Have you hugged your data today?

Most of us have a lot of data stored on our PCs, Macs, Networks and in the cloud. This data includes the obvious things like spreadsheets and documents, but also includes music, pictures, financial files, web sites, blogs and so on.

Probably you no longer think about much of this data, but you would miss it if it were gone and in some cases the loss of this data could be very harmful to you and your business.

Given that we may have many GB of data backing it up can be a pain, so we just ignore the situation because hard disk failures won't happen to "us".

Of course the reality is not if a hard drive will fail, but when it will happen. Of course the answer is at the most inopportune time :)

The good news is there are so many simple and inexpensive (sometimes free) options for backups to not take advantage of them boarders on crazy.

My own strategy is simple to setup and then just does it thing. All I have to do is check on it from time to time and review the strategy a couple times per year.

• I have multiple PCs and Macs at my house and I try and keep as much data as possible off of their local hard drives. Instead I keep almost all of my data on a NAS box (Network Attached Storage). To ensure the NAS box doesn't become a single point of failure, my NAS box has 2 hard drives configured in a mirrored configuration. This means that data is written to both drives so the loss of a single drive means my data is still safe. I simply pop in a new drive and the NAS box rebuilds the mirror and I am back fully protected.
• Of course the power supply or the controller on the NAS box could fail taking the box down with all of my data intact, but unreachable. So to deal with this I have a second NAS box. One NAS box is on my second story and the other is in my data closet (we can talk about my data closet another time) in my basement. This pretty much assures that one of the NAS boxes is going to survive almost any event.
• To keep the data in synch between the two NAS boxes I employ Microsoft's free SynchToy 2.0 product. You setup the sources and targets between the two NAS boxes and schedule a time to run the synchronization each day. Since it is a Microsoft product, it must run on a Windows PC. There are of course many products that do this type of work, depending on your platform, preferences and budget, but SynchToy has been working well for me for many years, even as I have added Macs to my network. It knows to backup only changes, so each night's sync process is fairly quick.
  
• So short of my house "going away" (as we say in the BCP world) or "someone" removing both of my NAS boxes, my data is safe. Of course it really isn't, which is where off-site storage comes in. There are many off-site companies that store your data in the "cloud". My current choice is Dell's DataSafe product. The key for me is having a product that can back up mapped drives, since my data is not local on my PCs and many of the products will not back up mapped drives. They consider mapped drives part of their "corporate products" which adds considerable cost and complexity, which Dell's product allows me to avoid. The initial off-site backup can take some time, but once the initial process is complete, the daily backups are scheduled and backup only the changes to the folders you have marked for backup.

Is this strategy for everyone? Of course not, but it does protect my data with very little work from me, which allows me to hug my data everyday and not even realize it.