NZBusiness+Management - June 2018

40 NZB JUNE 2018

BEATING THOSE

BACKUP

BAD HABITS

BILL BENNETT WALKS YOU THROUGH THE

BEST WAYS TO BACK UP YOUR DATA IN 2018,

AND DISCOVERS A STAND-OUT OPTION.

TECH STUFF

D

ata is important. Everyone knows they should

make backup copies of data.

But knowing is not the same as doing. A

surprising number of businesses still choose

not to make proper backups. In 2018 that's

not good enough. There are no excuses given the excellent

products that can help you keep your digital assets safe.

Sometimes people don't backup because it is an annoying

chore. Other times it's because people choose the false

economy route. Often people have no idea how valuable their

data is until too late.

There's another class of business that thinks it is making

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There are two tricks to staying safe and being able to

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of everything. Or, as they say in the data security business,

“think about redundancy”.

Fix this by making two backup copies and store them in

different places. If you're extra cautious make a third. Use

different technologies or services for each backup. If one is a

local hard drive, store the other in the cloud. If you make one

with the backup software in your computer's operating system,

make the other with a third-party tool. All these technologies

will not go wrong at once.

The second secret of making reliable and safe backups is to

check that the process works as expected. The best way to do this

is to attempt a data restore. If you can, try recovering your backed

up data on a spare computer. If it seems to work without hiccups,

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document types. If all that works, you can be sure you are safe.

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movies, photographs, as well as text documents and PDFs. It's

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This isn't necessary with web email services like Gmail. If you still

use Outlook or another mail client you should check your backups

include them. You might also want to check you are backing up your

browser bookmarks – because not all backup tools include these.

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memory stick. It is crude, but it works. Windows includes a Backup

and Restore feature to automate this. Mac Users have something

called Time Machine. Both are good.

A better approach is to use cloud storage. It's a must if you use

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as make backups.

There are some well-known brands in this space. The best are

Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and DropBox. For Apple users

there is also iCloud. Again, these are all good choices. The software

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All these services offer a limited free backup option. In most

cases the free options will not be enough to store all your data. The