Data Management

I can’t look back on this year without grimacing at the lesson hardest learned: data management. Since the first time I accidentally deleted project content (oops, forgot the “Where” on an SQL Update… heh.) I have always been a hardcore backup guy. My backups are so frequent that when my computer died in February I lost no data. The real problem was that my laptop HDD 80 gig capacity was too small. I only pulled what I needed off of my external drives, so my weekly backups started to become a mess. I have since rethought my entire backup system to keep things as organized as possible.

1. RAID – My first line of defence is a SATA Raid for my data drive on my computer (the OS is on a third hdd). This mirroring makes sure that my data is safe even if a hard drive dies.

2. Sync Back Pro Daily – Every day my system does a backup sync of emails and work files to an external drive using a program called Sync Back Pro. I highly recommend this product that easily allows scheduled backups and syncs of files to HDD, DVD or even FTP. There is a very nice free version as well with a couple less features. http://www.2brightsparks.com/

3. Closed Jobs drive – Since I do a lot of freelance work for a marketing agency a lot of jobs pass through my computer. To prevent redundancy I keep a drive of closed jobs as my only repository for files if the job suddenly re-opens.

4. Off Site Storage – Should the unthinkable happen I do have an external at a friend’s house with a collection of files I update a couple times a year.

5. Google Docs – For those important lists and billing / client information I have started to use Google’s services. I will never have hardware as reliable as this giant.

6. Fire Proof – What paranoid backup system would be complete without considering fire proofness? I recently got a safe for storing data on DVD and external HDDs. Can you really put a price on your data? The answer is yes. http://www.sentrysafe.com/

Categorized in: Personal

This post was written by ArleyM