12. Conclusions: Time And Effort For Backup Will Be Repaid

Those of us who've been using PCs for any length of time are keenly aware that the need for a backup is a matter of "when," not "if". One of your authors recently survived a month during which two separate hard disks on two different computers failed within ten days of each other. Because he had recent backups on an external USB drive, restoring the failed systems to working condition was simple, once the failed drives themselves were replaced.

The preferred frequency of backup almost always emerges from your answer to the question: "How many days of files or work can you afford to lose?" Whatever the answer might be, the corresponding backup settings are easy to create. In our case, we got by with losing three days worth of new or updated files on a primary desktop machine. That's because our backup frequency was weekly and the drives failed three days into the most recent cycle.

In your case (as in ours) it may be that this frequency will do nicely. If that's too much to risk, however, you can always perform incremental or differential backups daily in addition to weekly backups. That way you need never worry about losing more than a day's work.

If you're not backing up, now is the time to start. With NTBackup and the right storage hardware, you can be up and running in no time. And, once you've set up scheduled backups, you're pretty much in set it and forget it mode on the backup side. Let the backups happen, make sure they've happened and that you can restore anything from a file to a whole system disk. Then relax and live the rest of your life.

Join our discussion on this topic