TECH WATCH

Do you copy?
Don’t Be Caught Without Backup

With so many options for creating effective backups, there’s no excuse for not having solutions in place for protecting all your valuable computer data.

BY MIKE ANTONIAK

How’s this for a horror story. You sit down at your desk in the morning, switch on you PC, and there’s nothing there—no record of your appointments, no listing contracts, no contact database. By some act of nature, cyber attack, or your own carelessness, all the data that make you an effective real estate professional are suddenly lost or unavailable.

How long would it take for you to recreate or retrieve all of your lost information? Unless you’ve been wise enough to make back-up copies of files, photos, and other critical data, the answer could be dozens of hours trying to re-create lost files or clean up corrupted data. And even with all that effort, you still may not be able to recover the vital marketing and transaction data you’ve lost. Keep that in mind before you persuade yourself that system crashes, corrupted files, and hardware failure only happen to other people.

If you don’t want this horror story to happen to you, you need to develop a regular process for backing up important computer files. The solution you use should take into account the size of files you work with, how often you create and update your files, the type of computer(s) you use, where you work, and where you may need to access your data. For example, if you only update your contact database infrequently, you don’t need to back it up every day. However, if you keep contact records of calls and appointments that you input every day, you may want a daily backup of your records.

Once you’ve determined how often you need to backup various data, you can investigate options for your personal back-up needs. You’ll be best served with a redundant solution, which employs two or more of these options.

• External Drives: One of the easiest ways to have your data stored in two places at once is with an external hard disk drive that plugs directly into your computer. Many external drives now ship with software that allows you to schedule automatic updates of data stored on your computer’s internal drive. Others offer simplified one-touch backup of all data on your hard drive. Pricing on external drives has fallen as capacity has dramatically increased. Today, 80GB drives start in the $130 range, although prices climb with storage capacity. Pay more, and you can have multi-gigabyte capacity on compact drives ideal for the notebook user.
  
  
• Removable Media and Drives: Another backup alternative is an internal or external drive that reads/writes to some form of removable media. This option gives you a little more flexibility in how you store, organize, and transport backups. The most familiar removable medium is likely 1.4MB floppy disk, which has since been superceded by high-capacity disk formats like the Zip drive. Pricing starts around $80 for a 100MB Zip drive.
  
  
  Lower-capacity, removable-media solutions include Flash media cards like CompactFlash and Memory Stick cards. If your computer has a Flash card reader, you may be able to save individual files to these or other Flash formats.
  
  
  A new take on the idea of removable media, USB Flash plugs directly into your USB port and functions like a mini-hard drive. When you’re copied files, simply unplug this key-sized drive and take it with you. Pricing starts under $40 for 128MB drives. Vendors include Lexar Media with its JumpDrive and the new Swivel Flash Drive from Imation.
  
  
• Optical Drives: CD-ROM and DVD drives that allow you to write to optical disks are now standard on most new notebook and desktop PCs. Bought alone, prices on combination drives that can write files to both CDs and DVDs are now down to the $200 range. CDs have enough space for about 600MB of data; DVDs can hold more than 4GB. Both are economical solutions for backing up large amounts of data for easy storage off-site.
  
  
• Web-based Solutions: One advantage of using any Web-based application for backup is that your data is saved at a remote location. With TOP PRODUCER 7i, for example, the contact database available to you on your computer actually resides on the company’s server. You can achieve the same effect by leasing space on remote servers for a subscription fee that starts at as little as $9.95 per month for 500MB of storage. Providers include Xdrive, Connected Corp., and My Docs Online.
  
  
• E-mail: E-mail offers a convenient way to backup individual files. Simply attach a file to an e-mail message, and send it to yourself. Then you can open and save the attachment on another computer or store it online on the server of a Web-based e-mail account like Yahoo! Mail. But before you count on a Web-based e-mail service as your principal source of backup, find out how much storage capacity you are allowed and how often the service purges old messages.