W
WebmasterAlex
Guest
Just saw yet another hard drive failure that is going to cost a company 1000's and 1000's of dollars...maybe up to 20k if it turns out to be the worst case...
Let me explain why you need to back up. Your hard drive is going to fail. It may be 6 years it may be 6 months but it IS going to fail. It is a mechanical device and like all mechanical devices it wears out. Techies will fight over which brand of hard drive they like but they are all pretty much the same (and made in the same couple of factories! Dell, Compaq, HP etc all use somebody elses hard drives.
The inside of your hard drive looks like this:
Those disks you see there spin, in a normal home computer, at 7500 revolutions per minute the entire time your computer is turned on. It is spinning on a jeweled bearing. As you can imagine it does wear out. The part called the actuator arm moves back and forth across the surface of the disk at a distance closer than a human hair.
So how do you back up?
If you run a real business, you have to have tape. It is expensive finicky and quite frankly a pain in the butt but it is absolutely the best protection. Hand me a properly done tape and your business is back in a matter of hours. Portable hard drives, Cd burners etc are not acceptable substitutes for a business you depend on.
A smaller business might make do with burnable DVD's or CD's. The problem is they won't hold the entire drive so when it comes to restoring you have to "put the pieces" back together again which can take a long time.
One mistake I see a lot of people make is to back up to a second hard drive, that's totally unnaceptable. A virus that is dormant can damage both and then you are out of luck.
For the home user DVD or CD is great! Remember to get your email files, documents, pictures, tax returns etc...
Let me explain why you need to back up. Your hard drive is going to fail. It may be 6 years it may be 6 months but it IS going to fail. It is a mechanical device and like all mechanical devices it wears out. Techies will fight over which brand of hard drive they like but they are all pretty much the same (and made in the same couple of factories! Dell, Compaq, HP etc all use somebody elses hard drives.
The inside of your hard drive looks like this:
Those disks you see there spin, in a normal home computer, at 7500 revolutions per minute the entire time your computer is turned on. It is spinning on a jeweled bearing. As you can imagine it does wear out. The part called the actuator arm moves back and forth across the surface of the disk at a distance closer than a human hair.
So how do you back up?
If you run a real business, you have to have tape. It is expensive finicky and quite frankly a pain in the butt but it is absolutely the best protection. Hand me a properly done tape and your business is back in a matter of hours. Portable hard drives, Cd burners etc are not acceptable substitutes for a business you depend on.
A smaller business might make do with burnable DVD's or CD's. The problem is they won't hold the entire drive so when it comes to restoring you have to "put the pieces" back together again which can take a long time.
One mistake I see a lot of people make is to back up to a second hard drive, that's totally unnaceptable. A virus that is dormant can damage both and then you are out of luck.
For the home user DVD or CD is great! Remember to get your email files, documents, pictures, tax returns etc...
)
I totally agree with Alex. I work for a retail company with over 150 locations. Our mainframes live here in Mass. Our Server Room/Data Center is quarrantined from the rest of the building with extra firewalls (physical steel walls, not the cyber kind), separate generators, it's own separate fire supression, etc. We back up to tape EVERY night, and the tapes are stored offsite as well. 
