locally generated hard drives or tapes at a remote site. Many smart companies have been using this last method for decades. It’s possibly the best solution, but also probably the most complicated and expensive. It’s so easy to buy an inexpensive external USB hard drive, and/or to sign up for an online backup service. USB hard drives typically come with their own automated backup software. We primarily use Apple Macs, with Time Machine, that provides backups down to the hour and date versioning of files going back for months.
Our favorite online backup service provider, Backblaze, also has some advice on this topic. Did you know that you can start backing up your files online today, for just $7/month/computer? That’s too easy, and inexpensive, to justify not starting to backup your data.