Market Research regarding the Backup of your data

[sacotechnology]

Hi

Currently we are trying to get a better picture of how small businesses like yourself handle backing up of data.

How often do you Backup your Data?

Hourly
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Yearly
I do not backup


How do you backup?

USB Pen Drive
CD/DVD Disc
External Hard Drive
Online Backup


Have you ever lost data due to not backing up?

Yes
No


On a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the worst) how bad would it effect your business if you lost data?


What monthly price would you be willing to pay to know your data is secure?


If you prefer to not advertise this please PM me the results.

Thanks

[Sef]

Good subject, Nescio

Backup and other DR activities are often overlooked in small organisations and I must admit guilt here as well.
Whilst I don’t really have critical business data to back up it is a real pain (3 out of 10) when data does get lost.
Two years ago I had my laptop completely freeze twice in 2 months (due to an incompatibility issue between my back up software that came with my 500GB back up drive and Vista! – How ironic)
And this month I had my flash drive that contains my most current data corrupted twice (still don’t know why).
I’d like to think I back up every two weeks, but in reality it is more like every two months and I really need to improve on that or risk loosing important data and e-mails

[Tristan Boyd]

This is definitely not my area, but I reckon that the desktop computer is the biggest liability, so we set up a server. All project files live on the server, so theoretically, we could lose every desktop in the office and not lose any data.

The server has a couple of hard drives. An operating system hard drive, and a data hard drive, so if we lose the operating system hard drive, nothing is lost, we just buy a new one and install the operating system again. The second holds everything, so we have a small portable hard drive with some sync software. We plug it in, run the sync, and in about 15 minutes we have a duplicate of all our data. Someone always takes that drive home, so if the office burns down, we have a restore procedure that would just need a new computer and the back up drive.

Old stuff is taken off onto DVD's in two copies. One onsite for quick reference and one offsite.

[Renee Barber]

We have an external terabyte hard drive (it's amazing to me that a drive of this size is no longer *that* big) and backup on a fairly regular basis (probably once a month or sooner if I get paranoid about losing the data for a particularly long edit or large website project).

The latest horror story I heard from a friend is that she's lost all of her data: family pictures, novels-in-progress, the lot. It's a very scary prospect.

I suggest to people that they do at least weekly backups, daily if they're doing a lot of data-intensive work. Hard drives are so inexpensive these days that there's really no reason not to do it. Just think about how long it'd take you to recreate the data, if you even could, and that should give you some motivation.

To be honest, since I live and work in the same place, I think the backup might be the least of my worries if the place was burning down ... but hopefully it'll never be an issue! I've thought about storing the backup at a bank or the like, but that prospect didn't thrill me.

Anyway, I hope this information helps. By the way, thanks for the reminder! I think it's about time we did another backup. ;-)

[LeelaCosgrove]

How often do you Backup your Data?

Hourly

How do you backup?

External Hard Drive



Have you ever lost data due to not backing up?

Yes


On a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the worst) how bad would it effect your business if you lost data?

10

I have a Mac, so I've got the external hard drive hooked up at all times and time machine running ... time machine is AWESOME ... such a great tool ... I don't even notice that a back up is being done ... it just happens automatically in the background on an hourly basis, and then all of the data is stored for a month ... so I can go back to any hour slot over the last 30 days and see my hard drive exactly as it was ...

Only Apple could make backing up your data sexy ...

I paid $300 for my external hard drive ... wouldn't really pay anything on a monthly basis when I can just have it all running the way it is ... of course there are SOME concerns ... what would happen if the house burned down or someone stole both ... but I refuse to back up online. I hold a lot of client data on my computer and I could easily be sued if I put it online and someone hacked it ... I'm just not willing to take that risk.

[Heidi Price]

Git to say when it comes to my own data (photos, research, etc) I can sometimes get a bit slack and forget to back up.

BUT with client data - everything is backed up at least once a day to an external hard drive.

Ironically the external drive started life as my laptop hard drive. The laptop recently had the motherboard die, and if I hadn't been backing up to the desktop and flash drives I would have been digging my way out of the "poo"!

I learnt a big lesson in backing up a few years ago when I had a computer loose start-up files and all its data became corrupted - luckily everything was eventually replaced but I never want to go through that hassle again.


Heidi

[Astrid]

How often do you Backup your Data?

Daily



How do you backup?

CD/DVD Disc
External Hard Drive



Have you ever lost data due to not backing up?

No


On a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the worst) how bad would it effect your business if you lost data?

8


What monthly price would you be willing to pay to know your data is secure?

External hard drives are working fine for me at the moment - with just one work place. I also paid around $300 two years ago for it.