01 Jul 2007

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Discussions about data backup methods and techniques. Large businesses with IT professionals consider data backup and recovery absolutely essential. Many small businesses and most home computer users are doing very little to protect their data even though data loss would be a very painful and costly experience.

Laptops and mobile computers are particularly challenging to backup. Since they are not always connected, they tend to store data on the local hard drives. And since they are not always connected, it is difficult to schedule a backup to an offsite storage facility. I know of a lot of cases where field personnel rarely come the office and connect to the corporate network. In most cases their communication is over email and web portals.

Experience show that depending on manual procedures to connect a backup device and backup a laptop computer on a regular basis is unreliable at best and almost never happens. This is even more problematic because data on laptop computers is more vulnerable that most other data. Laptop computers are lost, stolen, and damaged in accidents much more frequently than other types of computers. And, the hard disk drives are more likely to fail because they are subject to more heat, less ventilation, and more shock than hard drives in workstations, desktops and servers.

The best solution is to use a reliable online backup service. These services are relatively inexpensive. They almost certainly cost less than equipment, support and procedures for any other backup method. The biggest problem with online backup services is that they depend on the computer being online and connected to the Internet for the backup to run. Almost all of the online backup services allow you to schedule a backup to run at specific times. The problem is that most laptop users don’t necessarily have their computer connected to the Internet and turned on at any specific times.

A few companies are providing a very effective solution to this problem. You specify that the computer is mobile and the the system will back it up on an interval, whenever it is connected. For example; you may specify that your laptop computer is to backed up once per day. The system will detect when the computer is online, and if it has been more than a day since the last backup, an automatic backup takes place in the background. Some of these services even notify you via email if the computer has not been backed up in a week or some number of days that you specify.

Below is a list of providers known to have this mobile backup capability: