Technically Speaking
By Tamara Nicola
After years working as a software executive in a fast paced, high pressure career, I decided to quit my job, sell the house, and buy a Winnebago… to the shock of everyone close to me. Okay they talked me out of the Winnebago, but they couldn’t talk me out of moving to Grand Bend. I have fallen in love with our village and it’s a privilege to share some of my computer knowledge with the Grand Bend Strip readership. Today I spend my time focusing mainly on web design, e-commerce and the marketing of both. For my first article I want start with a very important topic, and that is Backup and Restore.
A healthy sob
It’s almost time to put down the TV remote, dust the Doritos off your chest and head outside in the evenings. I have to admit that I have become addicted to reality TV over the winter. Is it just me or have you noticed the contestants crying a lot more this season? From Biggest Loser to Survivor they are all having a healthy sob on national TV.
This reminds me of my years working for a Backup & Restore software company.
See where I am going here? Everyday I encountered people sobbing over lost data. Even if they managed to hold themselves together initially, they most certainly lost it when they saw the price tag to manually recover a hard drive.Literally thousands of dollars, and often times it was only partially successful.
Off-site solutions
Businesses have long understood the importance of storing backups off-site. A disaster that wipes out one location won’t destroy the backups, too. Online backup services, which automatically move duplicates of your critical data over the Internet to remote servers, are now available to everyone.
It’s not just businesses that need to plan for disaster recovery; with digital cameras the new norm, important family memories reside on hard drives that will eventually fail.
If you have DSL or a cable modem and are backing up to floppy disk (yikes!), burning files to CD/DVD, or lugging around a zip drive, it may be time for a change.
Online backups are affordable and some are even free. While not designed for a full system backup, they are a great way to protect your critical documents, pictures, email and music.
Security is an important concern. The online service should offer encryption of your data so that any stolen files are unreadable. Restoring should be quick and easy. I recommend that you practice restoring so when a crisis hits, you are calm and ready to go.
✯ Hay Communications in Zurich offers a $9.95/per month plan and they have a free trial offer. Sign up online at www.hay.net
✯ At Mozy.com, you can sign up for 2 GB of free space. They support both the PC and the MAC. PC Magazine rates Mozy as Editors Choice. www.Mozy.com
✯ Windows Live SkyDrive. 5 GB of free storage is available. SkyDrive only backs up individual files, not directories but it has built in file sharing capabilities. http://www.skydrive.live.com
Tamara Nicola is a Grand Bend website designer and Grand Bend Strip’s technology expert. Visit Tamara’s blog at:
www.visitgrandbend.com.