2 replies to this topic

[biggerfish]

Royster brought this up here: http://www.distribut...62&postcount=12

royster13 said:

This situtation should remind all of us to have a backup plan......

I run my business off a laptop......With a copy on my desktop computer and backed up to a portable hard drive every few days I would be able to know what was going on even if something disasterous happened...

As a computer guy, I've long preached to clients the importance of backing up OFFSITE, as well as onsite. No telling when a fire or malicious person will relieve you of your data.

Being a one-man show run out of a home office, I really didn't have an "offsite" location to back up to. About a year ago it occurred to me... my "other office" at the UPS store will work just fine. So now I do this, but probably not regularly enough:

• I have 2 100-gig external firewire drives that I rotate backups to, and backups of live jobs run every night to one of those drives. The other drive is safely tucked away in my large Mailbox
  
• When I'm going to the UPS store, I just unplug the current drive, pack it up in it's original carton, and swap it out with the other one at the store - the guys at the store probably think that it's a delivery I didn't pick up yet
  
• For archiving, I spend a few hours every other weekend or so burning off old files to DVDs or CDs - 2 copies of each, one here to access at will, another set in a small CD case in the wife's car. The cd case holds a couple of hundred discs, so I've got some room to decide on a future location for those.

One thing I have NOT done is documentation of everything, in case something happens and I'm incapacitated. Passwords, URLs, Customer Lists, etc. All that neat data is worthless unless somebody knows what to do with it. That's my next thing, is coming up with some kind of shop manual to do my job.

[ridety]

www.carbonite.com

about 50 bucks a year;
off-site backup up to 20 gigs
this is super cheap

integrated with windows...works in the background all the time...when you're not using it...

i've tried other (expensive) backup methods....(offsite app hosting, external hard-drive, other)

i've never slept so well as with carbonite.com

it even puts little dots on your files so you can know for sure they're backed up

it's a no-brainer if you need to back up under 20 gigs

first backup takes a long time (like a week)...but it all runs in background

i've not had it interfere with any other program...simply awesome...

[buck25]

As of January, the new MAC OS (Leopard) will offer built in backups. You can restore individual files or go back to a certain date. Looks much easier than any backup system I have ever seen.
Until then, external hard drives (or online storage - more expensive, but safer).
Working on a Mac in this industry is MUCH easier. You can view all file types in your email messages, create PDFs without additional software, etc.