If you’re just joining this series of articles, welcome!  You may want to read articles one, two, and three first, or just jump in with the final installment.

Now that you’ve got the foundation of a robust backup process at your home or small office, let’s take a look at what it will take to truly complete the picture - an offsite backup. While this was once limited to large corporations that could afford many computers at widely varying locations, the advent of commodity storage services accessible over a typical home broadband connection has changed the landscape dramatically.  It is now possible to have virtually unlimited secure storage spread out across the country or even the world, all without leaving your desk or drastically changing your backup strategy.

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©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

We all have one of two “backup stories.”  Hopefully, you saved the day (and your own bacon) by recovering a file from a backup created by a long-forgotten backup process.  Otherwise… Well…  Obviously there are a lot of really bad situations that can come from lost data.

This article is the first of three four on the subject.  This edition will focus on the considerations needed to form a complete backup strategy.  In those that will follow, we’ll review the hardware, software, and online services that can be used to implement a complete strategy.

As our lives grow increasingly more digital, the problem of backing up our vast data will become more and more critical.  When is the last time you had physical negatives for your photos?  How much of your music or video collection exists only on your hard drive?  Do you capture and store digital video of one-time-only events with family and friends?  Are your financial files stored on your system?  What would happen to this data if you had a fatal, irrecoverable hard drive crash right now?

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©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.