September was a whirlwind travel month for me, having been in both Charlotte, North Carolina and Chicago in the last three weeks of the month.The training is great, but as anyone who has traveled lately knows, the airports can become a real challenge.
I was waiting in the Charlotte airport for my return flight to Detroit, and watched an awful story unfold.
A passenger, who was obviously a business owner or executive was searching frantically for his laptop case. After about 20 minutes, airport police showed up and it turns out his laptop had been stolen.
Business owners as well as your average everyday computer users are turning to laptops more and more each and every day, due to their mobility and the ability to keep them in touch with the office no matter where they are.
A huge importance that many seem to forget is keeping their data safe, and doing regular backups. I would guess that every three in five users are not performing any type of backups. They run the huge risk of losing all their valuable data, programs, and even their entire computer as the gentleman in the airport did.
It is crucial to have a backup solution in place, especially for business owners who keep most of their work information on their laptop computer.
With today’s technology options, you can find a backup solution that will work for you, and there seems to be a price range for everybody.
Backups can be performed in several ways, from a manual backup to a CD or DVD, some form of removable media like a flash drive, or SD card, and there are even the higher end solutions like BDR and off site backups.
Typically a backup solution would come with a piece of software to control your backups. Things such as what you’re backing up, how often your backing up, and where you want the backups to go.
The beauty of using software is it almost completely automates the process, and becomes something you don’t have to worry about any longer, knowing that if your computer is stolen, or your hard drive suddenly crashes out, you have a good copy of your data, and you can be back up and running in no time at all.
My favorite solution is the offsite backup, which can be offered thanks to the Internet. With an offsite backup system, data that is on your laptop, workstation, or server(s) can be sent out across the Internet (typically encrypted) to an offsite location.
So for example, you could be working at your company, and having all your daily additions to a highly secure data center out in the cloud. This would protect your information from a disaster such as a building burning down, or a fatal hardware crash.
If that sounds like overkill for your situation, an easier solution can be used, such as backing up once a week to a flash drive.
All Windows based systems have a utility built in called Backup and Restore. This utility will allow users to backup just their personal data, such as pictures, documents, emails, etc. or even take it a step further and back up the entire computer’s configuration, including the data.
Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore is most useful for disaster recovery when your PC malfunctions.
This feature helps you create complete PC backups, and then in the event of a serious system issue or data loss, Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore can restore your entire PC environment, including the operating system, installed programs, user settings, and data files.
If you do not have currently have a backup solution implemented, please contact our technical support team. We can work with you to set up backups to a flash drive or CD.
We also have a great offsite solution for $39.99 per month that will keep all of your data safe in the event of a failure. It works transparently in the background, encrypting and forwarding your data to our data center, where’s it is stored and updated as needed.
The best thing about this type of solution is that it doesn’t require you to do anything – the backups occur automatically, and we’re notified if there is ever a problem where your backup didn’t complete properly.