Making Business Decisions II

On your way to work this morning you stopped for gas. When you were inside paying someone broke into your car and stole your computer bag. You did not notice until you arrived at the cafe and began looking for your bag. As you begin to realize all of the data you just lost including customer lists, profit and loss analysis, tax returns, e-mail, sales information, payroll files, etc. you begin to wonder when you last backed up your hard drive.

Because of the importance of data backup, numerous companies produce specialized backup software. Backup utilities offer advanced features in the following areas to differentiate it from the Windows Backup utility and from software included with CD and DVD burners:

• Support for all current media types, including all DVD formats, Zip disks, Pen storage, and so on.
• Highly specific backup selections, combinations of files and folders in any location.
• On-the-fly compression of files, to provide reduced file sizes in the backup.
• Automatic comparisons of data after the backup, taking a number of forms.
• Support for multi-CD or multi-DVD backups, with a single backup spanning as many discs as necessary.
• Detailed backup schedulers.
• Detailed methods of including or excluding file types.
• Backup from remote computers.

In addition, some backup utilities now include the technology known as ghost imaging, or just plain ghosting. A ghost image captures the entire hard drive, backing it up to the point where you can restore your entire system from it.

PROJECT FOCUS:

Now that you have been stung by a painful data loss experience you realize the importance of having a backup strategy.

• Create a strategy to backup your personal computer. Be sure to search the Internet to find different third-party utilities that perform backup, restore, and ghosting.
• List the features and prices of each.