Data Loss - Who's Fault was it?

 

Imagine coming home  to find out your computer hard disk had had failed, taking with it the entire collection of photographs, music, home work and documents. Who's fault would you say this is?

 

Most of the time you would say it is the fault of the user for never backing up their data. The more clever of us may say it is the fault of the computer manufacturer who has not included suitable backup software and backup hardware.  At the end of the day it is not about blame, it is about making sure you actually back up your data and store it somewhere safe.

 

For businesses with a team IT people and a large amount of money, it is easy to run reliable backup every night. But until recently this has not been available a home computer user.  Think about it, is a member of your home with one or two computers which is used for basic tasks and internet use able to copy the latest data to CD or DVD every night?

 

Even if you had the time to do this we have to understand that this is not totally safe because CDs and DVDs are considered to be volatile media. This means a CD's or DVD's has a shelf life of anything between one day and three years.  You hard drive fails, buy a new one, try to restore your data from CD and it is corrupt AHHH!

 

For many reasons it is not suitable to backup to tape because it is initially very expensive (can cost more than your computer) it is complicated and prone to errors which means you have to continually monitor it.  It is the continual restore tests which have to be carried out that is the final straw for tape backup as you may only have one computer your restore will over write existing data which means you may over write your healthy data with corrupt data.

 

Home computer users should now backup over the internet, it is called online backup, and only use CD's and DVD's for re-installing the operating system and applications. 

 

Online backup is very easy to setup and totally automated, so every night your data will be backed up via your internet connection to a safe and secure offsite data storage faciliy.