Data Debacles

We live in a world of data. The most successful companies are all too aware of this fact, and are harvesting and storing data by the truck load. Even if you are not a top 500 Nasdaq company, you can still take advantage of good data practices.

One of the most important steps to protecting data, whether it is company reports or photos of uncle Jimmy at last summer’s BBQ, is to back-up. Back-up can be a tedious process, but there are many modern apps on the market today that allow updating to run in the background as an afterthought. One of these solutions is Carbonite.

Carbonite is a relatively cheap solution for cloud-based backing up of files and data. Cloud-based just means that it can be accessed from the internet from any machine.

What is great about Carbonite is that it does all the backing up of the file you select at any interval you choose automatically. This can be a great convenience. However, with convenience comes more responsibility to ensure that the data is correct and has not been corrupted.

The problem with backing up corrupted data, is that depending on how many revisions or history of back-ups, it may be that all of your data is now corrupted. It may become impossible or very difficult to recover the data prior to going corrupted.

To battle this issue, it becomes necessary to check on the validity and execute-ability of your backed up data. It should be someone’s job at your organization to pull the backed up data once or twice a week and ensure that it is accurate. If this step is followed, it is nearly impossible to lose data.

If a failure occurs on hardware, the data can easily be re-downloaded on a new machine. Data redundancy is a good practice that can save hundreds of hours of labor not to mention thousands of dollars.

Don’t be caught in a data debacle, start backing up your important files today!