How to… Backup

September 12, 2008

Do you backup your critical data? No really… do you?

We all know we should but it’s one of those things that often gets put aside and come back to bite us when we least expect it. Today Sean and I spoke about various techniques and technologies to help you backup…and more importantly recover your data if it’s lost.

Listen to the program here:

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Talking Points on How to…Backup

Frequency – regular backups should be a standard practice for either a home office or basic records for an expat household. Weekly backups are good, and anything more frequent is better.
Local or remote – the choice of creating local vs. remote backups of your data should be influenced by a number of factors.
- Risk of catastrophe
- Security of your data – what you need and, if applicable, what your clients expect
- Need for portability – can you take your data with you on a moment’s notice?
Using your current resources
- Old hard drive – buy and enclosure and there you go!
- iPod – its more than an MP3 player, its a handy and extremely portable hard drive. An older iPod can be an excellent emergency file storage unit
- Space on a website hosting server – you’re already paying for the space and bandwidth, why not make the most of it? You might want to think about encrypting your files before uploading them.
- Online mail services (Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail) – lots of space and plenty of capacity to add backup copies of files by sending them via email. A downside – attachments can only be a certain size. This might be an issue for expat professionals working in creative fields with large multimedia files.
Investing in new solutions
- Encrypted hard drive (portable) – price, features, risks/benefits
- External hard drive – 500 GB to 1 TB, price, features, risks/benefits
- Online storage services – Mozy, iDrive, Elephant Drive, other?; prices, features, ease of use, security, time required to implement, risks/benefits, try before you buy
- Online collaboration tools - Web Asyst ?, Microsoft Office-Live Workspace, Huddle, Back Pack

Outro

The options we presented in this program are adaptable to a wide variety of overseas environments. You may have found some additional solutions as well. Please leave a comment on this page and we’ll add it to the show notes. You can also send us your comments in an email using the TrailingSpouse.NET contact page.

We’ll be back next week with discussion of “Continuous Learning”.

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Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time on the Trailing Spouse Network.