Carol Harkins, Principal
CyberGnarus LLC

Solutions for the Internet

Data backup is a subject we take very seriously. If we are hosting your website, your files are our responsibility. They reside on your webserver, our hosting company's backups, our workstation, and our offsite storage location. If all four of those backups fail simultaneously, I'm going to guess that your website won't be your biggest worry!

Your email is different. Even if we are providing you with email accounts, we do not have access to your messages, and therefore we cannot be responsible for backing them up. In addition, unless you use webmail exclusively, or are keeping copies of all retrieved, as well as sent, mail on the server, the hosting company most likely can't restore your email either.

That's just one reason why it's very important to have a backup solution in place.

Ask how we can help!

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Sudoku Solution

We recently returned from vacation (wonderful time, thanks for asking!) to find my data drive had stopped working. Not what I needed - then or any time. But fortunately, most of my data was backed up offsite. Unfortunately, some of it wasn't backed up at all. What about yours?

If you are one of those whose data isn't backed up (some surveys indicate that only 57% of users do back up their data), now might be a good time to make a change. And if you are already backing up, you might want to re-visit your practice to verify that everything you might want, is included in that backup.

Why back up?
All hard drives are rated by their manufacturer with a "MTTF" value - the "Mean Time to Failure." The highest quality drives today come with a MTTF of a million plus hours, although according to a Carnegie Mellon University study, customers are replacing drives 15 times more often than vendors estimate. Even so, you can expect your drive to last, on average, more than 7 years. But does that mean you don't need backup? There's a saying that "there are only two types of hard drives - those that have failed, and those that will." Even if your drive doesn't fail, there's always the chance that your system will be infected with a virus that can't be eradicated without wiping the drive - and with it, all of your data.

What to backup?
If your drive failed tomorrow, what would you lose? Probably you have installation disks for your applications - the programs you run. Reinstalling would take time, but your machine would probably run faster with a fresh install! But what about your data: contact information (email addresses, phone numbers), photographs, the bookmarks to your favorite websites? Your resume, spreadsheets or databases for your class reunion, or your family genealogy, or your hobby? How about your tax returns and financial data? Music or software that you purchased and downloaded? Maybe you could re-construct some of this information from paper copies, but think how tedious that would be.

Online Data Backup
Many companies today provide online data backup. In choosing, the two most important factors relate to security - are your files safe? Encrypted? - and reliability - will the company storing them still be in business when you need them? The other factors - including how much will it cost? What is the backup/restore speed? How complicated is the interface? - mean nothing if your data is compromised, or the storage company folds. But all of these are important to consider before you choose an online backup solution.

While we can't guarantee the longevity of any of these services, a few of the highest-rated ones include:

• Carbonite - $49.95/year unlimited backup. http://www.carbonite.com/
• Mozy - 2 GB free. Personal, unlimited: $4.95/month; Business, starting at $3.95 + $.50/GB month (http://mozy.com/)
• MyOtherDrive - 2GB free, 100GB starting at $4.99/month (http://www.myotherdrive.com/) Great for photo sharing

Which of the following components fail most frequently?

• Hard Drives
• CPUs
• RAM DIMMs (memory)
• Hard Drives and CPUs (equally)
• Hard Drives and DIMMs (equally)