October 21

Part 1 of a set of articles in our series on Data Safety

Data Safety Series If data safety was a coin, data protection would be one of the sides (the other being data destruction). For most of us, backing up is an arduous process we know we need to do, but it’s historically been such a headache that it goes onto the “one of these days” list.

Manufacturers have been trying to make it a little easier with a bevy of choices: external hard drives, flash drives, cloud-based storage, CD or DVD media, built-in RAID solutions, etc. The devices are inexpensive and plentiful, and for some online services, even free, but we have always before had the hassle of running some backup software or manually copying files around – so right back onto the bottom of the list.

Finally, the software designers are trying to save us from our own laziness. Apple unveiled their Time Machine strategy: plug in a supported external hard drive, tell the computer this drive is to be used for backups, and now every time you plug in that drive your system will automatically copy all your important data.

Microsoft joined the fray with Windows 7, now allowing an external drive or device to be defined as a Backup Drive, Windows 7 will automatically copy all your important data protecting you from dreaded hardware failure.

Both strategies unfortunately still involved some user action, namely, plugging in a hard drive. Even still, because we are all really lazy, plugging in a hard drive goes to the bottom of the “one day” list again.

To be continued in Part 2…

Category: helpful hints, data loss prevention

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