When I started PC and Internet technology consulting with small businesses and individuals I am continually amazed by the number of companies and people who don’t back up their computers and critical data.
With so much of everyone’s critical information stored on personal computers especially for individuals and small businesses it is imperative you have a good backup strategy! What would you lose if your hard drive crashed? How would you recover your tax returns, customer invoices, address book, financial records, emails, customer presentations or your doctoral thesis? You can get the applications again but if you lose your data it may be difficult if not impossible to recover.
There are a number of FREE alternatives that are free for personal use and can provide basic protection of these critical files and information. While not free for professional use you will find these solutions very affordable if the cost of a traditional services has kept you from investing in a backup solution or if your company does not provide a backup solution for you. Be sure to check the license agreement to figure out if its free for you.
The best way to back up email is to use a free online mail provider that gives you enough online storage to allow you save almost every email. I like GMAIL however there are a number of other alternatives such as Yahoo, AIM etc.. You can continue to use Outlook, Thunderbird or your other favorite desktop mail client you don’t have to use the WEB interface. If you go this route – I highly recommend using and IMAP connection as it mirrors all changes on each client you use to access you mail.
Local Backup
Where to backup? : While you can backup your data into another location, drive or partition on your computer I highly recommend backing up to an external hard drive, DVD, Zip Drive or other external medium. If you show around you can get a large external drive for under a $100. Some of my favorite sites for online shopping of computer accessories are eCost and Buy.com but be sure to shop around.
- Traditional Backup – GFI Backup (Formerly Titan Backup) is a great backup client supporting networked drives, automated scheduling and more has recently been released as freeware. This is by far the best FREE solution I have ever tried and is better than many paid solutions and certainly much better than the solution included in windows.
- Image Backup – Macrium Reflect is my choice here. Image backups differ from more traditional file backups is that they take an image of th computers drive(s) that you can recover to later. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to reinstall applications. It used to be that you had to restore the whole image as the only option. Most of the contenders now allow you to Mount the images and virtual drives and recover individual files if you need to. I personally use Acronis True Image but its not free unless your lucky enough to catch it on Giveawayoftheday
Online/Offsite Backup
A wise man once said if its worth backing it up, back it up at least twice. What happens if your house burns down? idrive Is one of the best free solutions out there is my favorite. It offers 2GB of online storeage that you can be expanded to 12GB by referring your friends. It offers a free desktop client as well as an explorer plugin so can your your online storage right from your desktop. There are many options for this service and it is changing quickly some are better at sharing, others give more space etc…
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