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Keeping Your Data Safe A while back I wrote about the need for small businesses to constantly back-up all the business records and files that so many of us keep on our computers. You may not realise it but computers are fragile things and something like a hard drive can be destroyed in a split second. And when that happens all your valuable data disappears. Sometimes experts can recover the data but that is a very expensive exercise but just as often the data is completely corrupted and it is gone forever. Even if you do regular back-ups there is no guarantee that your data is safe. Unfortunately these days the quality of CD-ROMS is such that in some cases what you record today may be unreadable in 12 months time. The marketplace today demands more for less and one of the first things that is sacrificed in that drive to meet the demand is quality. And the quality of CD-ROMS is nowhere near what it was a few years ago. Today museum conservators who want to preserve valuable historical data on CD-ROMs and expect it to still be retrievable in a hundred years time only use one brand and the price of those discs is way too high for most businesses. Backing up on tape is not a complete guarantee that the data will be readable in the future. Tapes can be damaged or affected by incorrect storage and the same applies to CD-ROMs too. Even if you do store the media that contains your data correctly there is always the possibility that something will happen to your storage. It is a difficult situation and it is becoming more difficult every day as more and more data is entered into our systems. There really does seem to be no economical foolproof system and it all seems to be a bit of a gamble. But there are ways to hedge your bets and online data storage is one way of doing that. Certainly still go ahead and store your data locally on CD-ROM but also look at the possibility of storing your data online as a backup to the backup. A search
on Google for ‘online data storage’ will turn up plenty of
providers for this type of storage and you can never have too much backup. |