BACK UP TO THE FUTURE
Death, taxes and data loss; we don’t like to talk about any of them, even though they are all inevitable. We can’t do much about the first two, but we can at least show you how to avoid losing data by having everything important backed up.
We’ll take you through the why, what, when, where, who and how of backing up. That is: why backups matter; what you should backup; when you should do it; where is the best place to keep your data and who is responsible for it. We’ll show you the mechanics of various backup systems and the type of approach that may be best for you. Although this will look at software solutions, it is not a round-up review – the best software for you depends on your circumstances.
The Why
The first question, why, is the easiest to answer. Data storage media is very reliable, but it’s not 100 per cent reliable. While the people operating those systems are very much less reliable. You could lose data through a disk failure, or through a good-old user error. There are various techniques for retrieving data deleted or overwritten by accident, or stored on a disk that is giving read errors, but sometimes the only option is to restore a backed-up copy
