Don’t Back up What You Can Afford to Lose
Perhaps you remember the episode of “Sex in the City” where Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) turns on her Mac laptop, only to see the “Sad Mac”, indicating a serious hardware failure (“My Motherboard, My Self”, Episode 56.) This means that she cannot access any of her files. Her beau chastises her for not backing up her computer. She conjectures that backing up is a ritual for some strange secret society – because she has never done it and never heard about it.
These days, with laptops and home businesses so popular, a small business owner cannot depend upon the corporate IT department to routinely, silently and seamlessly backup files, and then recover them in the event of an electronic crisis. The good news is that it has never been easier to back up your computer. Depending upon the size of your critical files (typically just your data files, not the programs), you can copy them to a CD-ROM (~700 MB), DVD (~4 GB), or a USB key (capacity expanding every day). You can also purchase external hard drives, which connect to your computer through USB or Firewire cables. I distinctly remember my first home computer, which had about 20 MB (yes, MB) of hard drive space. Now, I can go to a discount warehouse to purchase a case of soft drinks or a dozen rolls of paper towels, and find a 1 TB (= 1000 GB = 1,000,000 MB) external hard drive for not much more than I paid for a tank of gas last fall (for example, www.lacie.com)
Home business owners – another word of caution. You need off-site storage. If there is a catastrophe at your home that involves your laptop and backup system(s), you need to have the information stored somewhere else. This can be as simple as storing one of those media at a friend’s house, signing up for one of the web-based storage systems (e.g. Norton offers several GB free as part of buying one of their software suites), or a much more complex system.
How often should you back up? The answer sounds like a country song – “How much can you afford to lose?” When I am not on the road, I back up my data daily. That’s right – every 24 hours. That’s more often than I have a vanilla latte. I employ a so-called “Father-Son-Grandson” method. You have three concentric cycles, one daily, one weekly and one monthly. Many backup software programs effectively give you this capability.
So don’t be a sad (Mac) like Carrie Bradshaw – back up early, often and now.
Photo credit: BBurnie82
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Now in our 10th year, BackJack delivers business-class online backup for the complete automated/offsite protection of your important Mac files – http://www.backjack.com – hope this helps