August 31st, 2011, By Dana Haugh
Here are some of my suggestions for back up programs:
Windows computers offer a plethora of third-party programs for relatively cheap. My suggestion for a near enterprise-level backup schemes and security is Acronis True Image.
This flexible and powerful program can actually create full, live disk images of your PC so that when the time comes to restore a backup, you’re not just restoring files—you’re restoring an exact copy of your PC as it was.
You can do full backups or incremental (just what’s changed since your last backup). The incremental backups save substantial time in backing up.
You can include or exclude files or folders from your backup “sets”. It offers encryption, which is really a must if you’re dealing with sensitive files.
It’s even free to try and well worth its price of $50 for your individual PC, if you decide to buy it. They do offer server versions too.
If you have a Mac, Apple’s Time Machine is your best bet. It will automatically backup your entire computer, or network of computers, by default, once an hour. All you have to do is point the software to an external backup drive. All that’s left is an exceptional backup scheme that you can set and forget. Not only is this software exceedingly impressive, what’s even more impressive is that it is built-in to the operating system and costs you nothing. Just buy an external hard drive and your set.
Beyond having multiple layers of backups, businesses that handle sensitive data for other companies or have hundreds, if not thousands, of employees need to have full-time, redundant servers. The servers must be geographically dispersed. As an example, our software, REoptimizer is designed to securely optimize the real estate portfolios for large corporate clients, so it is imperative that we employ the highest-level protocol. REoptimizer has 3 separate servers that are geographically dispersed by thousands of miles. Within a minute we can switch our clients over to any one of the other servers.
The big advantage for clients is that their corporate real estate (CRE) data is safely secured on multiple servers with bank level encryption. Any one of our CFO, CEO or Director of Real Estate clients can securely see all there is to see about their real estate portfolios from their computers, iPads or iPhones (still with 128 bit encryption). This offers them power, mobility and security.
It can be expensive to use third-party providers like Rackspace (Rackspace.com) to provide this level of service, but to our enterprise level clients, it’s worth having the highest level of security and availability.
In conclusion, there’s no excuse with today’s modern technology to have multiple layers of backups and perhaps even remote servers.