No backups? Don’t get surprised and prevent crying!

Big companies don’t need to be hammered on the importance of making good backups. They arrange this well. Sometimes it is not done perfectly regarding scheduling or security but at least the backup is running every day.

In little companies I see lack of good backups. They never check if the backup actually runs or is usable. Cutting costs on good maintenance is the issue.

I want to focus today on the normal computer home user. 10 years ago a home user had nothing important to do with backups. Occasionally a document and that was it.

Nowadays it’s different. Most families have at least 2 computers or notebooks in their home while this number is higher when they have more children in their family.

They all have their own passwords, documents, etc… but what do they backup at the moment?

In real life I see that they DON’T backup. They backup NOTHING. That surprised me a lot. People have the idea that harddrive will never fail and always will work. They don’t think about the possibility they can stop working in a second.

The photo and video files they have are GBs on data. I even know some families where they already have TBs on data. I have at the moment 5 TB on video (FullHD videocamera) and photo files. A good friend of me even has 16 TB on data and he told me recently it’s almost full. How are you suppost to backup this? What can you do as home user or little company?

The most easy solution is buying an external harddrive. A 2 TB external USB harddrive costs around 100 euro. Not expensive if you ask me. Harddrives have weakspots. If you really have important data I would recommend you buy 2. Maybe for your situation 2 x 1 TB is a safer option than buying one 2 TB. Be aware that 2 x 1 TB will cost more than one 2 TB.

If you  buy an extra large internal harddrive you can also consider mirroring. When one harddrive fails the other takes over the operation. Disadvantage is that notebooks in most case don’t give you the possibility to add an additional harddrive, this solution can only be applied on normal desktop computers.

You can consider to buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution. With a NAS you can connect harddrives to your network. Most of the NAS solutions offer RAID, RAID is necessary to do mirroring, like mentioned earlier. A NAS solution can be bought for 100 euro.

You can archive photos on a DVD. A single layer DVD can hold 4.5GB which are a lot of photos, a dual layer can hold even 9GB. Video files archiving is more complex. Especially if you use a videocamera which records in FullHD. You will notice the many GBs are used for recordings. You will have to archive those files on a harddrive. You can consider a Bluray writer (25/50 GB), but the GB cost is expensive.

If you really want to archive everything good you have to think about a tapestreamer. Be aware with large capacities they are expensive.

Take care of archiving you most important documents, photos and video file. Edit and publish on DVD your most important videos as soon as possible. Making a copie of a DVD is easily and fast done.