Do you have data recovery and backup plans?

Having data recovery and backup plans for your salon computer are critical to your commercial survival. If you’re storing all the appropriate information, your computer will hold data on your clients, appointments, banking and more, making it imperative that it is protected. The need for a workable data backup system is more acute considering the move – certainly for the Apple world – from the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) with spinning platters to solid state drives (SSD) which are markedly faster than HDDs. The difference is in the way they work and retain data. When you delete a file on a HDD, only the reference to the file is deleted, not the file itself. In other words, it’s possible to recover the file albeit at a cost and the right software. SSDs are different. Once a file is deleted or lost, that’s it – there is no recovery possible no matter how much money is thrown at the problem. So how do you plan for data disaster? The answer is with a triple layer of backups. Level one: local devices Hard drives and USB memory sticks are as an inexpensive option. A portable 1 TB drive can be bought from Amazon for under £50 while the same site will sell you a 512GB USB stick for £25. Buying (say) five hard drives, each labelled for a day of the working week, and creating daily backups, is a low cost option to secure protection. The next step is to have a separate disk that is a full backup that is updated weekly. In its simplest form, a backup procedure is just a question of connecting the drive/USB stick to a given computer and copying the files over. Level two: offsite The key to level two, as obvious as it may sound, is to keep backups offsite. There’s no point keeping the disks next to the computer or even in the salon. This is why you may want to use a more sophisticated method that involves something called a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive which allows all computers on the network to make backups. Apple Macs, for example, have Time Machine which makes and keeps backups hourly, daily, weekly and monthly, each of which are accessed through a typically Apple, easy to use interface for the recovery of files. The problem is that the storage drive is attached to a given computer or network – they’re not offsite. Even better, if set up correctly, you can use two compatible NAS devices – one onsite and the other at home, and set them to back up to each other over a network or the web. Once a feature of expensive devices, today practically every new NAS model does this. Look for NAS devices that support block-level sync, which conserves bandwidth by transmitting only the changed portions of a file. Amazon sell NAS drives from £99. Level three: the cloud A marvel of the web, among many, is that it allows access to a number of providers of cloud – offsite but online – data storage. The simplest are drag and drop cloud storage services where, for a fee (or free for a more limited service), you can either store all of your files in the cloud or just place copies in there periodically as a backup. Not only will you have backed up your data offsite but also will have copies that any machine that has signed onto the cloud account can access. The downside, of course, especially if all of your files are held solely in the cloud, is that should the internet fail somewhere in the chain you’ll have no connection and therefore no files. They’re safe but inaccessible. Dropbox and Box are two well-known firms offering this service free. They also offer more complex and more secure versions for a monthly fee. An alternative to drag and drop is an automated method using third party software. Essentially software that resides on a computer, it uses your broadband connection to create an automated offsite backup held in the cloud. Apart from the setup the backup process happens in the background. The only fly in the ointment is that the initial backup can take days or longer depending on the volume of data being backed up and also the speed of the broadband connection. But once completed, subsequent backups are much faster. About.com (see http://abt.cm/1djnfhb) has reviews of a number of providers of this type of service. At the end of the day, you need a system that works for you. But one thing is certain, doing nothing is not an option.