Number 232 - August 2002

Backing Up My Files On a CD
Question Answered by Duane S. Juergensen1, HAL-PC
Q. What Is The Best Way To Back Up My Files On a CD? Any Tips?     A. A back up plan is overlooked by most small businesses and individuals, and failure to have a plan can cost hundreds of dollars in lost time and clients (along with you having to find new employment). So therefore you must have a good backup strategy. The first thing you must remember is that all backups are mission critical, no matter how small or how large your company is. As a general rule, the best backup strategy is to keep it simple The larger the plan, the more difficult it will be to carry out on a day-to-day basis.     When choosing what type of hardware to use, there are many solutions available from SCSI tape drives, IDE tape drives, CD-RWs, removable hard drives, and magneto-optic drives, but the best is SCSI tape drives because it has gigabytes of storage. The second option is a writable CD. Also take into consideration the capacity of the backup device, your technical	sophistication and the importance of your data, plus the time it takes to perform a backup.     Using a re-writable CD or a write-once CD is quite acceptable. If you use the latter, choose the "multi-session" option and you can continue adding backed-up files until the CD is full. Generally, write-once CDs are less vulnerable to damage than rewritable CDs.     The perfect plan would be to have your data backed up fully every night; this is the method I prefer. The other is an incremental backup; a full backup is done once a week or once a month; the rest of the time only files that have been changed after the last full back up are done. With this method if you have a disaster, you must first restore the last full backup, then all of the incremental backups; this method is time-consuming if you have a large system.     1 Duane S. Juergensen is a HAL-PCmember and the Systems Administrator for the City of Southside Place, Texas. His e-mail address is SysAdmin @Southside-Place.org.
Number 232 - August 2002