Episode 14 - Backup Strategies for Small Offices

Backups - too few people bother. Too many lose data. Here's a simple yet bulletproof way to handle backups in a small office. For lots more about embedded systems (including over 1000 articles), visit www.ganssle.com.”

[@ITSessionLab]

Good video for backup strategies. Thanks.

[@RafaelSouza-xq6vw]

Great video; it evidences how a backup strategy goes beyond simply having a "backup software". Many years ago we used Second Copy at our company and it required us to manually close Outlook in order to do its business correctly - in practice, it was the same as never backing up e-mails: everybody forgot to do that. To compound the problem, IT had blocked the backup start time to 12PM, believing everyone would be leaving for lunch at that time. However, try to slam several GB of data from all site computers onto a 100Mbps connection to a NAS. Result: it took several hours of strong HD activity and slow network speed, to the point that people would eventually shutdown the backup manually so they could have a useable computer in the afternoon. After several incidents of unrecoverable data loss the solution was changed to something that, at least, had variable start times and could back up Outlook offline. However, the impact on performance was still quite high during data collection - something only minimized recently with the advent of SSDs.

[@DaveCurran]

Good advice, too many people rely on one single disk. I'm not a fan of those 2.5" WD drives where the USB connector is integral to the hard drive. I prefer to use ones that look the same externally, maybe slightly longer, but inside they are generic SATA drives with separate USB-SATA interface boards. This gives you the extra chance that if anything happens to the USB interface, you can still recover the data via SATA.

[@mikeselectricstuff]

A while ago I found a nice util called version backup. This backs up all changed files into zip archives, and you can browse every version from the last month (or however you configure it). Not so much for disaster recovery as reverting stuff you've messed up. Sort of like version control for people that don't use version control. I back up to a NAS box in a different building. I'd definitely agree that backup systems shouldn't need to be remembered, as they won't be. Most of the times IME backups are not so much about recovering hardware failure, as human errors! Cautionary tale from a company I visited many years ago - they had a break-in and someone stole a computer, and the backup tapes on the shelf next to it...

[@jasvirsingh-pw4kb]

Ihave a microwave in laser projector I've broken the Hdmi port how do I fix it or wee ca I go to have it fixed

[@hanshelly3411]

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[@jasvirsingh-pw4kb]

I have a Microvision pocket projector, I have broken the hdmi port I was wondering were I could have it fixed

[@DaveMcAnulty]

Dropbox.com is another quick and painless way of creating offsite automated backups. There is even (limited) built in automatic revision control in the free version. This is great for those late night programming binges when you SHOULD have been commiting to git.

[@KingOfKYA]

You might want to check out bittorent's sync application its great for people who turn of there pcs at night.(and its crossplatform) Unfortunately you need to have a server with some kind application that takes an incremental/differential backup of the synced directory of one of the nodes. www.getsync.com/ This may also be interesting to some as well. www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm