CONNECTIONS to HEALTH

What is the most valuable part of your computer? Did you answer your flat screen monitor? Or perhaps your raid array? Or maybe CPU? Well the answer is none of these things. The most valuable part of your computer is the data that's contained in it. Don't believe me? OK imagine that your computer is stolen, what will you care about most. Your monitor or the irreplaceable photographs of your child's first steps? How about the email address of that great person you met on your holiday last year? What about the family tree you've spent years tracing? You see the physical bits of the computer can be replaced but very often the things we have on the computer can't be. Now I know you all back up all your data every day so this won't apply to you, but listen to our sorry tale. A cautionary tale I consider myself to be reasonably computer savvy. Some would call me a geek but I wouldn't go that far myself. I'll accept the title nerd but hardly a geek! We have a back up procedure in place for our computers. We have rotating back up onto removable media which is supposed to be done at least once a week but definitely done at least once a month unless I'm too busy or forget. Sounds familiar? A few months ago we got a problem with our hard drive and we couldn't get any of the data off it. (For those who really want to know, the partition table dropped down into FAT12 format… I didn't know that could happen either.) And wouldn't you know it, it happened just before I was going to back up the last three months work. The short story is that we were able to recover all the data at a cost of £160 but we did have a few sleepless nights for a week while the data was being recovered by specialists. We nearly lost all our accounts, emails, holiday photos for the whole year, correspondence, banking history etc. How about you? So what would you lose if your computer lost its memory? Remember it's not just hardware failure as in our case, it could be due to virus infection, theft or fire. Now I know you can back up onto external hard drives, which is easier to do, but do you keep it next to your computer like most people do? If someone breaks in to nick all your valuable computer gear are they going to leave your external hard drive behind so you don't lose your data or will they nick that too as they could get £50 for it? If there was a fire would it not burn your backup? The Answer We struggled with these issues too. We discovered that there are online back up services which back up your data whenever you go online. It all happens in the background automatically. If you suffer fire or theft or hardware failure you simply get your new kit, click your mouse and all your lovely data is squirted down the wire to you. Which one to use I've been checking all these services out and I've come to the conclusion that for home users and small business users a company called Mozy provides a great service. (Large business users will probably already have off-site back up provisions made) Mozy will give you 2 GB of storage space FREE which is probably enough room for the average home user's critical files, and they give unlimited storage capacity for only $5 a month, which is a realy good price. Now the first time you back up your data it will take quite a while depending on your connection speed and the amount of data you want to back up but after that incremental back ups happen in the background while you are on line so you aren't even aware of them happening. (An incremental back up is one that happens only if there has been a change to a particular file and only the changed files are backed up.) So avoid some sleepless nights and possibly a lifetime of regret, start backing up your data regularly now. If you want to give Mozy a try just click here, and get an extra 256MB of storage space free.

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