Frequently asked Questions Computer Maintenance (828) 713-0535 helpdesk@leelehman.com PO Box 19185, Asheville NC 28815 Q:  How often should I back up? How should I do this? Q:  What is mirroring? Q:  What about off-site backup? Q:  Do I need to bother with doing backups within my programs? Q:  How often should I back up? How should I do this? A:  The simplest answer to how frequently you should back up your system is this: how much information could you recreate if your system was trashed right now? For some businesses, a couple times a week is adequate: for others, several times daily. In all cases, the trade-off is the slow-down you may experience while the backup is occurring. There are a number of media you can use for backup: external drives, cd's, or dvd's being the most common. Lehman Associates can examine your business and help you determine the best strategy for backup, including frequency, hardware, and software. Go To Top Q:  What is mirroring? A:  Mirroring is the process of making a complete copy of one hard disk on another, right down to the copy (or mirror) being bootable – meaning, it can run on its own. The idea with mirroring is that should your main drive go down, you could instantly switch to the mirror – and be up and running in seconds. Mirroring is usually fairly intensive to maintain, because it would be pointless if the mirror is not kept fully up to date. Lehman Associates can determine whether mirroring is a good backup strategy for your business. Go To Top Q:  What about off-site backup? A:  Off-site storage has become practical since the advent of high-speed Internet. The plan is that you can store a backup of your data at an anonymous site. Your data is protected both because these sites specialize in data security, and because you are one of many customers, and not easy to single out. Is this one hundred percent safe? No. But no backup system is. The advantage of off-site storage is a matter of catastrophe insurance: if your business place is damaged or destroyed by fire, flood, or some other tragedy, your computers and your on-site backups can be destroyed as well. It is for this same reason that, even if you don't choose off-site storage as a commercial solution, you can create some catastrophic insurance by regularly taking a backup off-site: either to your home, or a safety deposit box. One of the decision factors as to which is better also involves frequency of off-site removal: it may be a lot more convenient to build in off-site backup than to remember to do it yourself. Go To Top Q:  Do I need to bother with doing backups within my programs? A:  It depends on the program. Quikbooks and a number of other programs which store a lot of data often have an internal backup routine, while word processors make file backups. These are both good things to do, and it’s important to understand the difference between them. Here’s the difference. Accounting software generally stores all of your data in one or a very small number of files. If you had a hard disk crash, and had to restore your accounting records, or if you have bought a new machine, and want to migrate your accounting to it, it is often quicker and easier to do it from a backup, because the backup generally has the company settings built into it. So if you see a “backup” function as an option within your program, it’s good practice to do it. If you are regularly backing up your hard drive onto a cd drive or external hard disk, then you can probably backup your file onto your working disk, and then the disk backup will back that file up a second time. But it also doesn’t hurt to occasionally back up an “archive” copy onto a separate drive. With word processing or spreadsheets, you are using one program to create a multitude of separate files, each of them potentially valuable. In these programs, when they talk about backup, what they are talking about is making an working copy of the file as you are working on it. And this is also important, for different reasons. You could spend a whole day making a spreadsheet and then - there’s a power outage, and you have lost the whole file. But not if you have set your program to make automatic backups. Automatic backups are extremely important to your sanity. You may not need them often, but they are a lifesaver when the impossible happens. But once you’ve saved that file, chances are, the backup is completely redundant. If you are migrating to a new machine, it’s the regular copies of the files that are the important ones, not the backups. Go To Top All the images here are clickable links to websites that Lee has either designed, or administered.